Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

Charles MacArthur
November 5, 1895
Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA

Now you take the events leading up to the crime; his hanging a red flag out of the window on Washington’s Birthday. That ain’t normal, to begin with. The officer ought to have realized when he went up there that he was dealing with a lunatic.

Woodenshoes, The Front Page, p.25
by Charles MacArthur

Terrence McNally
St. Petersburg, Florida, USA
November 3, 1939

I had a fare to JFK the other day. “See any good shows?” I asked him. “No,” he said, “I hate the theatre.” I said, “Get out of my cab. I hope you miss your flight, you creep. How do you hate the theatre? That’s like hating life.”

Emma, It’s Only a Play, p.61
by Terrence McNally

The next meditation will be held Monday, November 9, 7:30 PST/10:30 EST.

This will be our second to last meditation for our 2009 experimental series. In honor of the love, warmth, abundance Spirit of Thanksgiving we will do a 3-minute meditation instead of the usual 1-minute.

Three of us will create a kind of meditation sandwich, and since one of us is calling in from a theme park who knows what will happen! We only know it will be fun to do. Maybe even fun to listen to.

Please sign-up if you are so inspired. We’d love to have you on the teleconference with us!

We hope you have an extraordinarily creative day and that you are shining your light as brightly as you can.

• Alice Childress
  October 12, 1920
  Charleston, South Carolina, USA
• Simon Gray
  October 21, 1930
  Hayling Island, Hampshire, England
• Moss Hart
  October 24, 1904
  New York, New York, USA
• Adrian Mitchell
  October 24, 1932
  London, England
• John Arden
  October 26, 1930
  Barnsley, England
• Richard Sheridan
  October 30, 1751
  Dublin, Ireland

  Well, I never will join in the ridicule of a friend.

  Mrs. Candour, School for Scandal
  by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Wendy Wasserstein
October 18, 1950
Brooklyn, NY, USA

My plays start with a feeling.

The Art of Theatre No. 13, an interview with Wendy Wasserstein, Paris Review, Issue 142, Spring 1997.

Arthur Miller
October 17, 1915
New York, NY, USA

So we’re probably in an art that is — not dying. I don’t think it’s ever going to die because it’s so simple: all you need is a board and a man standing on it and a woman saying something interesting. You don’t need machines. But it is going to have to develop a different way of production. The problem is not that people can’t write plays anymore, the problem is that the audience’s relationship to the theater has simply dribbled away. And the playwright is nothing without his audience. He is one of the audience who happens to know how to speak. We are a kind of church. And if the parishioners are no longer interested in that church, you know what happens. It becomes a garage or a grocery store.

“Theatre,” by Arthur Miller
New York Times, Sunday, January 17, 1993

The 10th in our series of meditations for 2009:

Listen to the October 12 meditation: An Act of Joy

Want to know more about our OMCCB meditation? Read here.

Keep on creating your Art and Entertainment!

Harold Pinter
October 10, 1930
Hackney, East London, England

A blank page is both an exciting and a frightening thing. It’s what you start from. There follow two further periods in the progress of a play: the rehearsal period and the performance. A dramatist will absorb a great many things of value from an active and intense experience in the theatre, throughout these two periods. But finally, he is again left looking at the blank page. In that page is something or nothing. You don’t know until you’ve covered it. And there’s no guarantee that you will know then. But it always remains a chance worth taking.

The Echoing Silence, by Harold Pinter
The Guardian, Wednesday 31 December 2008

Please join us for the next One-Minute Creative Coffee Break Meditation Monday, October 12 2009 at 7:30PM PDT / 10:30 EDT.

Please sign-up to receive the teleconference instructions. It’s free and it’s only a minute long!

We’re wishing you an extraordinarily creative day!

Robert Patrick
Kilgore, Texas, USA
September 27, 1937

And it’s nineteen seventy-four. Valentine’s Day, nineteen hundred, seventy, and four. That’s how many panhandlers there are on Third Avenue, how many burned-out bulbs there are on Broadway, and how many of these poisonous drinks I’ve put on the tab already this afternoon.

Sparger, Kennedy’s Children, p.12
by Robert Patrick

Marsha Norman
September 21, 1947
Louisville, Kentucky

And someone else
who is
unknown to us.

When a thing is wick it has a light around it.
Maybe not a light you can see.
But hiding down below a spark’s asleep inside it,
Just waiting for the right time to be seen.

You clear away the dead parts
so the tender buds can form.
Loosen up the earth and
Let the roots get warm.
Let the roots get warm.

Dickon, The Secret Garden, p.74
Book and Lyrics by Marsha Norman

The 9th in our series of meditations for 2009:

Listen to the Sept 14 OMCCB meditation: Keep the Change

Only three meditations left! We invite you to signup for the remaining meditations. It’s free, easy and fun.

Want to know more about our OMCCB meditation? Read here.

Keep on creating your Art and Entertainment!