Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

I believe that in their hearts, playwrights are trying to make sense of it all, trying to sell us something more than just tickets.

Carlyle Brown, “New Plays: Survivor or Lost?” American Theatre Magazine, Vol 27, No. 6, July/August 2010, p.54

Caridad Svich
Philadelphia, PA, USA
Birthday Unknown

…I write for the body in space, and I write for the voice in space—so it’s not meant to be literary; you’re not supposed to get it in readings. You’re supposed to get it in performance. That’s what plays are supposed to be. They’re meant to be performed.

Cartography Lessons with Caridad Svich, by Justin Maxwell, American Theatre Magazine, July/August 2009

Other playwrights born in July include:

Aphra Behn
Wye, England
10 July 1640

Susan Keating Glaspell
Davenport, Iowa, USA
1 July 1876

Jean Kerr
Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA
10 July 1922

Ann Jellicoe
Middlesbrough, Yorkshire, England
15 July 1927

Nathalie Sarraute
Ivanovo-Voznesensk (near Moscow)
18 July 1902

Rosie Malek-Yonan
Tehran, Iran
4 July 1965

And someone else
who is
unknown to us.

Theresa Rebeck
Playwright
Birthday Unknown
Kenwood, Ohio, USA

…if I had spent the past 15 years being a writer, assuming that then when I got around to it I would suddenly become a doctor, most people would consider me delusional.

Free Fire Zone, by Theresa Rebeck, p.1

Writing for the Theatre

What Lilly Said to Marsha Norman
Theatre Criticism
Celebrity
Failure in Theatre
Joy in Writing
Theories about Writing
Bureaucrats and Writing
When Writers Talk About Writing
Where Writers Come From

On Writing Plays
On Research
On Writing about People
Emotions and Writing
Waiting for Ideas
Hearing Your Words Aloud
Where Plays Come From
More: Where Plays Come From
Even More: Where Plays Come From
Lots of Drafts
Writing in Fragments
Know Your Characters
How to View Your Characters
Creating Characters
Stage Entrances and Exits
Length of Plays
Writer’s Block

What’s Required to Write Plays
Confidence
Being Present
Time Needed
Teaching Drama

I suppose the point I have in mind is this—you come to a place in your life when what you’ve been is going to form what you will be. If you’ve wasted what you had in you, it’s too late to do much about it. If you’ve invested yourself in life, you’re pretty certain to get a return.

Lillian Hellman Drama Forgoes a Villain, by Harry Gilroy, New York Times, Feb 25, 1951.

Some kind of confidence, even fake, is needed for any work, but it is particularly required in the theatre, where ordinary timidity and stumbling seem like disintegration, and are infectious and corruptive to other frightened people.

Pentimento
by Lillian Hellman
p.506-507, IBSN 9780316355117

You are good in the boats not alone from knowledge, but because water is a part of you, you are easy on it, fear it, and like it in such equal parts that you work well in a boat without thinking about it and may be even safer becasue you don’t need to think too much. That is what we mean by instinct and there is no way to explain an instinct for the theatre, although those who have it recognize each other and a bond is formed between them. The need of theatre instinct may be why so many good writers have been such inferior playwrights—the light that a natural dramatist can see on a dark road is simply not there.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.12

Many writers work best in times of trouble: no money, the cold outside and in, even sickness and the end in view. But I have always known that when trouble comes I must face it fast and move with speed, even though the speed is thoughtless and sometimes damaging. For such impatient people, calm is necessary for hard work—long days, months of fiddling is the best way of life.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.22

Watch on the Rhine is the only play I have ever written that came out in one piece, as if I had seen a landscape and never altered the trees or the seasons of their colors. All other work for me had been fragmented, hunting in an open field with shot from several guns, following the course but unable to see clearly.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.21

I’m not sure why writers should have remarkable personalities, or, they’re not actors, they’re not society people; they’re not automobiles, there’s nothing, no reason for them to be seen so much or be so interesting. Most very good writers I think are rather uninteresting in a room.

Conversations with Lillian Hellman, p.142

Mr. Alfred: Did you ever find newspaper criticism of your work helpful?
Miss Hellman: Not at all. Never.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.28

[Mr. Alfred = William Alfred, Professor of English at Harvard.]

I really don’t know how it is done. Writing, all writing, is tired up with the unconscious. You remember that Henry James spoke of the long pole that stirred the unconscious: the longer the pole, the more you seemed to move away and the shorter the pole, the closer you came. It is almost as if you were asked which arm you used to lift an object when, of course, you really wouldn’t know unless you were conscious of how and why you lifted it.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.34