Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

To me it was irrelevant that his [Cervantes] plays were not successful. One recognizes the passion for theatre that drives those of us who share it. A playwright has no problem identifying the techniques of theatre in the novel Don Quixote. There is the creation of living, breathing characters; the manufacture of a world better than the one we have been born to; the search for concise yet poetic expression of that world; the difficulties of realization which never measure so splendidly as the dimensions in one’s mind. And by all means include the love of applause, not from anonymous readers but from a living, breathing audience in the immediate presence of one’s creation. The affinity I felt with Cervantes is the same affinity common to all writers of theatre. We know each other, in the same moment in which we are ferociously competitive.

Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 19.1 (1999): 125-30.

Dale Wasserman. Born Nov 2, 1914. Died Dec 21, 2008.