Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

We have to be careful that we don’t equate success with how much money we make. I know that we all have to find a way to support ourselves. Certainly we want our work seen and read. But I have always been more comfortable with the goals of someone like Eliot who seemed to be interested in the work itself. And finding a way to bring out the highest sense of it he can.

On Risk and Writing, by Horton Foote

Horton Foote. March 14, 1916 – March 4, 2009

You need to know the craft, and you’ve got to write out of your heart. You’ve got to write something that’s meaningful to you.

In Their Company, p.19

Robert Anderson: Apr 28, 1917 – Feb 10, 2009

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.

…one of the most exciting things about being a writer is finding the life in different characters whom you don’t know at all. To a certain extent, you’ve got to let them live their own life. But there’s also a conflict constantly going on between you as the writer and them as the characters. Who’s in charge? There’s no easy answer to that. I suppose, finally, the author is in charge. Because, whether the character likes it or not, all I’ve got to do is take out my pen and do that (a gesture of erasure) and he’s lost a line. It may be one of his favourite lines of dialogue [laughter]. But I’ve got the pen in my hand.

“I’ve Written 29 Damn Plays. Isn’t that Enough?” by Michael Billington, The Guardian, Mar 14, 2006

Harold Printer: Born 10 Oct 1930. Died 24 Dec 2008.

…writing when it goes well, is no trouble at all, and hardly deserves the name of work.

William Gibson, A Season in Heaven, 1974

November 13, 1914 – November 25, 2008

Someone who knew a good story when he heard one.

I think it’s realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: ‘I despair. The world’s no good.’ That’s a perverse idealist. It’s practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That’s very realistic.

Studs Terkel

As portrayed by Anna Deavere Smith:

• FRANK
• Charlie, I read your two plays last night. They were so wonderful I couldn’t sleep.
• CHARLIE
• …I have to tell all the people who stay over to wake me whenever they think I’m wonderful.
• George Furth, Playwright, Merrily We Roll Along

December 14, 1932 – August 11, 2008

…I need to be in touch with my inner adult…who has always been lost to me except as an idea.

Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries