Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

John Osborne
December 12, 1929
London, United Kingdom

You know, I hadn’t realized—it just hadn’t occurred to me that you could love somebody, that you could want them, and want them twenty-four hours of the day and then suddenly find that you’re neither of you even living in the same world.

Jean, The Entertainer, p.27
by John Osborne

Ronald Harwood
November 9, 1934
Cape Town, South Africa

…writing is like an actor improvising. It is where my voice comes from. One time a psychologist wanted to interview me about my creative process. But I was scared that if I looked too closely, I will jinx it. How can you assure yourself that is you write something that someone will want to read it? You can’t.

Interview with Ronald Harwood (Wendy J. Williams, November 13, 2007)

Mo Gaffney
Nov. 5, 1958
San Diego, CA USA

I am just so goddamn tired. It gets so’s I dread takin’ a shower. I don’t know why…Worse thing, though, is I get this feeling like if I don’t get something I just won’t be whole, and I don’t think I can get it ’cause I don’t know what the hell it is, but it just keeps on suckin’ at me ’til I gotta have a drink or do a crossword puzzle or something to make that feeling go away.

Karen Sue, Parallel Lives, based on the Kathy and Mo Show, p.100
by Mo Gaffney
and
Kathy Najimy

Sam Shepard
Fort Sheridan, Illinois, USA
November 5, 1943

Something’s been coming to me lately about this whole question of being lost. It only makes sense to me in relation to an idea of one’s identity being shattered under severe personal circumstances—in a state of crisis where everthing that I’ve previously identified with in myself suddenly falls away. A state of shock, I guess you might call it.

Letter to Joe Chaiken, October 29, 1983
written by Sam Shepard
Joseph Chaiken & Sam Shepard: Letter’s and Texts, 1972-1984, p.128

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

• 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

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

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

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