Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

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

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

Sonia Sanchez
Birmingham, Alabama, USA
September 9, 1934

Wait for what my man? Wait for you to find out what’s happening? It’s not hard to see. We’re moving the people out—out into the cool breezes of the street—is that so difficult to understand?

Charles, The Bronx is Next, p.49
by Sonia Sanchez
(A Sourcebook of African-American Performance)

Michael Frayn
Mill Hill, London, United Kingdom
September 8, 1933

So many people, with so many different views and so many different voices. And inside each of us so many more people still, all struggling to be heard. For a moment one voice rises above the others, and everyone picks up the tune. And then the cacophony resumes. Until sooner or later another voice is raised…

Brandt, Democracy, p.86
by Michael Frayn

James Goldman
Chicago, Illinois
June 30, 1927

All the things I thought made life worth living, they don’t seem to matter much. I wanted a career once, but the Follies closed and nothing happened. And you know what? I was fine.

Sally, Follies, p.32
Book by James Goldman
(Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim)