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.

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

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

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

As for how they all come together—the plot, the audience, and the setting—it is a matter of your own personality, your ability and interest, and the particular time of your life. It is really a mixed brew, a stew pot in which the meat is as important as any other ingredient.

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

The production is of great importance, has given the play the only life it will know, but it is gone in the end and the pages are the only wall against which to throw the future or measure the past.

How the pages got there, in their form, in their order, is more of a mystery than reason would hope for.

An Evening with Lillian Hellman, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7, April 1974, p.11

There is great pleasure in making something out of nothing.

Conversations with Lillian Hellman, p.105

…failure is faster in the theatre. It is necessary that you not become frightened of failure. Failure in the theatre is more dramatic and uglier than in any other form of writing.

Lillian Hellman, The Art of Theatre No. 1, Paris Review, Issue 33, Winter-Spring 1965