I fell in love with 19th-century Russian plays.
I don’t like the designated hitter. A guy who plays should be able to catch and hit.
I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn’t start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn’t feel like I could do that either. It didn’t occur to me to do my own thing.
I’d like to improve on running plays. I want to see if I can hurt some more people. To me, I don’t think I’m out there hurting enough people.
I’m fascinated by failure, and I’m fascinated by finality. Shakespeare’s historical plays are more universal than his comedies because they relate to the finality of life. Without finality, life would not be beautiful.
As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.
Women are just much better at getting degrees than men. It seems that school at every level plays to the natural strengths of women more than it does to men.
My fault now is making my plays too short.
I believe in fate, but I also believe that hard work and diligence plays a very important role in our lives.
I was in a lot of school plays, and it became the thing I did.
The process of doing plays will make you an actor.
Being a young parent, you can play cricket, football, and I can play chess with my son. In fact, he plays the piano better than I do.
I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
And people do enjoy the plays at completely different levels. And, likewise, they enjoy the authorship question… at completely different levels.
I have sisters who act, and I’d always seen it as their thing. I was never in the school plays like them – I wanted to be a painter.
I do have some theatrical background. I’ve written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don’t read is screenplays.
I don’t do stuff to be a star. I do it because I feel it’s important for kids, African American kids, to see an African American face that plays baseball.
I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn’t acting. It’s following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that.
So you wake up this morning and find you’re president of the United States. Pretty cool, no? Helicopters and a 747 at your disposal; courtside seats at any NBA playoff game of your choice; everyone stands up and the band plays when you come into the room.
This outfit called Los Angeles Theatre Works does readings of plays.
Soccer is the most improvisational sport. There are no set plays. And in soccer, as in improv, you are trying to find the flow.
There are so many actresses I want to write for. I see them, and I think, ‘Why is she not playing that lead? What’s happened to that actress?’ I think all I can do is to write parts for women, to say, ‘Keep going, keep acting, because there are parts for you. There will be those plays.’
I don’t write political plays in the sense that I’m writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say ‘Well, here’s the point.’
If it’s not in New York, let’s say it’s in St. Louis, then they’ve got to find a place or get with someone who knows about the work… they’ve got to find a place like that and do scenes, and then try to get in plays.
The plays that I performed in the ’70s are not the same plays that I perform today. However, what they have in common is a solid foundation of a story, and good, healthy comedy.
I started writing plays in around 1967, and at a certain point, I thought, ‘I’m writing plays, I should learn about acting and what it is.’ So I went to the HB Studio in New York, and I was there for about nine months.
The plays and sports of children are as salutary to them as labor and work are to grown persons.
I don’t think there’s been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He’s unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays.
I write plays, and I have a musical that’s starting to get produced now. That’s what I would love to do, but it’s so hard. The only reason people are reading my plays and musicals is because I’m in movies.
I love puns and plays on words, which is why I love RuPaul so much.
You’ll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I’ve written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has in a sense shaped me.
The great thing about university is that they incline you to get up and do it, from the Classics to modern plays, to the humor that Monty Pythons made popular.
I have been doing acting my whole life. I did plays in high school. I take it pretty seriously. I used to do a lot of Shakespeare and Shakespearean festivals and monologues.
I had played many gay characters before, but they were finite – guest characters in TV shows or characters in plays.
I’ve seen where the NFL guys get all over the ‘Madden’ creators for their ratings and how they don’t look good. One of my buddies plays in the NFL and he was so excited to be in ‘Madden,’ but then we got the game, and he was a 58.
Even the way Mamet describes silences within his plays is different. There are pauses; there are pauses within parentheses; there are pauses before dialogue; there are pauses in the spaces between the dialogue – there’s this extraordinary vocabulary of silence which is all there on the page, mapped out.
Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don’t bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.
I love stage work. The thing about plays is that they’re perfectible. With film, you shoot that take and maybe another. During ‘Spamalot,’ I rewrote Act II three times.
While I was doing these plays in the beginning, I wasn’t getting paid. I thought of it more as a hobby. Then I realized how seriously a lot of these people took what they were doing.
I write the music, produce it and the band plays within the parameters that I set.
It’s great to do small plays in the theatre and then go off with Blur and play in front of thousands of people.
My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books.
Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang – even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me.
Plays never feel like the right thing to do at the time.
I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don’t walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
But it has also enabled me to find my feet as a lecturer and a reader of my own plays to audiences who like to hear them; and that experience of immediate appreciation gives greater pleasure and more stimulus towards further activity than even the most laudatory of reviews.
I was a theater dork in high school and did all the plays. My theater teacher in high school, Janet Spahr, was absolutely incredible and mentored me throughout school. She taught me a lot about relying on my instincts.
A lot of times, I played bass on songs. Gene plays guitar on some songs.
That’s how I judge a quarterback: Either you make plays or you don’t. I don’t even want to talk about mechanics.
Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral.
I wouldn’t say that ‘The Fabric of the Cosmos’ is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.
It is the best feeling in the world to have a close game come down to just a couple of plays and you are able to do it.
I would write plays for my grandmother, who was stone deaf, my mother and the dog, that was our audience.
I’d love to do radio plays. I think that one should be open to everything and shouldn’t limit oneself.
I think of guitar players in terms of doctors: you have the doctor for your heart, the cardiologist, then one that works on your feet, your leg. But I believe George Benson is the one that plays all over. To me, he would be the M.D. of them all.
But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn’t always have to speak in my own voice.
American power confers benefits on most inhabitants of the planet, even on many who dislike it and some who actively oppose it, because the United States plays a major, constructive, and historically unprecedented role in the world.
Standup led me to acting because I liked standup, and I saw people on a stage, and the closest, nearest thing to me was doing plays. It was like, that’s the same thing as standup – people are on a stage; they’re being seen and saying things – so, because of my love of standup, I moved towards acting.
