6 Quotes Tagged: playwriting

How many plays have been written in France?' Candide asked the abbe.

'Five or six thousand.'

'That's a lot,' said Candide. 'How many of them are good?'

'Fifteen or sixteen,' replied the abbe.

'That's a lot,' said Martin.

Making Life means making trouble

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.

But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use.

As a youth I enjoyed — indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered — the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system — which is to say by the accrual of wealth — house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.

Don't make a wall of glass between your play and the people watching. Don't forget they were once children, who enjoyed being read to, or sung to sleep.