When I’m writing a new play, there’s a period where I know I shouldn’t be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together.
I find writing very difficult. It’s hard and it hurts sometimes, and it’s scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.
Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.
The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in ‘Nashville,’ transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.
The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it’s ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they’re attacking the center of your being.
I write everything with fountain pens. I don’t know why. I’ve done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I’ve never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points.
I feel there’s a power in theatre, but it’s an indirect power. It’s like the relationship of the sleeper to the unconscious. You discover things you can’t afford to countenance in waking life. You can forget them, remember them a day later or not have any idea what they are about.
One of the things I learned in ‘Slavs!’ is that it’s much easier to talk about being gay than it is to talk about being a socialist. People are afraid of socialism, and plays that deal with economics are scarier to them.
The body is the garden of the soul.
Nothing’s lost forever.
The act of thinking and interpreting is so central to Judaism that it makes more sense that we’ve become people like Woody Allen – thinkers and talkers and drafters of law.
My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.
We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.
There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics.
Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.
There’s a way in which ‘The Illusion’ is a play about the theater.
You don’t go to the movies to do historical research, unless it’s historical research about the movies.
A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer’s ‘The Normal Heart.’
But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in ‘The Diary of Anne Frank.’ The second thing she did was a play about Freud called ‘The Far Country.’ She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud.
The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It’s sort of the sound of impatience to me.