George C. Wolfe Quotes
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Growing up in the South, I was raised to be a Negro boy. I was acutely aware how other people perceived me, and that informed my behavior. That worked for a period of time, but it could also be suffocating.
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I'm interested in exploring how an individual maintains a sense of power in a world that tends to make individuals feel powerless.
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I could program a 'fabulous, I love it' kind of hit season right now. I'm more interested in breaking boundaries, telling a story, defying a truth that has been accepted.
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I absolutely love working on musicals, but anytime I finish a project, I want to move on to something completely different.
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I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.
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There are a lot of people who will tell you I'm very ruthless. I'm very fierce. If I feel I'm right, if I feel I've been violated, then I am like a warrior from hell!
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Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.
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Anytime you create art, you create a mess. I mean, 'Hamlet' is a mess!
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'Jelly,' more than any black musical before it, celebrated the majesty, the purity, the joy of so many artists who are unable to fully embody these same qualities in their own lives.
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Commercial theater, in its agenda to appeal to everybody, is often at the expense of the unique vision of the artist.
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I feel like I've been very blessed in the sense that I've had the veracity of spirit to not be stopped and, at the same time, the protective energy and the generosity of those who have come before me, who saw something inside of me and, therefore, invited me into rooms that I would not have been inside of otherwise.
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I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.
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When I was on dialysis, I willed myself to do 'On the Town.' It accesses my most childlike, joyful love of theater.
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It may take a while, but I think 'On the Town' has the potential for us to break down the boundaries between the traditional theatergoer who may have fond memories of the musical and those with a 'Broadway-is-not-for-me' agenda.
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The best of any artist is in their art.
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I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.
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The only rule of a musical is that it must maintain its buoyancy.
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With actors, I have very close, intense working relationships with actors in theater.
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As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.
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I like to knock down walls and allow others to enter.
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A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.
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To me, 'Show Boat' was the first American musical, the first to have the real texture of this country.
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I was obsessed with New York early on. I was watching sitcoms that were set in or around New York, like 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.' I was always very fascinated with the people who were on 'What's My Line?' and I always had an incredible obsession with the city.
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Everybody wants to be remembered for the best of who they are.