George C. Wolfe Quotes
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I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.
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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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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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One thing I tend to do is ask actors tons and tons of questions to try to get at what they're thinking but also to expose to them whatever box they've placed their characters in - to blow up that box so the journey can begin.
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I feel like I'm edgy and I'm funny and I got this bite, this outrageousness.
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You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.
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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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At the end of the day, 'Shuffle Along' is about people coming together and making something extraordinary - and history not necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of doing, regardless of the consequences.
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I've always tried to do shows in a filmic way. I like it when forms smack up against each other.
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Generally, the realm in which black playwrights have been allowed to achieve success has been social realism or musicals.
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The wonderful thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. The worst thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. That dynamic is thrilling and challenging every time you make a show.
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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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Always, when I do a play, there's got to be an equation of risks and potential failure. When you're working on a new play, it's like, 'How the hell do I do this, and do we have the time?' All of these huge questions engage, hopefully, the smartest part of me. And then when you're doing a revival, I went, 'Well, somebody's already solved it.'
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Our lives are connected in ways we can't imagine. They're connected even before we know they're connected.
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AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.
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A lot of directors tend to manipulate actors' vulnerability to get what they want, and that can work.
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Certain events make people come out of their little boxes and become part of the whole.
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Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender.
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I love working with actors who will just go, 'Oh O.K., let's try it and see where it goes,' and 'Let's see what we can discover.'
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In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other.
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My absolutely favorite time of working on a project is the time I spend not knowing what it is. Because the longer you live inside that period, the likelier you are to discover something new.
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If you love theatre, do theatre wherever you can, because theatre is theatre, and you can experience it anywhere.
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The only rule of a musical is that it must maintain its buoyancy.
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Confidence comes in going on personal journeys in a public arena and feeling as though you have a right to do that. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you need to discover and not worry about how pretty the journey is. If you're aware of the pretty, you're not going to dig into the mess.