George C. Wolfe Quotes
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I don't go, like, 'Hmm, I'm now going to create something for the black community.' I just feel this compelling urge. I just feel myself drawn to stories that I feel have a potency and immediacy.
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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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Broadway was very vital back in the '20s. There were probably close to hundreds of productions that opened up through the course of the year and through the course of a Broadway season.
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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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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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There is a strange kind of parental pride when 'Topdog' ends up on Broadway, or 'Elaine Stritch.'
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'You Gotta Have Heart' is one of the most ridiculously perfect, amazing musical comedy songs ever.
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It's easier to be cynical and edgy and tough rather than overly emotional.
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Each actor, every single time you work with an actor, you have to come up with the language that's going to serve them. And that's what allows them to give the performance that you want to nurture inside of them and what you think they're capable of giving.
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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.
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Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.
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AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.
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When 'The Normal Heart' first appeared, the sense of urgency was so important.
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Certain things come to me; I just become intrigued by them and want to live inside them.
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A lot of '20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence.
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The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.
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You can go see ballet in its purity; you can go to a recital to hear music by itself. But what the American musical does so thrillingly is bastardize these forms into something that is exhilarating and compelling and deeply moving.
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There's no place more theatrical than history.
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If you have the talent and passion and commitment, you shouldn't be locked out of the room.
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The Public Theater requires one to be very public, and writing requires one to be very private.
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Something that can be so vital at one point can be inconsequential at another. I'm just intrigued by that phenomenon.
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Theater should address the stories of its communities, or I don't know why it's here.
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When you're writing, in theory, everybody is serving you. When you're directing, you're serving everybody - in the guise of acting like everybody's serving you. But you're really serving the materials. You're serving the actors. You're in charge, but it's not free.
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My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.