BOMB Magazine | Sarah Ruhl

I come into the theater wanting to feel and think at the same time, to have the thought affect the emotion and the emotion affect the thought.

I think of each production as a Tower of Babel. Everybody comes in with different training, speaking different languages, and you have four weeks to speak the same language.

Arnold Aronson blames it all on the introduction of the chair to the stage. Once you put a chair on the stage, we sit down and have a chat. You know, “Mrs. Tesman, let’s have a little chat.”

I believe that’s why the theater is actually going to grow in the twenty-first century, because it forces us to slow down. The circadian rhythms are being lost, technology is speeding up, so we have to go somewhere and literally have a one-to-one relationship with the tick-tock of the clock.