MAKING ART

I always think that the last acts of my plays should be like bonfires, where all the characters are throwing their stuff onto it and watching it go up, and the heat and light that comes off is what you’re attending.

“If what Picasso proposed is true, that the first stroke on the canvas is always a mistake, it is best to get on with the mistake, without delay, earlier rather than later. Write one sentence, make one choice or point at something and say “Yes.” And then, as the process unfolds, and as long as I keep at it and stay attentive and resolute, making... See more

I also like to look at a lot of photography, whether I’m directing, writing, or performing. Sometimes if you look at a moving image, your brain will want to copy that too easily. But photo, art can be quite evocative and force you to color in the lines.

In her illness, though, Alice seemed to access her emotions more freely, a shift that Jenny attributed, in part, to the fact that she wasn’t writing. “She wasn’t putting every difficulty in her life through that machine that turned things into gold,” Jenny said.

The theater’s rich intellectual inheritance serves as a buffer to society’s recrudescent stupidity. Upholding this legacy seems a more vital role for a critic than operating as a tour guide of commercial entertainments. The survival of our democracy depends on the recovery of our critical thinking skills.

In the past, when I’ve made the case for... See more

Editing[*] is deliberating—choosing a word or a thought, dismissing or advancing; it comes up often in this book as a way to describe artistic decision-making. And in my journalism career, editing had served me well. My temperament was well suited to it. I always had trouble writing—I was too self-conscious (you can see a pattern). And I couldn’t

... See more

“You cannot create results. You can only create conditions in which something might happen.”

― Anne Bogart