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A CurtainUpFeature
Quotes 'n Notes
From Current and Past Plays
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Note: Quotes are arranged alphabetically by play title
(but not considering
a, an or the— An Ideal Husband is sorted under
"Ideal." For all plays reviewed, see:
master review index .
Other Quote Archives:
Timely Quotes
Quotes By and About the Theater World's Famous and Infamous
Shakespeare's Little Instruction Book
A
Optimism:
Well, spring isn't everything, is it, Essie? There's a lot to be said for autumn.
That's got beauty, too. And winter -- if you're together -- Father to Mother
in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy Ah, Wilderness! The play
thought by many O'Neill fans and scholars to be the idealized family, a
sort of pipe dream (a la the dreamers in The Iceman Cometh which
O'Neill needed as a launch for his later and much darker family portraits
(Moon for the Misbegotten and Long Day's Journey Into the Night. Both Ah, Wilderness and
LongDay's Journey Into Night were revived twice during the 1998 seaon and
reviews of all four productions are in our archives. It's also worth noting that
a movie version of the idealized Miller family of Wilderness seeded
a movie (Summer Holiday ) starring Mickey Rooney, who later also
played Andy Hardy. Playwright John Guare called both the Hardy and the Aldrich
families (remember Henry Aldrich?) theinheritors of O'Neill's Miller family
Evil/Goodness:
I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father—Chris, who like his fallen brother Larry, thinks his father should have realized the men fighting World War II were "all his sons."— Chis Keller in All My Sons
Mistakes: little man makes a mistake and they hang him By the thumbs; the big ones
become ambassadors
--Joe Keller in Act 2 of Arthur Miller's 1947 play, All My Sons.During its 1996 season, the
Williamstown Theatre Festival revived this 50-year-old play in tandem with
the American premiere of The Run Down Mt. Morgan.
It resonated powerfully with both critics and audiences. Another, All
My Sons came to Broadway in Spring 1997.
Responsibility:
Once and for all you must
know that there's a universe of people outside, and you're responsible
to it. --Chris Keller (to his mother) in Act 3 of All My Sons Unfortunately,
Chris' eloquent plea still falls on many a deaf ear and the current examples
of greed-above-all, make Joe Keller's knowingly selling defective plane
engine pistons to the Army during World War II, all too timely.
Awareness:
I should have known
I
could have known
I didn't know - - Albert Speer, the title character in Albert Speer
Goodness:
Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art
--
Antonio Salieri the man who was once good but without the goodness to be
a great composer --played by David (Hercules Poirot) Suchet in Amadeus
.
Death: Death is such an old disease. >The Doctor in. All Over revived at the Roundabout
Personal Traits:
I am a vulgar man — but my music is not. Randy Harrison as Mozart in Berkshire Theatre Revival of Amadeus
Action: . . Just one thing, Bob. Action counts. (Pause.) Action talks
and bullshit walks --Don inAmerican
Buffalo
City Life. The air feels thick and dense,
as if the buildings breathe and steal away the oxygen./As my father used to say, living in the city is like living inside the mouth of a crocodile, buildings all around you like teeth. The teeth of culture, the mouth and tongue of civilization.---Juan Julian, the lector in Anna In the Tropics.
Soldiers:
There are only two sorts of
soldiers: old ones and young ones. . .you can tell the young ones by their
wildness and dashing. The old ones come bunched up under the number one
guard; they know that they're mere projectiles and that it's no use trying
to fight.--Bluntschli, Act 1, George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the
Man
Image, Personal:You are not the person
you were born? Who wonderful is?>--Alexa Vere de Veer,
in As Bees In Honey Drown. Alexa is the over-the-top self-inventedcelebrity in Douglas Carter Beane's 1997 comedic look at the quest for
fame and its accompanying perks. Her volley of one-liners may not quite
match Oscar Wilde's quips but they did add a fine dash to the 1996-97 Off-Broadway
season
Fame:
Fame without achievement is the
safest bet I know.---Alexa Vere de Veer, As
Bees In Honey Drown. The many pronouncements by the anti-heroine
of Douglas Carter Beane's 1997 comedy could almost fill a small book.
Life's Turning Points:
There are no
big moments you can reach unless you've a pile of smaller moments to stand
on. That big hour of decision, the turning point in your life, the someday
you've counted on when you'd suddenly wipe out your past mistakes, do the
work you'd never done, think the way you'd never thought, have what you'd
never had--it just doesn't come suddenly. You've trained yourself for it
while you waited--or you've let it all run past you.
--General Benjamin Griggs,
in Act 3 of Lillian Hellman's 1951 drama,
The Autumn Garden. The playwright's own life
was interesting enough to be the subject of a play--and indeed became just
that in Cakewalk.
Personal Responsibility:
It's easy to say we should all be loving and sweet, but meanwhile we're enjoying a certain way of life -- and we're actually living--due to the existence of certain other people who are willing to take the job of killing on their own backs
---Lemon in Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon in a revival from the New Group.
Togetherness:
There's a fine fine line/Between together and not/There's a fine fine line/Between what you wanted and what you got...---Kate in song from the new musical Avenue Q which opened Off-Broadway, extended three times and will will move to Broadway in July 2003.
Life's Meaning:
We don't want life printed on dollar bills!
---Ralph in Lincoln Center's revival of
Awake and Sing! honoring Cliffor Odets' 100th birthday.
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B
Imagination: Nobody
likes to be chained to the wall by somebody else's imagination
--
F. Nietzsche via R. Foreman in Bad Boy
Nietzsche
*
Beauty: Oh, it's no use. She's so beautiful, and I'm... Well, look at me!—the Beast in Beauty and the Beast.
Thinking: I'm afraid I've been thinking —Gaston
A dangerous pastime—Lefou.
Beauty and the Beast
Interactions:
Why don't you kill yourself? Why don't you kill yourself? — B
I have thought of it. . . I am not unhappy enough. — A
From Rough For Theatre I— part of Beckett Shorts at NYTheatre Workshop
Mothers
and Daughters: I have a dream sometimes there of you, dressed all nice
and white, in your coffin there, and me all in black looking in on you,
and a fella beside me there comforting me, his arm around my waist --Maureen
to her gross, dominating mother, Mag in Martin McDonagh's dark and comic
drama,
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
about a mother and daughter locked in a relationship that is doomed to
go from bad to worse. Set as it is in a dreary village where gossip and
grudges are the only entertainment available or as Pato, Maureen's one
and only hope for romance and escape declares You can't kick a cow in Leenane
without some bastard holding a grudge twenty years.
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Politicians:
Men
without faces tend to get elected President, and power or responsibility
or honor fill in the features, usually pretty well --William Russell in
Gore Vidals's The Best Man, Act 2, scene 3.
A fairly nondescript vice-president now viewed as one of our best presidents,
perhaps best illustrates this line towards the end of Vidal's 1960 play.
Politics.
Political conventions today are not what they used to be. There was a time when politics
was played openly on the convention floor for the elucidation, delight,
and occasionally dismay of the American People. --Walter Cronkite's voiceover was a new touch added
to a 2000 season revival re-titled Gore Vidal's
The Best Man>
Life:
35 years spent sleeping, 5 years going to the
bathroom and 8950 minutes blinking your eyes -- David Cale, giving
a 17-year-old's droll view of life passing by quick as a wink in the monologue
"Wink Wink" from Betwixt
Will
Power: I'm like a girl in a summertime canoe. I can't say No -- Marcus
Hoff in Clifford Odets' 1949 play (1955 movie) The Big Knife,
revived at the Williamstown Theatre Festival during the summer '98 season
(our review). Hoff, a ruthless Hollywood producer,
is adding another financial sweetner to a long-term contract the main character,
an actor, does not want to sign.
People, Types:
There are two kinds of people in one's life—people whom one keeps waiting—and the people for whom one waits
— Feydak in S. N. Behrman's Biography
Charisma: There are two kinds of people in one's life—people whom one keeps waiting—and the people for whom one waits— Feydak about Marion Froude, the heroine of S. N. Behrman's Biograpy.
Memoir writing: One can never be sure what made certain memories so acute. It's like recalling a landscape without color, a kind of color-blindness of memory— Marion Froude, the heroine of S. N. Behrman's Biograpy.
Memoir Writing: After you've written your biography what else could there possibly be left for you to do? Marion Froude, the heroine of S. N. Behrman's Biograpy. But, unlike the vain actor who sees his inclusion in her memoir as a way of achieving immortality, she's realistic when she tells him "I think immortality is an over-rated commodity. "
Life:. Life isn't a drawing room.— Richard Kurt in S. N. Behrman's Biography
Passion:Careless rapture at this stage would be incongruous and embarassing.— Ruth, explaining the more settled aspects of the second marriage of previously married couples like her and Charles in Blithe Spirit
Control.
The subtext is: "I can‘t control my love of the grape,
but I can control you."
---Donny, explaining 12-steppers to Liz in The Book of Liz
Stress. Yes, this shall be our party. And we must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.
--Anna in Boston Marriage
Life: Ah,
life is such a grand design--spring, summer, fall, winter, death. Whoever
could have thought it up?
--Michael, one of the gay
men in Mart Crowley's 1988 The Boys in the Band, which
enjoyed a well-received revival at the Lucille Lortel Theater during the
fall '96 season.
Moral Values:
It's discouraging to think
how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit --Charles
in Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, Act 1, scene 1. According to Coward's friend,
lover and literary executor, this is one of the three most frequently revived
Coward plays. The line remained intact in Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray's
musical adaptation of the play, High Spirits (Revived at the Berkshire
Theater Festival, summer '98--.our review).
Change.
The 60's didn't do it. Gandhi didn't do it. Malcolm X didn't do it. Acid didn't do it.And shockingly enough, apathy hasn't worked up to now.
---Brian Dykstra on the modern world's resistance to change in Brian Dykstra: Cornered & Alone. . . .
Opera Queens. I'm not an Opera Queen, Burton.
I've seen opera queens, and believe me, I rank no higher than
lady-in-waiting.
--Larry in Burn This.
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C
Happiness:We ave no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it
--Morell, in Candida,Act 1. Morell, a clergyman who owes much of his success to his wife Candida. ile the tradition of marriage generally, and the clergyman's in particular is upheld, it's not done on the basis of the conventional wisdom of the day, but in terms of a commitment free of self-delusion. This 1894 "pleasant play" (a Shaw term) has enjoyed many revivals.
Marriage: Larochefoucauld said that there are convenient marriages but no delightful ones.--Candida,Act 1, scene 3 -- revived at the Pearl Theatre 9/14/98-10/11/98
Mendacity:
Self-Reflection:
Doing laundry underground / for thirty dollars every week. . . / And I am mean and strong and tough but . . . / Thirty dollars ain't enough.----a plaintive song from 39-year-old Caroline, who's raised three children from the meager earnings of a go-nowhere job as a maid in the South on the cusp of the civil rights movement, in Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's musical collaboration Caroline, or Change extended twice, to 2/01//04.
Love.People talk about love when what they mean is closer to a hideous insidious itch
---Mac Wellman, author of Cat's Paw, at the Soho Rep
Love. My love herewith does not depend on how you treat me.
. . . Love alone does not yield love.
-- from Cartas: a nun in love.
Success: Love can be had any day! Success is much harder.— Mrs St Maugham in the Donmar Warehouse revival of The Chalk Garden
Life:Life is tit for tat.
--Matron "Mama" Morton,in Chicago which makes music out of greed and corruption. This line comes from "When You're Good to Mama".Lest her tit-for-tat view of life isn't perfectly clear, Mama elaborates with "there's a lot of favors I'm prepared to do/you do one for mama/and I'll be good to you." A torrent of musicals arrived on Broadway in April 1997 but none enjoyed Chicago's critical or box office success.
Monday--it's inevitability:Monday.What other day works so hard at reminding you not to get your hopes up 'cause it's gonna be coming around again real soon?" ----Stone, a private eye (the movie cast), Act 1, scene 2 in the multi-layered, Tony-award winning 1989 musical City of Angels (book, Larry Gelbart; music,Cy Coleman; lyrics, David Zippel). Stone comes back to his view of Monday as an unhappy day at the beginning of Act 1, scene 11: "If there really is someplace called Hell, the calendar's nothing but Mondays"
James Naughton who played Stone in the original production played Billy Flynn in the successful revival of Chicago
Life: Life isn't clean. . .it's like a good joke— Matilde, the housekeeper in Sarah Ruhl's The Clean Housewho is more interested in finding the perfect joke and grew up thinking that if the floor was dirty, you should just look at the ceiling.
Oppression: We will wrench her teeth out like a toothless whore. We will make a nun out of her yet -- "The toothless whore" is Ireland. The speaker, Sir Charles Sturman, one of Oliver Cromwell's men during the period from 1551 to 1553 when massacres and forced relocations were the law of the land -- and the setting for a fine play with frighteningly contemporary undertones, The Clearing
Past:We arrive with our baggage. . .they have none. ..then, just as you're relaxing. . .Great Big Juggernaut arrives with their baggage. It got held up! --Anna (Natasha Richardson) summing up the war of the sexes in Partrick Marber's dark, x-rated comedy of mannersCloser.
UnderstandingOthers:What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them
--Unidentified Guest, Act 1, scene 3 in T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party. According to the author when the moment that enables you to know another person passes, that person is in effect dead for you. And if you consider Eliot's long poem The Waste Land an unlikely vehicle for the stage, the English actress Fiona Shaw managed to bring it off for a short run at the Liberty Theater in 1996. It was the shortest-in-length offering, with a 35 minute running time (that adds up to $1 a minute).
Posterity: No man wants to be forgotten --- Ty Cobb, via Lee Blessing Cobb
History:
History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. It takes wit and courage to make our way, while our way is making us, with no consolation to count on but art and the summer lighting of personal happiness. . . Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other.
— Alexander Herzen inin the conclusion of Tom Stoppard's trilogy Salvage. from The Coast of Utopia
Alcoholics Alcoholics are mostly disappointed men.—Doc Delaney
in Come Back, Little Sheba
Public Taste, Intelligence:Maybe that's all any of us do -- Adam, a young writer who'd like to raise the level of this ultimate in dumbed down TV.
The interchange is from Alan Ayckbourn's satirical farce Comic Potential having its American premiere at Manhattan
Women's happiness.
She eats well, sleeps well, dresses well and she's losing weight. No woman can be unhappy in those circumstances.--Lynn Redgrave's Mrs. Culver, explaining why she thinks an adulterous husband is no cause to break up a marriage in the Roundabout revival of The Constant Wife (posted 6/17/05)
Personalities
Who is she?--Michael (Boyd Gaines)
Someone who likes to dance-- the bartender in a swing club (Jason Antoon) where everyone except Michael is a spectacular dancer, especially the girl in the yellow dress who helps to transform the man who stumbles unhappily through life to one who comes alive and makes contact-- as in the groundbreaking all-recorded, dance musical,Contact
Comedy:
I think Geffin Price has got that notion that comedy is an ice pick to pierce the frozen tundra of the heart.
---Trevor Griffiths, paraphrasing a quote from Kafka's notebooks in NYTimes article about Comedians.
Crime and Punishment
>Insults: You're he most boring man in Ireland, and there's plenty of competition --Mammy to her son Johnnypanteenmike in Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan which arrived at the Public Theater in April 1998 after a successful London run (our review. Johnnypanteenmike is not only hilariously boring but so bored with having to take care of his crusty old mammy that he regularly disobeys doctor's orders and encourages her taste for whiskey in hopes that it will do her in. When the Doctor threatens to make him look at his mother's liver after she dies, Johnnypanteenmike declares: I can barely look at the outside of mammy now so I wouldn't look at her inside when she's dead.
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D
Preparedness:
I wouldn't insult you with a rehearsed show --
Dame Edna Everage of Dame Edna: The Royal
Tour -- whose triumphant reign at the Booth Theater in 2000 owed much of
its success to its convincing sense of improv -- but is of course a carefully
crafted routine by Dame Edna's alter ego, Barry Humphries. The show went on to a national tour.
Relationships: He doesn't and he can't really care for me. You stand before him. His real caring goes to you. Me he only wants sometimes. --the title character of D.H. Lawrence's 1911 play The Daughter In Law confronting her husband's powerful mother.
Tragedy:
Tragedy is when a few people sink to the level of where most people always are.
Langley the artistic but infantile brother in Richard Greenberg's play about the Collyer Brothers, The Dazzle.
Soul:His
soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end upon all the living
and the dead
--James
Joyce's, concluding sentence of his novella, The Dead. It's not
easy to translate such internalized poetry into a musical, but in James
Joyce's The Dead Richard Nelson and Shaun Davey have made a
very creditable attempt.
Life: Life is essentially a very large brillo pad.>— T. Ryder Smith in Dead Man's Cell Phone
Self Image: Even if you've always been that/ Barely-in-the-background kind of guy/You still matter— Dear Evan Hansen
Smiles. You must not smile so! Listen, no one is allowed
to smile that way to anyone! ---Aschenbach, portrayed by Giles
Havergal in a highly praised adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death In Venice .
Dignity: He's not the finest character
that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening
to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into
his grave like an olddog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to
such a person---
Linda Loman, Act 1, Death
of a Salesman This much quoted speech was first spoken on stage
50 years ago and returned to Broadway for a 50th anniversary revival (our
review)
Political Legacies:
Willy Brandt's legacy is precisely one of perpetual two-sidedness.
---Brandt's third wife quoted in the program of Michael Frayn's new play, Democracy, a hit in London and Broadway bound.
Democracy.
Let me tell you what I've learned from bitter experience about democracy. The more of it you dare the tighter the grip you have to keep on it
--- Herber Wehner played by the excellent Robert Prosky in Democracy (Posted 12/02/04)
Employers/Employees:
I put thirty-four
years into this firm., Howard, and now I can't pay my insurance! You can't
eat the orange and throw the peel away--a man is not a piece of fruit!--Willy
Loaman the central character in Arthur Miller's Pulitzer prize winning
Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy is worn out and tired and no longer
able to deal with being on the road in a sales climate in which his kind
of salesman has become a dinosaur. Our current climate of downsizing has
made the plight of the Willy Lomans of this world painfully timely. Not
surprisingly, the 8/31 Op-Ed's page of the Sunday The New York Times
dedicated to the overall question of "What's Ahead for Working Men and
Women" included the above quote in a sidebar titled "Old Saws, Sharpened."
Dreams:
I wanna be read, loved, memorized. I wanna be a poem that changes lives. -- Suheir Hammad
one of the poets of Def Poetry Jam
Happiness: Do we dislike happiness?
We manufacture such a portion of our own despair --Agnes in Edward
Albee's Pulitzer prize winning A Delicate Balance, Act 3.
Theater: Our theater
doesn't exist any more. They're all revivals, and then they revive the
revivals -- Diana in Neil Simon's
much revived hotel plays newly anthologized as Hotel
Suite
Independence: If I'm ever to reach any
understanding of myelf and the things around me, I must learn to stand
alone. That's why I can't stay here with you any longer --Nora, in Henrick
Ibsen'sA Doll's House, Act 3. The play which has become
something of an all-too familiar feminist tract, was given a dynamic and
sexually charged new interpretation by Janet McTeer and Owen Teale during
the 1996-97 Broadway season. The production, (our review: A
Doll's House) which was a hit in England nabbed four Tony awards
in New York--for best revival-actor-actress-director.
Relationships.
You spend your entire life with someone and it turns out that person,
the one person you completely entrusted your fate to, is an impostor?!
--Karen
But
it can't be as simple as that. It never is --Gabe
The
"happily" married pair is part of the foursome at the center of Donald Margulies' Pulitzer Prize winning
marital comedy, Dinner With
Friends
Obsession: Obsession grants the patience to really fine tune the details
-- from Dirty Blonde a play which
has fine tuned the subject of obsession.
Blondes:I made myself platinum but I was born a dirty blonde
--
Mae West who's the most flamboyant of three dirty blondes involved inDirty
Blonde, the other two being Jo, a Mae West fan and Claudia
Shear, the author who plays both Mae and Jo.
Doubt.
Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.
--- Father Flynn in Doubt (Posted 11/23/04)
Memory:
Memory's like a policeman. Never
there when you want it --Norman in Ronald Harwood's
The Dresser,
Act
1.Harwood's play Taking Sides
enjoyed a successful October to end of 1996 run at the Brooks Atkinson
Theater. It starred Ed Harris and Daniel Massey. Check out
our review
Hypocrisy:You
can do anything you want as long as you don't call it what it is-- Jeffrey,
a Hollywood producer to Robert, a writer, in Craig Lucas' cynical 1998
play The Dying Gaul. In a narrative passage Robert explains that
the Gaul statue was erected by the victorious Romans as a monument to the
fallen dead of the enemy; a seemingly beautiful gesture of remembrance,
and--just maybe--the physical embodiment of Jeffrey's credo. our
review.
D
Preparedness:
I wouldn't insult you with a rehearsed show --
Dame Edna Everage ofDame Edna: The Royal
Tour -- whose triumphant reig at the Booth Theater in 2000 owed much of
its success to its convincing sense of improv -- but is of course a carefully
crafted routine by Dame Edna's alter ego, Barry Humphries. The show went on to a national tour.
Soul: His
soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end upon all the living
and the dead
--James
Joyce's, concluding sentence of his novella, The Dead. It's not
easy to translate such internalized poetry into a musical, but in James
Joyce's The Dead Richard Nelson and Shaun Davey have made a
very creditable attempt.
Dignity: He's not the finest character
that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening
to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into
his grave like an olddog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to
such a person---
Linda Loman, Act 1, Death
of a Salesman. This much quoted speech was first spoken on stage
50 years ago and returned to Broadway for a 50th anniversary revival (our
review)
Employers/Employees:
I put thirty-four
years into this firm., Howard, and now I can't pay my insurance! You can't
eat the orange and throw the peel away--a man is not a piece of fruit!--Willy
Loman the central character in Arthur Miller's Pulitzer prize winning
Death
of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy is worn out and tired and no longer
able to deal with being on the road in a sales climate in which his kind
of salesman has become a dinosaur. Our current climate of downsizing has
made the plight of the Willy Lomans of this world painfully timely. Not
surprisingly, the 8/31 Op-Ed's page of the Sunday The New York Times
dedicated to the overall question of "What's Ahead for Working Men and
Women" included the above quote in a sidebar titled "Old Saws, Sharpened."
Patriotism:
I'm still looking for a good clean fight --- Lt.Colonel Littlefield
You dumb son of a bitch. There's no such thing ---Margaret Littlefield
in a scene from John Patrick Shanley's Defiance
No matter what, here in America we have freedom to say what we want, be what we want, to decide what happens in our country. We even get to decide what happens in other people's countries. There's no other place like it.
Happiness:
Do we dislike happiness?
We manufacture such a portion of our own despair. . .--Agnes in Edward
Albee's Pulitzer prize winning A Delicate Balance, Act 3.
Theater: Our theater
doesn't exist any more. They're all revivals, and then they revive the
revivals -- Diana in Diana and Sidney in a revival of Neil Simon''s
much revived hotel plays newly anthologized as Hotel
Suite
Independence: If I'm ever to reach any
understanding of myelf and the things around me, I must learn to stand
alone. That's why I can't stay here with you any longer --Nora, in Henrick
Ibsen's A Doll's House, Act 3. The play which has become
something of an all-too familiar feminist tract, was given a dynamic and
sexually charged new interpretation by Janet McTeer and Owen Teale during
the 1996-97 Broadway season. The production, (our review: A
Doll's House) which was a hit in England nabbed four Tony awards
in New York--for best revival-actor-actress-director.
Life:
You spend your entire life with someone and it turns out that person,
the one person you completely entrusted your fate to, is an impostor?!
--Karen
But
it can't be as simple as that. It never is --Gabe
The
"happily" married pair is part of the foursome at the center of Donald Margulies' Pulitzer Prize winning
marital comedy, Dinner With
Friends
Obsession: Obsession grants the patience to really fine tune the details
-- from Dirty Blonde a play which
has fine tuned the subject of obsession.
Blondes:I made myself platinum but I was born a dirty blonde
--
Mae West who's the most flamboyant of three dirty blondes involved in Dirty
Blonde, the other two being Jo, a Mae West fan and Claudia
Shear, the author who plays both Mae and Jo.
Memory:
Memory's like a policeman. Never
there when you want it --Norman in Ronald Harwood's
The Dresser,
Act
1.Harwood's play Taking Sides
enjoyed a successful October to end of 1996 run at the Brooks Atkinson
Theater. It starred Ed Harris and Daniel Massey. Check out
our review
Death. I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits --- the Duchess in London's modern dress revival of The Duchess of Malfi
Musicals
Everything always works out in musicals. In the real world nothing ever works out and the only people who burst into song are the hopelessly deranged.
--- Man in the Chair, the narrator and heart and soul of The Drowsy Chaperone.
Work: I did not like my work, but I did it...All day long, every day, day after day. And I would feel. . ..lucky. Lucky to have some place to go every day. But why? Why did I want so little? Where did I learn to want so little for myself? —Boo-Seng , a Korean-American in Julia Cho's play Durango.
>Hypocrisy:
You
can do anything you want as long as you don't call it what it is-- Jeffrey,
a Hollywood producer to Robert, a writer, in Craig Lucas' cynical 1998
play The Dying Gaul. In a narrative passage Robert explains that
the Gaul statue was erected by the victorious Romans as a monument to the
fallen dead of the enemy; a seemingly beautiful gesture of remembrance,
and--just maybe--the physical embodiment of Jeffrey's credo. our
review.
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E
Political evils: The blacklist was a time of evil. No one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides.
Failure felt very much like success.
Sylvia Plath, via Paul Alexander in Edge
Music:
As
long as man can believe in music, I'll believe in the future of mankind.
--Albert Einstein, Einstein, A Stage Portrait.
Death:
He
who fears not death can fear no threats --Count de Gormas in Pierre Corneille's
much-studied, rarely performed classic El Cid, Act 2, scene
2.
Credibility:
Ain't a man's talkin' big what makes him big-long as he makes folks believe it?
---- Emperor Brutus Jones in London revival of Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones which coincides with Broadway revival of A Touch of the Poet
War:
If we don't get this war started soon we're going to be competing with the NBA playoffs.
---Cove (a parody of Karl Rove) in Embedded
Life, Preparation:
One prepares, is good, and is rewarded. I didn't know how quickly things change. That one must keep an eye on what one is preparing for, in case it no longer even exists.
---Lotty in Enchanted April
Work:
My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.
---Samuel Beckett, quoted in review of Endgame at BAM
Love:
I'll be your mamma. I need to be loved. I shall be so ashamed in the morning.>---Kath to her sexy lodger Mr. Sloane, in Entertaining Mr. Sloane revived at the Roundabout until May 21st.
Doctors:
If
you ever want to feel ill--just go and spend a happy half-hour in a doctor's
waiting room. If you're not ill when you get there, you will be when you
leave --Ernie in Alan Ayckbourn's one-act play Ernie's Incredible
Illucinations..
Passion: Passion,can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created
— Dysart— dysart in Equus
>Rules:
Bending
the rules was all I had. A tongue licking after a taste of life I'd never
had. I felt it like a power. . ..I thought I was supposed to love one man,
three children and then a cavity opens up in my chest. Love like that takes
many prisoners. Love like that don't care about good -- And it don't care
about danger -- Ruby McCollum, the tragic central character in Act 2 of
Thulani Davis' compelling fact-based drama,Everybody's
Ruby
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Poets. It's not easy to be a poet and yet I sing. . . We sing ---Dilbert Tibbs, a philosopher-poet, one of the six falsely incarcerated whose stories make up The Exonerated.
Greatness:
I will be remembered as a great physician and you, Roget, as a man
who made lists--Thomas
Armstrong to fellow physician Peter Mark Roget who is dismayed at his disregard
of ethics in the interest of scientific curiosity in Shelagh Stephenson's
new play An Experiment With
An Air Pump
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Television: It's {television| gonna change everything, it's gonna end ignorance and misunderstanding, it's gonna end illiteracy. It's going to end war.— David Sarnoff,— in The Farnsworth Invention
Political Life: You're twenty-five. There's so many other things you could do besides this horseshit. Think about it. You make it to the White House. You do your four years, if you last that long, and then what? You get off the train every morning at Farragut North and trudge to some onsulting firm with all the other political has-beens. Next thing you know you're forty, the fifty, so many races under your belt you can't remember which you won and which you lost..— Tom Duffy, who's managed enough campaigns for his advice to his young hotshot opposite to resonate.— in Farragut North
Fate.
I'm not talking about what people deserve, I'm saying what they get. You look one way, you have access to all this. . .look some other way, all you get is that. Sorry, but it's true.
--- Carter in Fat Pig (Posted 12/16/04)
Dreams: Dreams are life's coming attractions.— a line from A Feminine Ending, a new play by Sarah Treem
Interactions: Some people build fences to keep people out. . .and other people build fences to keep people in. Rose wants to hold on to you all. she loves you.
—Bono about the fence that Troy and his son Cory are working on throughout the play even though neither quite understand's why Rose wants it since their modest home "ain't got nothing nobody want." Fences review
Religious
Symbols:
The Wailing Wall never spoke to me --Sonny
It's a quiet wall --Schlomo
This interchange between
a young American filmmaker and an Israeli who is also a rapper is from
The
Flatted Fifth by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld. Click
here for a review
Prayer:
When
you pray it's you talking to God. When you follow your instincts that's
God talking back--Sonny towards the end of The Flatted Fifth
Life
You
work, you slave, you worry . . . Life is just a bowl of cherries, so live
and laugh at it all -- so sings Valarie Pettiford, in "Life Is Just a Bowl
of Cherries" the opening number of Fosse.
the
musical revue. Those lyrics neatly sum up the legendary dancer-choreographer-director's
life and style of frenzied, on-the edge body movements.
People: Where have all the droll people gone?.
--- Marian Seldes, one of the droller characters in Neil Simon's
45 Seconds From Broadway
Power: Aeschylus and his Greek contemporaries believed that the Gods begrudged human success and would send a curse of hubris on a person at the height of their powers; a loss of sanity tat would eventually bring about their downfall. Nowadways, we give the Gods less credit. We prefer to call it self-destruction—
James Reston, in Frost/Nixon
Clothing:
Blue jeans are the greatest
invention since the gondola. Beautiful! Because of the cut. Because
of the fabric. Because of the way they look on the leg. --Diana Vreeland,
brilliantly brought to life by Mary Louise Wilson in Full Gallop,
Act 1. This hilarious mono-drama, which premiered at Manhattan Theater
Club last year and made a successful transition to the Westside Theatre,
is loaded with the famous high priestess of fashion doyenne's pithy pronouncements
on color, style, food and life. Fired from her 9-year editorship of Vogue
in
1971, she became even more famous when she took the helm of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art's Costume Institute--and more recently, the subject of this
very successful and stylish show. Click here for
a review
Style:
Style
is the great thing. It helps you to get down the stairs. It gets you to
move. -- Mary Louise Wilson as Diana Vreeland, Full Gallop,
Act 1.
Excess:
I'm
a great believer in vulgarity. We all need a splash of bad taste. No taste
is what I'm against. -- Mary Louise Wilson as Diana Vreeland, Full
Gallop, Act 1.Vreeland's actions often belied
her somewhat ditzy pronouncements. In the play this accompanies her filling
every vase in sight with flowers which might make some apartments look
vulgar or like a funeral parlor--but never Vreeland's Park Avenue apartment
with its all-red, all-chintz, all tasteful excess. The techno-millionnaire,
Stephen Jobs, who is equally committed to good taste--(he once rejected
a proposed Macintosh circuit board visible only by service technicioas because
it was ugly)--tends towards the minimalist view. And while he seems to
respect his great competitor, Bill Gates of Microsoft, like Vreeland, he
can't accept what he considers Microsoft's lacks of taste.
Clothing:
It's
not the clothes (stored in a museum exhibit) that people come to see. It's
the life people led in them that counts. --Diana Vreeland, paving the way
for her work with the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, in
Full
Gallop, Act 2.
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Freedom.
You got to fight to make it mean something. . . What good is freedom if you can't do nothing with it?
--- Solly Two Kings, in Gem of the Ocean (Posted 12/1/04)
Men's Sphere
It's not a world of men -- it's a world of clock watchers, bureaucrats, officeholders. --- Richard Roma, the super slick salesman's ironic lament about the by-gone days of noble knights, in the revival of David Mamet's Glengarry Glenn Ross
Family
Secrets:
Our folks knew each other before we were born. Don't you think
that's weird?--
Delia Glimmer, daughter of a scarf tycoon from Greenwich, Connecticut.
What's
weird is you didn't know they knew each other. It's like they hid this
whole past from you. Like he was in some sort of CIA witness protection
program--Jordan Shine, a trombonist whose father played with the Glimmer
Brothers, and through whom she's only lately discovered that her businessman
father was once a jazz musician and that he had a twin brother, also a
musician. Act
1, scene 9 of Glimmer Brothers
the new play by Tony-Award winner Warren Leight (Side
Man) given a World Premiere at the Williamstown Theatre in July
1999
Contradictions: Conraditions are what people are, bundles of contradictions, fighting them and working them out. And I refuse to be dictated to by your overly simplistic logic-chopping approach to life—Tom in Grace
Dreams: No one with a dream should come to Italy, no matter how dead and buried you think it is. . .This is where Italy will get you. --- Margaret in The Light in the Piazza (Posted 4/22/05)
People may say that I can't sing but no-one can ever say I didn't sing.
---- Florence Foster Jenkins, in Glorious, the second pay about the famous atonal American diva to make it to a mainstream theatre. Glorious stars Maureen Lippman and follows the same basic story. Souvenir starring Judy Kaye has moved from Off-Broadway to Broadway. Posted 11/05/05
Behavior, unexplainable:
. . .don't you see the "thing" that happened to me? What nobody understands? Why I can't feel what I'm supposed to!? Because it relates to nothing? It can't have happened! It did, but it can't have!
Martin, an accomplished, happily married man trying to explain a shameful event that has turned his world topsy turvy. The Goat.
Childhood:
In
the house of his birth a man is always a child
--Eng
Tieng-Bin, a Chinese businessman who shuttles between the Western world
and his traditional early twentieth century Chinese home, Act 1, . . .
See our review Golden Child. Its
3-week run at the Public Theater ended 12/08/96 but it's played in other
venues elsewhere in the country and there's much talk that it will return,
this time to Broadway and with some revisions
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The type of justice meted out at Guantanamo Bay is likely to make martyrs of the prisoners in the moderate Muslim world with whom the West must work to ensure world peace and stability.
--- Lord Justice Steyn in Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom imported to Off-Broadway from London. (Posted 8/26/04)
New York--disaster:
New York. . . my beautiful, gleaming, wounded city.
oan, the editor/writer trying to do something positive after 9/11, in the play that turned journalist Anne Nelson into a playwright, The Guys.
Regrets:
I was born too soon and I started too late---
---Rose, the stage mother of them all who finally admits that it was all "for me" in Gypsy
Personality: You're like a pioneer woman without a frontier — Herbie when he meets the indominable Rose in Gypsy
H
Life's Stages:
A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself? When you are a child your vessel is not yet full so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows, and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age, the vessell dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.—Captain Shotover, Act 2 Heartbreak House revived by the Roundabout.
Sexual
Relations : It is clear that I must find my other half. But is
it a he or a she? Is it Daddy? He went away.
Or
Mother? I was suddenly afraid to go back to bed. What does this person
look like? Identical to me? Or somehow
complementary?...And what about sex? Is that how we put ourselves back
together again? Is that what Daddy was trying to do to me? Or can two people
actually become one again? And if we're driving on the Autobahn when it
happens, can we still use the diamond lane? -- --Hedwig, the title character
in Hedwig and the Angry Inch by
John Cameron Mitchell.
Most of the stuff poetry's about hasn't happened to us yet ---Timms, arguing against Mr. Hector's insistence on his boys memorizing vasts amount of the stuff.
But it will Timms, It will. And then you have the antidote ready! Grief. Happiness. Even when you're dying. We're making your deathbeds here boys. Poetry is the trailer! Forthcoming attractions! --Hector.
Interchange from Alan Bennet's The History Boys.
Attentiveness.
Everything distracts me from everything else, but what I've really noticed is that mainly, the thing I'm most distracted by is myself. I mean, I'm my own major distraction.
--- Eddie, in the New Group's revival of -- Hurlyburly which will move to 37Arts after current run on 42nd Street. (Posted 1/27/05)
Money:
Money doesn't buy happiness -- Oliver, in a remark tinged with schadenfreude
since it's addressed to his highbrow friend Laurie who is unhappily coasting
"from tiny windfall to tiny windfall" and not surprisingly retorts: But
it can upgrade despair so beautifully! in Richard Greenberg's Hurrah
At Last
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I
Pipe
Dreams:
You become such a coward you'll grab at any lousy excuse to
get out of killing your pipe dreams. And yet, as I've told you over and
over, it's exactly those damned tomorrow dreams which keep you from making
peace with yourself --Hickey in
The Iceman
Cometh, Act 3 (our review of 1999 Broadway production
Moral
Values:
A man who can't talk morally twice a week to a large, popular,
immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician.
--Lord
Goring in Oscar Wilde's
An Ideal Husband.An
Ideal Husband opened in London the same year as The Importance of
Being Earnest, (1895), but never enjoyed Earnest's success.
In 1992 director Peter Hall's company took An Ideal Husband out
of the ever popular, much revived Earnest's shadow, with a successful London
revival. This led to a successful New York run at the Barrymore Theater
where it played from the second half of the 1995-96 season to 1/21/97.
It was also made into a star-studded film in 1999.
Truth vs. Fiction.
I believe in the truth, -- Mary McCarthy
I believe in the story -- Lillian Hellman. Imaginary Friends
Memory:
Memory,
my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.
--Miss
Prism in Act 2 of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.
Earnest,
often considered Wilde's masterpiece had a successful, limited run (closed
12/22/96)at the Irish Rep. But this enduring example of the Wilde wit at
its best is practically always playing on some stage, somewhere.
Simplicity: Nothing is simple. 'Simple's' not even simple anymore. Terry, commenting on his kid brother's psychobabbling promise to get his act together in Neil LaBute's world premiering play In a Dark Dark Place
Death: Death ends a life,but it does not end a relationship.—Gene, the son in I Never Sang For My Father
My life's my own fault. I know that. But the world don't help, Maam
-- Hester
The
world's not here to help us. The world is simply here. We must help ourselves
-- Welfare Lady
Suzan-Lori Parks'1999 play, In the Blood
Knowledge:
Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God - Richard Easton, as scholar A.E. Housman, in Invention of Love>explaining why he devoted a lifetime translating an obscure Latin poet nobody cares about.
Youthful Accomplishment
Now is the time, when you are young, to deck your head with myrtle -- A. E. Houseman, looking back at his youthful self in Tom Stoppard's The Invention Of Love another quotable quote from the same play:
Fate: There is a group determined to continue. What's been set in motion can't be stopped. —Agamemmnon in Iphigenia 2.0
Hatred: . . .Every time you meet hatred, stand up against it and that way, it can never happen again— Irene Gut Opdyke in , a Polish Catholic woman who saved a dozen Jews during the Holocaust, urging a group of students to never again allow such horrors to happen.— in Irena's Vow
Career Choices: I'm a mime because I'm from Montana. Now Montana is not known as a hotbed of mime activity; but still, it is BIG and QUIET.--- Bill Bowers in his staged memoir It Goes Without Saying
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Marriage:
I think marriage is like the cockpit of a commercial airliner.
. .you know. . .all those switches. . .and they all. . .all 200. . .have
to be in. . .the right position, only in aviation they know what those
are, and in marriage you never do, so the odds . . .the odds are astronomical
you won't. . .stay in the air. So I don't think we're bad people, Jack,
I think we are disgruntled victims. . .of the odds. -- Jill, the distaff
half of Jane Martin's Jack and Jill
at Shakespeare & Co, Summer 2000
Men & Women
How many men have you forgotten?-- Johnny Guitar
As many women as you've remembered -- Vienna.
---An exchange in Johnny Guitar, the Musical, courtesy of the moie that inspired it. (Posted 3/23/04 )
Understanding:
You only really see a person through love. It's only
when you love somebody that you really -- Liam Neeson as Oscar Wilde in
The Judas Kiss
Atheism.
Atheism is a sort of crutch for those who can't bear the reality of God--- George Jumpers, Tom Stoppard's 1972 play which recently transferred from London to Broadway. (Posted 4/28/04)
Extravagance:
She
wants a taxi if she's only goin' in the other room -- Fred Stevens, the
central character in the revival of the 1929 bittersweet comedy with music,
June
Moon by George Kaufman and Ring Lardner. This less than
rosy assessment of his gold-digging fiancee marks the beginning of the
young lyricist's loss of innocence.
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Togetherness:
But I don't care if you don't/
And I don't feel if you don't/
And I don't want it if you don't /
And I won't say it/
If you don't say it first.
---song from Kiki & Herb: Alive On Broadway
Life: Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale/Vexing the du
drowsy man. ---Act III, scene 4, King
John
L
Life.
It’s my world
That I want to have a little pride in
My world
And it’s not a place I have to hide in
Life’s not worth a damn
Till you can say "Hey world.
I am what I am!"
--- Albin in La Cage aux Folles (Posted 12/17/04)
Love.
I didn't know what love
was till I tasted her cooking.
--Ruben Santiago-Hudson in his memoir, Lackawanna Blues
World Affairs, irrelvancy of: What in the world do world affairs have to do with anything?
The biggest laugh line in the Los Angeles Road Company's latest production of The Lady's Not For Burning
Gay Life: After twenty-five years, everything has changed about gay life. Except the Gay Pride Parade.---Charles in Jonathan Tolin's play about gay plays, The Last Sunday In June
Wealth, effect of: This mornng I was a peaceful country doctor filled with gentle thoughts of a medical description and I coveted nothing, not even my collections. Look at me now. . . if a patient came in with an appendix now I'd miss it so far I'd put his eye out!.— Dr. Haggetty expressing the effect of discovering that the paintings given to him by his deceased former patient and boarder were not as worthless as he had thought, The Late Christopher Bean.
Money:What
confuses me about money is how unfairly it's distributed --Mr. Astruc,
the man who came to look at an apartment for rent and stayed to make endless
telephone calls ("I see a phone -- I have to use it" and eat paté
--- Jean-Claude Carrière's La Terasse imported from
France to the Manhattan Theatre Club in early summer '99. For more details
about and word wit from this well-translated French farce see our
review
Transience:
Yesterday's bread is tomorrow's
croutons.
---Malcolm McLaren, Lipstick Traces
Cynicism:Cynicism is only an unpleasant
way of saying the truth.--Ben (to Regina), Act 1, Lillian Hellman's The
Little Foxes. Regina has accused her oldest brother of being
interested in her interests only as a way to keep control of the business
in the family and while Ben accuses her of being cynical, his smile acknowledges the truth of her accusation.
Guilt and Responsibility: Well, there
are people who eat the the earth and eat all the people on it, like in
the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and
watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch
them do it --Addie (to Birdie), Act 3, Lillian Hellman's >The
Little Foxes.This indictment of the Birdies and Horaces of
this world as well as the Hubbards, serves as Alexandra's wake-up call
at the end.
Theater Habits:
We don't have a problem with cell phones in the theater in this town. We've simply stopped doing theater altogether.—One of innumerable bon mots popping out of the mouth of Julie White's hot-shot agent, a performance that helped to move The Little Dog Laughed from Off Broadway to Broadway.
Lies:
You've become so good at telling lies, you can even fool yourself. --- Diane, to her movie star client who "suffers from a slight recurring case of homosexuality" in The Little Dog Laughed.
Opportunists, Go-Getters: There are
hundreds of Hubbards sitting in rooms like this throughout the country.
All their names aren't Hubbard, but they are all Hubbards and they will
own this country some day. --Ben, Act 3, Lillian Hellman's The
Little Foxes.These fictional turn of the century robber barons
bear an all too close resemblance to the many family businesses turned
mega-corporations ruled by greed. The only thing dated about the oldest
Hubbard brother's Act 3 declaration is the modesty of his estimate..
Rules
If you stick to the rules, then you never have to have a discussion about whether or not you were justified not sticking to the rules
--William a straight arrow security guard in Kenneth Lonergan's Lobby Hero>
Fame:My work will become famous for all time, and your efforts, reductive
and simplistic, will fade from the American memory
--Salvador Dali to a Walt Disney studio animator in Kira Obolensky'sLobster
Alice a surrealistic comedy loosely based on Dali's short stint
with Disney.
Mankind:
Man is a creature of the hour--the
dinner hour, I suppose -- Lady divker, Dion L. Boucicault's >London
Assurance , Act 4, revived to generally good reviews during
the Roundabout's 1996-97 season.
Hesitation:
Hesitation destroys the
romance of a faux pas and reduces it to the level of a mere mercantile
calculation -- Lord Courtley, Dion L. Boucicault's London
Assurance Act 4. Brian Bedford won
much praise as Lord Courtly in the Roundabout's 1996-97 revival.
Parental Control.
We struggle to keep our children from the moment they're born. . .And it's a struggle we're destined to lose. That's the way of the world; our children never really belong to us. As for other people. . .even our best friends are only guests in our lives; they get up from the table when they've finished--and vanish back into their own life.
--- Professor Wegrat, in the Mint Theater's newly translated production of Arthur Schnitzler's The Lonely Way (Posted 2/14//05)
Godlessness It seems like God has no
jurisdiction in this town. No jurisdiction at all
--Father
Welsh about the parish where murder, fighting and immorality rain is the
town of Leenane the setting for The Lonesome
Westwhich completes Martin McDonagh's trilogy about people in
rural Ireland.
Nicknames.
We called him Skeet. 'Cause he was all time buzzin' around like one of them little old bugs. . . And skinny. Legs no bigger'n a buggy whip. I'd say, 'Skeet, you're so skinny you could change clothes in the barrel of a shotgun.'--Hank Williams bible-toting mom about her legendary son in Hank Williams: Lost Highway.
Politicians:
When you come right down
to it, there are only two kinds of politicians. There's the crooks like
you, and the fellows who aren't smart enough to be crooks! So we have to
become reformers--Senator Loganberry in Irving Berlin's 1941 book musical
Louisiana Purchase.This rarely mentioned political musical
play had an enviable year-plus run.
Audiences
People like their b lues singers sad and drunk.
-- Janis Joplin, who drank and drugged her way to an early grave, in the concert-play, >Love, Janis
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Thoughtlessness:
I didn't mean -- at least...---Lomax
You didn't think, Charles. You never do;
and the result is -- you never mean anything.--- Lady Britomart
in Shaw's Major Barbara
Thought Processes:
. . .
There is a hole in the middle of my thinking
that my thinking cannot touch.
---Richard Foreman
Foreman's latest production Maria del Bosco currently at his Ontological Theater
Perfection.
I'm practically perfect in every way!
--- Mary Poppins, the Nanny who has moved from page to London stage -- our review. (Posted 1/02/05)
Parents
and Children:
Parents should instruct children -- Mr. Asano
. . . Not
in America! -- Mrs. Jacoby.
One
of the still timely and subject-to-debate themes in a 1999 revival of The
Majority of One> .
Artists:
We artists wear our hearts
on our sleeves-- Maria Callas early on in Terrence McNally's Master
Class which defied the fate of most dramas by running through two
full Broadway seasons, with several actresses making the role of Callas
their own (Zoe Caldwell, Patty LaPone and Dixie Carter). While the play
left the Great White way on June 29, 1997, it promises to continue to entertain
and move audiences on the road both in the U.S. and abroad.
Hatred:
Hatred
is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
--Barbara
Undershaft, in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara,
Act 3.
This play about a wealthy girl who joins the Salvation army is a 4-star
golden oldie with movie fans and of course the basis for the musical Guys
and Dolls.
Race.
If you colored and can make them some money, then you all right with them. Otherwise, you just a dog in the alley.---Ma Rainey (Whoopi Goldbeg in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
Wealth: Jewels did not make the queen— Mary after her personal belongings have been taken awayin Mary Stuart
Money:
Money
should circulate like rain water. It should be flowing down among the people,
through dressmakers and restaurants and cabmen, setting up a little business
here, and furnishing a good time there
--Dolly Levi in Thornton/Wilder's
The Matchmaker,>Act 1. Mrs.
Levi returns to the subject of money several more times:Money!--it's like
the sun we walk under; it can kill or cure and, in a re-phrasing of philosopher
Francis Bacon --Money--pardon my expression--is like manure; it's not worth
a thing unless it's spread about a thing unless it's spread about encouraging
young things to grow.While the musical Hello Dolly
has somewhat
eclipsed the source, the Williamstown Theatre Festival managed to give
it a fresh as a strawhat summer production during its summer '98 season.
(CurtainUp's Review)
Advice, Miscellaneous:
Everybody should
eavesdrop once in a while. There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you
that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your
head
--Malachi
Stack in Thornton/Wilder's
The Matchmaker Act 3
Adventure:
The test of an adventure
is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, Oh, now
I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.
And the sign that something is wrong with you is when you sit quietly at
home wishing you were out having lots of adventure
--Dolly Levi in Thornton/Wilder's
The Matchmaker, Act 4.
Memories: All memories are false
--Mary,
one of three sisters rexamining their conflicting memories of lingering
discontent with their mother in Shelagh Stephenson's The
Memory of Water
Democracy: Democracy reads well but it doesn't act well — Lord Summerby in< Misalliance smartly revived by the Pearl Theater
Modern Adaptations of Classic Plays:
The
world's a mess. Absolutely. We've fucked it.
So
why not just sit back and deconstruct it? -- John in the opening scene
of Martin Crump's adaptation of The Misanthrope
that opened 2/99 at the Classic Stage Company and did indeed deconstruct
the original. The results were greeted with mixed critical response and
a sold-out house.
Fun and Games:
Play
us some music. And nothing too arty.
I'm
sick of this. I want to party.
--
Jennifer, Moliere's widow now a movie star played by movie star Uma Thurman
in The Misanthrope. Martin Crimp's update for the classic
did not abandon rhymed couplets which prompted CurtainUp's editor
to sum up the adaptation with a bit of doggerel of her own:
The
fact that it's fun and accessible even for Molière neophytes
>May
draw sneers and complaints from the master's acolytes. (our
review).
Hope
Hope? I find it hard to get on the hope bandwagon. I always have. -- Veronica, the middle aged central character of Christopher Durang's Miss Witherspoon. Veronica wants to stop the world and get off -- and does, only to find herself in an anteroom to the after life that she can't enter without going through several reincarnations.
Life:
You know -- there are only two
plots in this life: the one that works out the way it should, and the one
that doesn't-- Mizlanky before his partner Zilinky is sent to prison
courtesy of Mizslansky talking to the IRS to save his own skin in Jon Robin
Baitz's play, Mizlansky/Zilinsky or Schmucks, about two Hollywood
producers who were once kings of Schlock but are now as short of good ideas
as they are of cash. See our review
.
Self-descriptions:./b>
If I were a word, I would be 'more'
--- Yeardley Smith in a statement that gives her solo play its name: More (Posted 3/22/04)
Men:
Trouble with me is I never saw a man who was worth the powder to blow him up with.
Aunt Arrie, the sharp-tongued spinster in Mornings At Seven currently at the Lyceum where it last played in 1980.
Angels:
Angels are just the Prozac
for poor people.--- The quotable laugh lines came so fast and furiously in
The
Most Fabulous Story Ever Told that we lost track of who said
what during this homosexual update of the story of Adam and Eve (make that
Steve).
Corruption:
Corruption is our only hope.
---Mother Courage in the Classical Theater of Harlem's production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (Posted 12/8/03)
War:
What they could do with round
here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all
over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization.
--Mother
Courage, in Bertolt Brecht's anit-war epic Mother
Courage and Her Children, revived by the Jean Cocteau Repertory
company with a never-before performed musical score by Darius Milhaud.
Good Intentions. Whether he meant to, or not, my father did a good thing by sending me here.[Looking up to heavens]Thank you, Max. On a scale of one to a hundred, you've gone from one to a three--- Mathias, in My Old Lady, ever resorting to sarcasm, to hide the pain of a child growing up emotionally traumatized.
.
Human Connection:
Do you
know what it is to need someone? What is it that makes someone a link between
you and your own life? -- Pea one of the characters in Maria Irene
Fornes' playlet Drowning-- one
of a pair of plays that opened the Signature Theatre Company's 1999-2000
season dedicated to this little known but much admired playwright.
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Sin/Sinner:
I
could see the sin . . . I could hate the sin . . .but never the sinner
--Clarence Darrow in his argument with the prosecuting attorney in Never
the Sinner (NYC) a play by John Logan
reviewed by CurtainUp during it's Washington and New York run.
Religion: The only difference between a Jew and a Christian is the superstitions to which they subscribe.— Spinoza. in David Ives' New Jerusalem
>Freedom of the press.Freedom of the press
is freedom to gossip.
--President Mageeba defending the "relatively free" press (as in &qedited by a relative") of the African nation he rules,
in Night and Day, by Tom Stoppard.
Life vs. stage:
Death is being rained from the sky on whole populations. . . What sort of world is this? And you expect me to sit in my room contriving stage situations for you to be witty in!
--- Gaylord (Gay) Easterbrook, a successful playwright of frothy comedies questioning his relevancy, is the stand-in for S. N. Berhrman whose No Time for Comedy
Entrapment:
Every
man walks around with a cage he carries around with him until he is dead
-- Jim the ?caged canary? of the dynamically restaged early Tennessee Williams
play Not About Nightingaleswhich
moved from the Alley Theater in Texas to London and in Spring 1999 to Broadway.
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Life's Meaning you got somebody in you right from the start, and if you're lucky you figure out who it is and you become it. People who don't become are. . .well, look around you. — LouiseNevelson— in Occupant
Destiny:
But
I am sure of one thing; nothing,
No
disease can touch me now.
I
would not have been saved from death
Unless
it were for some strange destiny.
But
let my destiny go where it will.
--Oedipus
at the end of
Oedipus the King. This conclusion sums up the
abiding message of this and other Sophocles plays: Take what comes and
do not be come so hardened in your attitudes that you snap under pressure.
Or to put it another way, be resilient. In the same way when Creon prays
for death at the end of
Antigone, he is told: Whatever will
come to pass
Has
already been appointed. Nobody can change it.
Art:
Art consists of knowing the basic
rules and realizing when it is time to deviate from them
>--Prof.
Joseph Mashkan in
Old Wicked Songswhich
opened on September 7th at the Promenade Theater (76th Street and Broadway).
I saw
this play last year at the Jewish Rep Theater and found it to be one of
the most moving and exhilarating theatrical experiences of the season.
The Dichterliebe cycle of Schumann songs (based on Heinrich Heine's love
poems) are an important element in this story of the clash between two
men who come from very different places, literally and emotionally. With
playwright Jon Marans a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama,
the production had a decent second life at the Promenade.
Compromise: Citizens -- embrace the middle way --Athena, in the third play
of the Aeschylus trilogy The Oresteia
Suffering: How can human beings stand all that comes to them? How can they?— Horace Robedaux in The Orphans' Home Cycle Part 3
Truth: Telling the truth is a very expensive hobby.Silda forewarning her niece about the consequences of publishing her tell-all memoirOther Desert Cities
Life: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute— Emily in Our Town<
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Relationships:
How
could I be so lucky
?What
kind of fool could have taken you for granted?
--
Leo Frank in the musicalParade
after tragedy has eroded the differences between him and his wife -- differences profound enough to make him an outsider even in
the home he shares with a woman who would rather he say howdy and not
shalom.Besides
documenting the wave of post-Civil War class consciousness and anti-Semitism
seeded by a shift from an agricultural to industrial economy Parade
also captures the media's hunger for sensational news stories.
Leadership, bad:
He has emptied an empire. Poured the youth of an entire world like so much water into desert sand. --- the ghost of Darius speaking of his son Xerxes in The Persians
Acceptance:
Accept me as something enigmatic, for I am not what I appear to be.
---Dona Angela
The Phantom Lady at the Pearl Theater
Influence.
There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray.
All influence is immoral. . ..Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul.
--Lord Henry, Oscar Wilde's epigram-spitting soul mate in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Eleanor, love, time is running out. You and I have 20, 25 years if we're lucky, slowing down like a rusty old rudder until one day we stop forever. So this probably is my last chance and where's the harm? It's marvelous being a lover. -- James, trying to rationalize his infidelity to his suffering wife in James Nichols' Passion Play
Lies, Deception: There's not much value in a town propped up by lies
---- Lona in a rare revival of Ibsen's Pillars of the Community at the Royal National Theatre, posted 11/04/05
Real Life.
There are no happy endings in real life --- Katurian K. Katurian, in The Pillowman
Pain, it's necessity.
If you have no wounds how can you know if you're alive? If you have no scar how do you know who you are? Have been? Can ever be?
-- Man (Brian Murray),
in The Play About the Baby
Wisdom: I'm gonna tell you something now that will guide your entire life. Alla da wisdom you ever need to know. . . All Polish jokes are true.---Roman, shaking up his nine-year-old newphew's faith in the pleasure of humming the Beer Barrel Polka, playing the accordion, and eating kielbasa and duck blood soup. in Polish Joke
Playwriting
Advice:
If you want to be a playwright...go and get yourself a job
as a butler in a repertory company, if they'll have you. Learn from the
ground up how plays are constructed and what is actable and what is not.
Then sit down and write at least twenty plays one after the other, and
if you can manage to get the twenty-first produced for a Sunday night performance,
you'll be damned lucky!
--Garry
Essendine to aspiring playwright Roland Maule, in Noël Coward's Present
Laughter.. When it
opened in 1939 Coward played the lead.
Hypocrisy:
Hypocrisy
does keep things pleasant for at least part of the time
---Raymond
Brock in David Hare's Plenty,Act 2, scene 9.
Credentials:
The
only thing you can do today without a license is you'll go up the elevator
and jump out the window --Gregory Solomon in Arthur Miller's The
Price, Act 1.
Solomon, the character who brings the play its light touch, thus amplifies
his statement that he is both registered and licensed as an appraiser
Success:
It's good to be the king
--- Max Bialystock, in The Producers.
I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the creme de la creme.—Miss Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie revived by the New Group and starring Cynthia Nixon.
Personality.
I hope you’re going to be slightly more dynamic once we’re married. --Nicola, to the fiance who's been mysteriously ousted from his army career and is now a borderline alcoholic and anything but dynamic. These are just two of the characters living lives of isolated discontent in Alan Ayckbourn's Private Fears Public Places , the jewel in the second Brits Off-Broadway Festival's crown.
Creativity: There's this fear that your creativity
peaks around 23 and it's all downhill from there . . . Once you hit 50
it's over, you might as well teach high school
-- Hal
a math instructor who at 28 is very much aware of the narrowing of his
window of opportunity in the Pulitzer-prize winning Proof.
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Understanding:
People want things to make sense.
--- Nat, the outspoken mother in John Lindsay Abaire's first Broadway play, Rabbit Hole.
Playwriting
I am trying to write plays that contain the sum total of black culture in America, and its difference from white culture. Once you put in the daily rituals of black life, the plays start to get richer and bigger. You're creating a whole world in the process of telling your story, of writing this character. Once you place him down in his environment, you have to write about his whole philosophical approach to life. And then you can uncover, from a black perspective, the universalities of life. -- August Wilson, American Playwright, April 27, 1945 -October 2, 2005. To read our review of his last play, Radio Golf go here. (Posted 10/04/05)
Change,
Signs of:
Something
beginning
an
era exploding
a
century spinning
in
riches and rags
and
in rhythm and rhyme
the
people call it ragtime
--from
the title prologue number of Ragtime: The Musical
which opened 1/18/98 at the new Ford Center on Forty-Second Street. Critics
and audiences were split into raves and yea,buts. Everyone did agree, however,
that the opening number was a Wow for all the senses.
Dreams:I wasn't lying. I was dreaming -- Starbuck The Rainmaker, Act 2 to which Lizzie replies: There
are all kinds of dreams, Mr Starbuck. Mine are small
Dreams:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
--- opening lines of Langston Hughes' "Harlem [2]." which inspired the title of the play A Raisin in the Sun currently being revived on Broadway.
Words:
Words if you look after them . . .they can
build bridges -- Henry, the playwright in Tom Stoppard's The
Real Thing who learns that neither his definition of words or love
have been quite the real thing of his intellectual preconceptions.
Art
and Life: Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art
to give it some
--Part
1 (Act 1, scene 2 in the original), Jean Anouilh's The Rehearsal.
Love:
Love
is not that entertaining but it keeps your hopes up. --Part 2, Jean Anouilh's
The
Rehearsal.
Political Views: It's such a comfort that all the rich people about here are Conservatives. I believe the same may be noticed in other parts of the country. It almost seems like a special Providence.— Lady Faringford in
Lady Faringford, the slim, chic Lady Bracknell-like character in the Mint Theater's 's New York premiere of The Return of the Prodigal
Life, Assessment of: Maybe all I can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
-- Lyman Felt's lawyer, as influenced by Arthur Miller in The
Ride Down Mt. Mortan
Love: Love is too fragile a sentiment for out here— Mama Nadi in Ruined
Heritage: . . . Your father has lived here, and your grandfather before you. It's your inheritance-can't you realize that?--what you've got to come to when I'm under ground. We've made it for you, stone by stone, penny by penny, fighting through thick and thin for close on a hundred years---Rutherford, in Rutherford & Son, a 1912 social drama at the Mint Theater
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Life, Meaningful.
I've gone all over the world. . .but I didn't find a reason for me anywhere in the sense of my life. A break through cause. Something that puts me on the the other side, you know, with the people who knew why they're alive. Am I gonna wait for that to come to me? What if it doesn't come. Or maybe I don't know it when it shows up. Then I'm just another guy waiting to die.
--- Rich in John Patrick Shanley's new play Sailors Song-- a watercolor.
Violence.
I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent, we have no future
-- Edward Bond, whose 1965 play Saved.
Courage:
I
hate these faint hearts who are always thinking of the consequences.
--Scapin,
in the play named after him, Act 3.The roguish servant thus responds to
another valet's advice to avoid always risking actions that could get him
into trouble, adding that he is addicted to living dangerously. Moliere's
comedy, clearly comes down on the side of life's risk-takers.
When this
farce was first performed in 1671, the playwright himself played the part
of Scapin. Bill Irwin, who directed and cast himself as Scapin in the 1997
Roundabout production, followed the Comedia del Arts tradition of Moliere's
day by freely veering from the script. Consequently, while Scapin and his
colleague Sylvestre remain as the key figures, the above quote never shows
up in the Irwin/ Mark O'Donnell adaptation. Review
of Scapin
Gossip: To smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another's breast
is to become a principal in the mischief -- Joseph Surface, to Lady Sneer,
Act 1, scene 1, Richard Brinsley Sheridan' The School For Schandal)--
To which, true to her name, the lady retorts: Psha! there's no possibility
of being witty without a little ill-nature: the malice of a good thing
is the barb that makes it stick.
Sheridan
whose play was revived in December 1997 at the Pearl Theatre on St. Marks
Place was famous for giving his characters names that capsulized their
personalities. The pleasures of scandal are, alas, as timely today
as they were when the play was first performed at London's Drury Lane Theatre.
Specificity.
All my life I wanted to be somebody, but I see now that I should have been more specific
--Chrissy, one of 12 characters played by Lily Tomlin in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe .
HumanBody: So imagine your body's a community,
and your cells are the people who live there.
The dream of every cell is to be immortal. . .
to make endless copies of itself, but the community
Can only use so many liver cells and no more than
two eyes, so your cells need to cooperate. . .
.— Dr. William Shumway in The Secret Order
Life:
The Bible say some things ain't for you to know. It say you know neither the day nor the hour when death come.---Vera
He come like a thief in the night. And he don't go away empty.---Canewell
.
Interchange from Seven Guitars, part of the Signature's August Wilson Season
Malevolence, Ill Will:
. . . there's just about nothing more bond-inducing than sharply focused ill will.---Melissa James Gibson,
[sic]
Obsolescence:
No
more nonets and tenets. No more 60 weeks on the road. No more jam sessions
till dawn in the Cincinnati zoo. When they go, that will be it. . .a 50-year
blip on the screen
--Clifford,
the son of a jazz musician in the 1998-99 season's first Broadway opening,
Side Man by Warren Leight. Clifford
is the narrator and participant in the heartrending story of his motionally
dissonant family life and the larger story of the itinerant musicians whose
world collapsed with the end of the era of the legendary big bands. With
all the praise that's been heaped on the production (both in its original
Off-Broadway run) the musicians whose careers ended so sadly did get a
reprieve of sorts through Leight's affectionate portrayal of their passion
and their era
Evil. What, Cardinal Law, were you specifically doing to reach out and help the victims of Paul Shanley's unspeakable evil?
--- Krieger, the lawyer at Law's deposition hearing, a question met with silence in Michael Murphy's docu-drama, Sin (A Cardinal Deposed) playing on Theater Row. (Posted 10/28/04)
Regrets.
Have you ever done anything you've regretted, Nancy?
-- Philip
I've never done anything at all. I regret that
-- Nancy
in Amy Rosenthal's delightful Sitting Pretty
Language:
Language belongs to the past.
Now you throw out a big serve and it never comes back.
--Tom
Sergeant (Michael Gambon) explaining his lack of communication with his
son in David Hare's
Skylight which was a big hit at the Royale
during the Fall '96 season.Review
People's Worth:
Never think too little of people. There's always a little less to be thought.
---Foxwell J. Sly in the fthe Broadway revival of Sly Fox.
Race Relations:
If it wasn't for all you Southern niggahs, yessahin' bowin' and scrapin', scratchin'your head, white folks wouldn' think we were all fools. ---Tech/Sergeant Vernon C. Waters in Second Stage's revival of Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play.
The culture of illness is so strong in my familythat it's the way we keep time
Excuses:
Not
havin' ain't no excuse for not gettin'.
--Tech
Sergeant Vernon C. Waters in Act 1 of Charles Fuller's 1982 Pulitzer Prize
winning A Soldier's Play.
The drama
which centers on a murder investigation in a Southern Army camp during
W.W. 2 explores the devastating effect self-hatred can have on those around
him. The new non-profit Valiant Theatre company chose this as its second
offering for the season. (From November 20th-December 8th).A
Soldier's Play review
Love:
Love's a fairy tale for idiots.
--
Charles Bukowski, whose stories were adapted for
South Of No North
Prejudice:
You've got to be taught to be afraid/Of people whose eyes are oddly made. . . .—--from "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught" — in South Pacific
Reality:
But why should it all be garbage?
Why? Why should nickels be bigger than dimes? That's the way it is.
— Fox explaining the realities of Hollywood to Karen, his secretary in Speed-the-PlowSpeed-the-Plow
Politics:
You're
not nominated by the people--you're nominated by the politicians! Why?
Because the voters are too damned lazy to vote in the primaries! Well,
politicians are not lazy!
--James
Conover in State of the Union by Howard Lindsay and
Russel Crouse, Act 2.
On
June 2, 1997 the annual Arena Stage benefit for the Living Stage Theatre
Company unpacked this 1945 cornball hit from the theatrical archives and
gave politicians and journalists the opportunity to strut their thespian
stuff. The plot centers on one Grant Matthews, a guy too honest to run
for president who runs for president, which of course makes him less and
less honest. His moral seducers included, among others, Charles Rangel,
playing, a pro-business pol; Richard Lugar and Donna Shalala as a judge
and his Southern wife; Susan Molinari as an Irish maid complete with accent
(the congresswoman was herself seduced that month to swap her congressional
role for that of newscaster). In the end, Grant's wife who held tight to
her integrity and helps him to step back from the edge of moral turpitude.
Realism:
I don't want realism. I want
-- magic. Yes, yes, magic!
--
Blanche DuBois, in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.
In August 1999, a deconstructed version of this play -- with Blanche bathing
on stage, and Mitch as well as Stanley raping her -- opened for a limited
run in the East Village (our review)
Truth/Untruth: I know I fib a good deal but when things are important I tell the truth.— Blanche
— in A Streetcar Named Desire
Kissing:
When all is said, what is a
kiss? An oath of allegiance taken in closer proximity. . .a fashion of
inhaling each other's heart
--
Cyrano, in Edmond Rostand's
Cyrano de Bergerac .
The quote
may be from Rostand's play but it's inspired by a much more up-to-date
romance by an exciting young playwright: Stop
Kiss by Diana Son.
Marriage:
Marriage is like lying in a warm bath. And slowly it gets colder and colder for the rest of one's lifetime ---- Alfred Darby in The Sugar Wife an Irish play currently at London's SoHo Theater (posted 1/29/06)
Life is a fight--people always seem to be against you
---- Laurence, the type A real estate salesman in Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party
Loneliness:
All
rooms are lonely where there is only one person --Alma Winemiller
to the lonely travelling man she picks up at the end of Tennessee William's
Summer
and Smoke revived during the first part of the 1996-97 season at
the Roundabout
Talent,
As a Means to Stave of Age: Where there's talent, there's no such thing
as old age--Vassily Vassilyvitch Svetlovidow in Anton Chekhov's one-act
play Swan Song. This short play, the last of an evening of
four of Chekhov's early playlets (Four Of a
Kind), served up as the Berkshire Theatre Festival's first-of-the-season
offering is a soliloquy of an aging actor re-playing some of his best roles
(a la Christopher Plummer in his 1997 Tony winning role Barrymore..
As played by Bob Dishy this statement proved to be something of a joke
on himself--and the audience which was in danger of aging from boredom.
As Broadway has its failures, so does summer stock--even much venerated
(deservedly so) landmarks like BTF.
Music: To think that syncopation outwitted segregation
--
Singer-lyricist Ann Hampton Calloway's apt addition to the classic"Stompin'
at the Savoy" for themuscial Swing!.
Self-Understanding:Self-Sufficiency--
I have come to see is not the road to self-knowledge -- Agis, the romantic
principal in act one of James Magruder's translation and musical book for
the Marivaux comedy, Triumph of Love., the musical
See
our review.
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Basbeall.
Baseball is better than democracy.
--Mason Marzac in Take Me Out a hit at the Donmar Warehouse in London and the Public Theater from which it moved on to Broadway..
Places to Live In: Champlain is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.—Linda, the volatile talk show host's assistant on her experience as his occasional lover in the Broadway revival of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio.
Truth.
True is a word humans have invented to give them a sense of
meaning. Immortals do not use it -- one of many quotable lines (by Thetis) from the epic Tantalus at the Denver Center .
Faith:
Faith
is a gift...and there's no learning it
--Lady Hurf, in Act 4 of Jean Anouilh's Thieves' Carnival.
Life, appreciation of.
I know this wasn't much, but let it be enough. Isn.t it great to be alive? --- a reader-submitted favorite quote from Thom Pain (Based on nothing). Extended to July 3!
(Posted 2/05/05)
Teen Problems. That's the problem with high school-- one of the many problems, anyway. You're so desparate to fit in, and at the same time totally needing to stand out --- Belinda explaining her inter-racial marriage to the high school athletic hero to the high school nerd. This Is How It Goes.
Second Chances:
I often wonder what it would be like if we could begin our
lives over again. . .as if the life we'd already lived were just a rough
draft and we could begin all over again with the final copy. . . If that
happened I think the thing we'd all want most would be not to repeat ourselves.
--Vershinin,
Act 1, in Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Vershinin, a
family friend and eventually the middle sister Masha's lover, is thinking
about his own unhappy marriage. For the sisters a new beginning would mean
leaving the provincial town where they've been trapped for eleven long
and frustrating years and returning to the more culturally stimulating
life of Moscow.The fact that the 1996-97 season boasts three productions of this play underscores
the fact. During 11/96 the Sovremennick Theater of Moscow paid a short
visit to Manhattan with a Russian language version, (with earphones for
simultaneous translation), in the style of the original Moscow Theater's
production by Constantin Stanislavsky.
Neccessary/Unnecessary:
Knowing three
languages in a town like this is an unnessecary luxury. In fact, not even
a luxury, just a useless encumbrance. . .like having a sixth finger
--Masha Act 1, in Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters. People born
in small towns will always see the big metropolis as the place where a
more stimulating life beckons. Many writers and artists end up returning
to their birth places, if not physically, as a wellspring for their imagination.
In the case of the Prosorov sisters and their brother, however, the big
city and its more culturally stimulating atmosphere is not an unknown dream,
but one from which they've been exiled.
Small vs. Big City Life: You can sit
in some huge restaurant in Moscow and not know a soul, and no one know
you; yet somehow you feel that you belong there. . .But here you know everybody
and everybody knows you,and yet you don't feel you belong here,no not at
all. . .You're a stranger and all alone.
--Andrey,Act 2, in Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters.
Work:
I must get another job. This one
doesn't suit me. It lacks all the things I long for and dream of. It's
work without poetry, without meaning.
-- Irina, Act 2, in Anton Chekhov's he Three Sisters.The cry
of the person who feels trapped in a deadend job persists even today with
so many seemingly endless opportunities. Jobs like lovers, will often start
out full of promise and turn out to be filled with the dailyness that tarnishes
the dream.
Life, the Sameness Of: After we're dead,
people will fly in balloons, fashions will change, the sixth sense will
be discovered, and for all I know, even be developed and used. . .But life
itself won't be very different; it will still be mysterious, always difficult,
yet filled with happiness. And in a thousand years people will still sight
and complain 'How hard life is!'--and yet they'll still be afraid of death
and unwilling to dies, just as they are now
--Tusenbach,
Act 2, The Three Sisters. The sisters
and the various players in the drama are assembled. Vershinin has announced
his desire for tea, adding "Well, if we can't have any tea, let's philosophize
a bit, anyway"--and it is in the course of this "philosophizing" that the
baron who repeatedly announces his desire to experience real work, makes
the above statement. While the advances we now anticipate are different,
the essence of what he says remains true.
Belief:
But man must have some faith,
or at least he's got to seek it, otherwise his life will be empty, empty.
. .How can you live and not know why the cranes fly, why children are born,
why the stars shine in the sky!. . .You must either know why you live,
or else. . .nothing matters. . .everything's just nonsense and waste.
--Masha
, Act 2, The Three Sisters.
Love:
When
you read a novel, everything in it seems too trite and obvious. It's so
understandable--but when you fall in love yourself, you suddenly discover
that no one really knows anything, and you've got to make your own choices
--Masha,
Act 3, The Three Sisters. Masha who's
come to realize that the man she married at 18 was good but not brilliant,
has just confessed her affair with Vershinin to her sisters. How many men
and women who married the man of their dreams based on the happy but
vague endings of novels and movies have been disappointed by the reality
of every day? How many, like Irina, find it difficult to compromise their
vision of the man of their dreams for a man with flesh-and-blood shortcomings?
Life and Death:
What beautiful trees--and
when you think of it, how beautiful life ought to be when there are trees
like these!. . . Look at that tree, it's dead, but it goes on swaying in
the wind with the others. And it seems to me that in the same way, if I
die, I'll still have a part in life, one way or another.
--
Tusenbach, Act 4, iThe Three Sisters. The
baron's statement foreshadows his fate. Having finally won over Irina,
he can't refuse the challenge of a duel that will prove fatal, leaving
him "swaying in the wind" like the tree in the forest he contemplates with
such admiration.
Time's Passing:
Oh where has it gone?--What's
become of my past when I was young and gay and clever, when I had beautiful
dreams and was full of ideas, and the present and the future were bright
with hope? Why do we become so dull, so ordinary, so uninteresting, almost
before we've begun to live?
---
Andrey,
, Act 4, in Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Andrey's cry
is the leitmotiv of Chekhov's tragic story of a family whose dreams are
shattered in part by external circumstances and in part by their own weaknesses.
Life:
Some day people will know why
such things happen and what the purpose of all this suffering is. . .Meanwhile
we must go on living
--Irina,
Act 4, is The Three Sisters. Irina' desperate
cry comes at the end of the play. Her fiance has been killed in a senseless
duel, just after she's agreed to marry him without love but with the hope
of forging a new life instead of yearning for the dream she realize will
never materialize. With the Russian Revolution beckoning on the very near
horizon, she sees some hope in work as a way to give some meaning to the
life she is determined to go on living. Her oldest sister Olga underscores
this, concluding with: "No, my dear sisters, our lives aren't finished
yet" and a plaintive "soon we shall know why we live, why we suffer...Oh,
if we only knew, if only we knew!"
Naturalness:
You are only yourself when no one's watching.
---Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog
This is a play about family wounds and healing. Welcome to the family
Suzan-Lori Parks, about Topdog/Underdog, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama the day after its official Broadway opening. (posted 4/13/02)
Women's Role:
I am a woman who has no place to go, but I'm going, and after a while I will ask myself why I took my mother's two children to be my own.
Anna Berniers in Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic being given a lovely revival at the Pearl Theatre in the East Village (Posted 1/14/07)
Destiny: Destiny seems to get up very
early and go to bed late at night --Madame Sylvie, Act 1, Transit of
Venus by Maureen Hunter. The Canadian playwright's love story imagined
from accounts of a real life French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil de la
Galasiere's eleven year effort to chart the transit of Venus. Madame Sylvie
is the astronomer's crusty and cynical mother who while convent trained,
has little faith in God's reliability, as evidenced in a later statement
that" God will not give anything without taking away something." The play
had its American premiere as part Berkshire Theatre Festival's summer '98
season.
Life,
Deferred: I'm tired of being stuck in this fluffy gown waiting for
a man who's always late --Celeste, Act 2,
Transit
of Venus by Maureen Hunter. Celeste's exasperation is understandable
when you consider that the French astronomer she loves has kept her waiting
around for years, and is now ready to embark on another journey.
As played by Maryn Hinkle, Celeste's emergence from trembling virgin to
a woman refusing to be denied a real life by a man who puts his worldly
pursuits before their love, is the play's strongest suite. She re-states
her dissatisfaction with "I'm sick to death of making do with dreams and
a phantom loverand of being a book stuck on a shelf -- unread." Nevertheless
she agrees to wait through another journey for her astronomer lover and
waiting at home, but with this proviso: "I won't go on forever competing
with the universe."
Revolutionaries:
I learned three things . . .during the war. . .Firstly, you're either a
revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an
artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might
as well be a revolutionary. I forget the third thing
--
Henry Carr in Tom Stoppard's Travesties.
Appreciation:
Henchmen are forgotten once their dirty work is done Self -- This is the
title and leitmotiv of an Act 2 duet sung by the gardener and the Harlequin
in Triumph of Love,the musical.
Fate:
I knew he could have been me. If I hadn't had the good fortune of being
born a Jew I might well have been sitting where he was sitting . . .I,
too am capable of becoming enamored of idea or idealogies. -- Lisa Kron
quoting her father during his stint as a US interrogator of suspected Nazi
war criminals during World War II in her one-person serio-comic 2.5
Minute Ride which premiered in Spring 1999 at the Public Theatre.
Life--its passing:I've lost a whole life of stitches in this house.A whole life. That's
what gets to me. So many days gone. . .I could knit a whole bedspread for
this island with all the lost days -- Sofia, who is a political prisoner
in Two Sisters and a Piano.
They say I was born with luck. They didn't say what kind.—Wolf in August Wilson's Two Trains Running.
U
Accusations:You ruined my life you sonuvabitch! I am just as gifted as
you -- just as intelligent. I'd send you my short stories and you'd give
me your phony praise because you knew I'd keep sending you your goddam
checks. But you also filled me with false hopes because you knew that if
I was published I would eclipse you! Deny it! Go ahead -- deny it! You
told me I wrote like Cheever. Like Mailer. . I BELIEVED YOU!--Jonathan
"Jack" Vaughn, Uncle Jack, Act
Three by Jeff Cohen, produced at SoHo Rep in 1999.
Life.
I've wasted my lifea belief shared by all the unhappy people in Chekhov's classic tragi-comedy Uncle Vanya.
Discomfort:
In my easy chair I was anything but. --Captain Josiah
Wickett in The Uneasy Chair.
The crotchety
Wickett comes to Miss Pickles' parlor as a tenant end up her husband in
a marriage that leads a a judge to accuse them of having "done more harm
to matrimony than anyone since Henry the Eighth."
Public Taste:
I don't think too many people are going to come and see this musical.
Why do you say that, Little Sally? Don't you think people want to be told that their way of life is unsustainable?.---an exchange between Officer Lockstock and Little Sally in Urinetown, the first Broadway opening afterthe September 11th, 2001 tragedy. And exactly the kind of musical people were glad they came to see.
Talkativeness:
. . .nothing can kill a show like too much exposition
-- Officer Lockstock
How about bad subject matter? Or a bad title? That could kill a show pretty good -- Little Sally
An exchange by the comic commentators of Manhattan's unlikeliest new musical comedy hit Urinetown
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V
Honesty:
.. .Honest men
Are the soft easy Cushion on which Knaves
Repose
and fatten
--Pierre, Act 1 of Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd.
Pierre is answering his friend Jaffeir's quandary how "that damn'd starving
Quality Call'd Honesty, got footing in the World." Both young men live
in a corrupt society dominated by ineffectual politicians. Pierre will
soon enlist his friend in a plot to overthrow this regime. Otway, while
famous in his day, has been overshadowed by Shakespeare and even this,
his masterpiece, is rarely performed. That's why the Pearl Repertory Theatre
deserves commendation for mounting this and other often forgotten plays.
Review
Dependability:
Clocks
will go as they are set; But Man,
Irregular
Man's ne'ere constant, never certain --Renault, Act 2 of Thomas Otway's
Venice Preserv'd. Renault is the leader of the conspirators
who are planning to overthrow the corrupt and ineffective Senate, yet he
himself is not above the weakness of the flesh, having tried to make love
to a would-be conspirator's wife.
Places/Ideas:
Are we where we live or are we what we think? What matters? Stones or ideas?
--
David Hare's final question in the play/travelogue, Via
Dolorosa,which he wrote and starred in for a limited Spring 1999
run at the Booth Theater.
Warnings:
There are times when you want to spread an alarm -- A
View From the Bridge>Act 1. The times thus described are when
you know something terrible is going to happen, but there's nothing you
can do to prevent it since you have no firm facts.
Personal
Traits: He allowed himself to be wholly known --Alfieri in Arthur Miller's
A
View from the Bridge, Act 2. In his summary speech, this is the
characteristic the narra
as he could his "more sensible clients."
You know what your trouble is, John? You have no spirit of ruin. . .---Denis McCleary, the Fitzgerald-like novelist in The Violet Hour when his fledgling publisher friend hesitates to risk publishing his book.
We swell about in a vortex of beastliness.
---Noël Coward's Nicky in a revival of The Vortex
Money: In this world one is either the master or servant of money
--
Mr. Voysey, Sr., a solicitor who's mastered the manipulation of money without
undue stress on his conscience in The Voysey Inheritance
W
Helplessness: Nothing to be done— Go Go in Waiting for Godot
al Joey
Ideas:Ideas have their place, undoubtedly. We need them to draw upon.
But the stateman's task is the accommodation of stubborn facts to shifting
circumstance and in effect to the practical capacities of the average stupid
man. Democracy involves admission of that. -- Blackborough, one of
a half dozen uncannily up-to-date British politicians, circa 1907 in Harley
Granville Barker's Waste.
April:
April
is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs
out of the dead land, mixing
Memory
and desire, stirring
Dull
roots with spring rain
--T.
S. Eliot's The Waste Land starts out like many a conversation,
talking about, well, yes, the weather. It's good reception as a mono-drama
for the British actress Fiona Shaw (at the Liberty theater) was as surprising
as the weather can be. It's not an easy poem to read, nor is it a laugh-it-up,
straight entertainment theater piece. Compelling? Yes! And, some thought
something less than an evening's entertainment...considering its 35-minute
running time.
Aging, and men:
Men age so well. It really is just enough to make you sick..
--- Helen, played by Kate Burton in Water's Edge.
Relationships.
I'm not sure I've ever felt complete with anyone . . . not even myself . . . especially not myself
--Kate who used to feel complete with Chris (and maybe will again!) in Katherine Tolan's modern drawing room farce, The Wax
Illness: The culture of illness is so strong in my familythat it's the way we keep time
---Lisa Kron, whose meta-theatrical exploration of wellness and illness in individuals and community, is hilariously (and often touchingly) taken over by her well and yet unwell mother. From Well.
Sanity. The purpose of my husband's clinic isn't to cure, but to liberate and exploit madness -- Mrs. Prentice, in Joe Orton's >What The Butler Saw revived by The New Group
Death: Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which yet thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more, must low
And soonest our best men with thee do go,Popular Celebrated heads of state or especially great communicators
Did they have brains or knowledge? Don't make me laugh!
They were Popular! Please!
It's all about Popular!
It's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed
So it's very shrewd to be
Very very Popular, like me.
— From " Popular" by Galinda in Wicked.
Rest
of their bones and soul's delivery. --John Donne quoted by the Donne scholar
at the center of Margaret Edson's Wit.
XYZ
Change. I can't change my body, but I can have a new voice.
--Alma in Yellowman
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