Richard Foreman Quotes (33 Quotes)

Quite the opposite. I might fall on my face, but I feel born again.

But I also enjoyed the way more realistic, earthly events, like somebody peeking in the window, which you just happen to notice as the camera swings past, would redeem that film from being too much of a purist exercise.

I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.

It's true, I don't like the real world.

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

I wrote an outline. I wrote a rough draft. And then I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. And that's the way you were supposed to write plays.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

My rule for staging for the first six years, at least, was to make the staging be an ex-ray of the text. Try to be as simple, to do as little as possible, and only to do what was really indicated in the text.

I'm there to make a kind of theatrical music that is desperately missing in my life. And if other people don't like it, I'm very unhappy, but I can't do anything about that.

Now we speak in telegram form, we write little e-mails, and we have everything at our fingertips, so we don't train ourselves to keep anything inside.

Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.

I've been trying to figure out for at least the last 10 years how to force myself into something more risky.

I used to go to theater a lot with my grandmother. She had a subscription to the Theater Guild I used to go with her every Saturday afternoon.

Because at Yale, each year I was writing a play in a different style. Not that they demanded that, but I was searching as any young artist would be.

I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do.

I feel confused about the influence of a computerized society, where there's instant gratification at every level.

I make theater for myself, and if someone else can derive some value from it, fine.

You see, I thought of myself as making minimalist art like the music of Lamonte Young, or the paintings of Frank Stella.

I like to think of the notebooks as a pool of raw material, ... I make plays of out it, so why can't other people I just identify with this idea that I'm a funnel for this material that doesn't particularly belong to me.

Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.

As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.

So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.

You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.

I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre.

From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything.

We live in a world in which everything's interpreted for us. I'm interested in creating a different experience.

All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.

When, at fifteen years of age, I started going every weekend to New York, the plays that I loved were always the weird plays.

If I wasn't in the theater, I would be a hermit.

From the seventh through the twelfth grades, I probably designed and did a lot of the building for twenty or thirty productions.

Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.

What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.