I love working with a set designer because, in many respects, you meet the set designer before you meet the actors. So it's a chance for me as a director to figure out what I'm thinking and to explore how the space is going to actually be activated.
George C. Wolfe
My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.
Confidence comes in going on personal journeys in a public arena and feeling as though you have a right to do that. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you need to discover and not worry about how pretty the journey is. If you're aware of the pretty, you're not going to dig into the mess.
Each actor, every single time you work with an actor, you have to come up with the language that's going to serve them. And that's what allows them to give the performance that you want to nurture inside of them and what you think they're capable of giving.
Surviving failure is one thing. Surviving success is... is challenging, with the consequences and what you lose along the way.
I've always tried to do shows in a filmic way. I like it when forms smack up against each other.
There's no place more theatrical than history.
One of the things I learned very early on was that if you cast the show correctly, and if you've created the right energy in the room, the solution is also in the room. The solution doesn't necessarily come from someone, but if everybody is working in a very steadfast and rigorous way, then everything you're looking for is in the room.
Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.
I love working with actors who will just go, 'Oh O.K., let's try it and see where it goes,' and 'Let's see what we can discover.'
Growing up in the South, I was raised to be a Negro boy. I was acutely aware how other people perceived me, and that informed my behavior. That worked for a period of time, but it could also be suffocating.
I came to New York to write and direct, and when I got here, a lot of my rage came out.
I feel like I'm edgy and I'm funny and I got this bite, this outrageousness.
As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.
To me, 'Show Boat' was the first American musical, the first to have the real texture of this country.
The wonderful thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. The worst thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. That dynamic is thrilling and challenging every time you make a show.
Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.
You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.
Generally, the realm in which black playwrights have been allowed to achieve success has been social realism or musicals.
You can go see ballet in its purity; you can go to a recital to hear music by itself. But what the American musical does so thrillingly is bastardize these forms into something that is exhilarating and compelling and deeply moving.
Anytime you create art, you create a mess. I mean, 'Hamlet' is a mess!
I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.
Our lives are connected in ways we can't imagine. They're connected even before we know they're connected.
The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.
The best of any artist is in their art.
Ultimately, theatre is about creating a sense of wonder, and I think wonder is achieved not by a kind of wide-eyed silliness but by being available to that which is most unknown, inside the material and inside yourself.
When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it.
AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.
I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.
1985 - That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories.
I could program a 'fabulous, I love it' kind of hit season right now. I'm more interested in breaking boundaries, telling a story, defying a truth that has been accepted.
There is a strange kind of parental pride when 'Topdog' ends up on Broadway, or 'Elaine Stritch.'
You've got to make the rehearsal room very safe. You can't bully people, because if you bully people, they're going to freeze and lock up.
I love Kabuki, Noh theater and bunraku.
I personally am a very big fan of 'Romeo + Juliet.' It had a visceral power to it that I thought was just exhilarating. It was a very arresting and very disturbing and deeply compelling version of the play.
I was raised to believe that other people's suffering was my responsibility.
In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other.
I pride myself on being available to as many people's stories as I possibly can.
I think I am the first person of color to direct a major white play on Broadway. In 1993? That's astounding to me. And horrifying to me.
The Public Theater requires one to be very public, and writing requires one to be very private.
To want to come to New York, you have to have a sense of wonder about the world and a foolish sense of worth about yourself. And I, too, had both of those things.
If you have the talent and passion and commitment, you shouldn't be locked out of the room.
Certain events make people come out of their little boxes and become part of the whole.
I like to knock down walls and allow others to enter.
When you're writing, in theory, everybody is serving you. When you're directing, you're serving everybody - in the guise of acting like everybody's serving you. But you're really serving the materials. You're serving the actors. You're in charge, but it's not free.
When I was on dialysis, I willed myself to do 'On the Town.' It accesses my most childlike, joyful love of theater.
When 'Jelly's' went out on tour, no one really wanted it. It was undersold. And I knew if I gave 'Noise' to someone else, they would sell it as 'Stomp' with little dancing black boys.
Producing has empowered me as an artist in a specific way. It's forced a certain kind of maturity.
Commercial theater, in its agenda to appeal to everybody, is often at the expense of the unique vision of the artist.
Racists are deficient as human beings.
