Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Edward AlbeeRead
The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence - putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply - if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Avant-garde theater challenges traditional norms and encourages an open-minded approach for a rewarding experience.
Edward Albee emphasizes the significance of experiencing avant-garde theater with an open mind and a sense of childlike wonder. By setting aside preconceived notions and societal expectations, audiences can fully appreciate the boldness and humor of this unconventional art form, leading to unexpected and liberating insights.
Themes
Avant-GardeTheaterArtHumorCreativitySurpriseFreedom
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech to aspiring actors and playwrights encouraging them to embrace creativity, one could quote Albee to inspire them.
More from Edward Albee
All quotes →When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.
Edward AlbeeRead
I am convinced that no one is fully educated without a full grounding in the arts.
Edward AlbeeRead
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
Edward AlbeeRead
Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.
Edward AlbeeRead
Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.
Edward AlbeeRead
Similar quotes
There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.
Neil GaimanRead
When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical.
James TaylorRead
Nothing is contrived. At night, the clothes should pour like liquid over the body.
Oscar De La RentaRead
Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results
Brian EnoRead
Well, you put a little piece of yourself into every character that you do. Even if you're playing some psychotic person, which of course I'm not, some part of you is in that character and it's hopefully believable. I always come back to the fact that my own instinct is better than something I build in my mind.
Scarlett JohanssonRead
I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.
Annie ProulxRead