Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of rhythm in storytelling and performance.
George C. Wolfe highlights that every play should have a deliberate rhythm that guides the audience's emotional journey. By controlling the pacing and flow of the narrative, a creator can effectively lead the audience through moments of tension and release, creating a compelling experience that resonates deeply.
In practice
In a theater workshop, a director might quote this to emphasize the importance of pacing in their actors' performances.
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.
A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.
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.
I was raised to believe that other people's suffering was my responsibility.
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.
One thing I tend to do is ask actors tons and tons of questions to try to get at what they're thinking but also to expose to them whatever box they've placed their characters in - to blow up that box so the journey can begin.
To make music means to express human intelligence by sonic means. This is intelligence in its broadest sense, which includes not only the peregrinations of pure logic but also the "logic" of emotions and intuition. My musical techniques, although often rigorous in their internal structure, leave many openings through which the most complex and mysterious factors of the intelligence may penetrate.
Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.
I want to tell a story that makes the reader always want to see what will happen next.
The actor must use his imagination to be able to answer all questions (when, where, why, how). Make the make-believer existence more definite.
I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.
I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.
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