A Quote by Tony Kushner

As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people. — © Tony Kushner
As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.
I pray to be of service to the playwright, the audience, the other actors and my character.
Torture is something that happens between two people, the torturer and the victim. The victim is made to taste death without actually dying. He is subjected to atrocious pain and begs his torturer to kill him. He's even ready to forgive the torturer as long as he kills him.
Stage is the place of the playwright: you're guided by great actors and directors, but it's the playwright's word on the page that counts.
A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.
A playwright, especially a playwright whose work deals very directly with an audience, perhaps he should pay some attention to the nature of the audience response - not necessarily to learn anything about his craft, but as often as not merely to find out about the temper of the time, what is being tolerated, what is being permitted.
There are some actors that are great stars and storytellers, but not necessarily good actors. I'm talking about some - not all - of the people you see in action flms or blockbusters. They're film stars, though not necessarily great actors. And there are those who are great actors, but not necessarily big film stars. Jim Sturgess is both. He's quite obviously a star, the audience likes him, he's a great storyteller and he turned out to be one of the greatest actors I've worked with as well.
Any actor worth his salt is looking for truth, the core of truth of the particular situation he is portraying, of that play. The playwright, the actors and the audience, that's what we're all there seeking. When it's working, time is destroyed. Sometimes 'Moon,' a play of four hours, would go by in a snap of the fingers.
Well, one of the things we're supposed to be able to do as playwrights is write from a place of empathy, get into another character's shoes and experience things both mundane and tragic. And people don't - like me right now - people aren't necessarily the most eloquent when trying to express their emotions. I guess I feel as a playwright that those people deserve a voice, too, a voice that isn't so articulate that they themselves can no longer identify with it.
People think that theater actors are too big for the camera. It's like, 'No, we're actors and we adjust for our audience.'
One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.
There's music in my films but you seldom hear it. Very early I got the idea that the important things in films were people - the actors. They are the intermediary between the director and the audience. They make direct contact. People to people communication.
We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage.
You can't be a playwright without believing there's an audience for adventurous work.
I wouldn't inflict my naked body on any paying audience.
I've never watched my films with an everyday audience so it was really crazy to watch people clap at the end of my film - with no one there, no actors, no people from the film. It was just a spontaneous reaction, so I thought that was probably the best compliment you could get from an audience.
[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.
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