A Quote by David Henry Hwang

You can't be a playwright without believing there's an audience for adventurous work.

David Henry Hwang

Quote Topics

Adventurous Audience Believing Playwright Without Work

Quote Author

David Henry Hwang
American - Playwright
Born: August 11, 1957

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.

Edward Albee

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.

Terence Rattigan

It's a lucky circumstance when you get to usher in new work, because you are able to ask the playwright and the director (who in a new work is always in dialogue with the playwright) an unlimited amount of questions.

Gideon Glick

I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg. I believe in a theater where the director and the playwright work together to create what they need.

John Guare

I always like to break out and address the audience. In 'The History Boys', for instance, without any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up.

Alan Bennett

We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage.

C. S. Lewis

I found doing that kind of comedy without an audience is just... for me, it's almost impossible. You need the audience to do their half of the work.

Dick Van Dyke

I pray to be of service to the playwright, the audience, the other actors and my character.

Lusia Strus

By believing your work is a 'gift,' it radically changes what you create. I think this is a revolutionary idea. It's no longer about client approval or a paycheck, but aspiring to make work that has meaning and purpose in your life and for your audience.

James Victore

As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

Tony Kushner

One can believe God capable of anything without believing that he did everything anybody may say he did. One can believe in the possibility of miracles without believing that every reported miracle must in fact have happened.

Robert M. Price

An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.

George Jean Nathan

I am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.

Lucille Ball

You don't fully understand the meaning of a work until the audience responds to it. Because the audience completes the circle, and adds a whole other shade of meaning. Whenever you view something, and this is why great works of art survive decades and centuries, is because there's a door within the work that allows the audience to walk through and complete the meaning of the work. An audience isn't passive, nor are they unintelligent.