You're Alive Only Once, As Far As

The Condition Of The Theater Is Always An Accurate Measure Of The Cultural Health Of A Nation. A Play Always Exists In The Present Tense (if It Is A Valuable One), And Its Music -- Its Special Noise -- Is Always Contemporary. The Most Valuable Function Of The Theater As An Art Form Is To Tell Us Who We Are, And The Health Of The Theater Is Determined By How Much Of That We Want To Know.

Usually, The Way I Write Is To Sit Down At A Typewriter After That Year Or So Of What Passes For Thinking, And I Write A First Draft Quite Rapidly. Read It Over. Make A Few Pencil Corrections, Where I Think I've Got The Rhythms Wrong In The Speeches, For Example, And Then Retype The Whole Thing. And In The Retyping I Discover That Maybe One Or Two More Speeches Will Come In. One Or Two More Things Will Happen, But Not Much.

I'm Back In Fashion Again For A While Now. But I Imagine That Three Or Four Years From Now I'll Be Out Again. And In Another Fifteen Years I'll Be Back. If You Try To Write To Stay In Fashion, If You Try To Write To Be The Critics' Darling, You Become An Employee.

A Play Is A Parenthesis That Contains All The Material You Think Has To Be Contained For The Action Of The Play. Where Do You End That? Where The Characters Seem To Come To A Pause... Where They Seem To Want To Stop - Rather Like, I Would Think, The Construction Of A Piece Of Music.

Martha: Oh, I Like Your Anger. I Think That's What I Like About You Most. Your Anger.