Saturday, November 20, 2010

Playwriting is Lasagna

"[Tony Kushner] has compared the [playwriting] process to making a proper lasagne: 'All the yummy nutritious ingredients you’ve thrown into it have almost-but-not-quite succeeded in overwhelming the design. A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.'"
--"The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide To Himself," New York magazine
"If I think I'm going to do research for a particular play, my inner child rebels and I won't do it. So I do research by constantly reading things that excite and interest me and I don't know yet if it's going to be a play. [...] I just kept sort of laying in all this reading because of being excited and not knowing for sure a play would come out of it. But then I realized I was getting close ... It's like making lasagna. One book is the noodles and a couple of movies are the sauce... And then one day, suddenly, I know it's the moment to put it in the oven and start writing."
--Liz Duffy Adams, quoted in the Magic Theatre's playbill for Or,

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