I think theatre is a democratic act and I think writing a play is not a democratic act. I think we should give writers more leeway and space to write the thing they want to write, and then we should produce the play, multiple times, and let them re-write it.

Sarah Ruhl

Categorized in : Thinking Writing Play

A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.

wedding daughter mother

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.

artist beautiful love

Theatre is, at its roots, some very brave people mutually consenting to a make believe world, with nothing but language to rest on.

roots believe people

Art is a way of freezing time, or extending time. ... It's another way to bridge the gaps between us.

gaps bridges art

It was important to me that people know that you can make plays and raise children at the same time - for other mothers, for other parents, for other women considering having children and who want to be working and thinking and contemplating and making things while they're raising children.

mother children thinking

Have you ever been so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved's hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?

sadness stars lying

We all exist in relation to the world, our partners, the human ra... by Sarah Ruhl

We all exist in relation to the world, our partners, the human race.

partners race world

I think a person has to believe in something, by Sarah Ruhl

I think a person has to believe in something,

stars believe children

Plays are architecture, and you can make them stand in many ways that are hard to describe. And, I think, in our limited ability to describe them, we've substituted our inarticulateness for saying that there's one and only one structure.

play way thinking

What I really value about being a writer is that I can go to rehearsal when I want to, and then, when I need to be at home writing or with my kids, I go home.

home writing kids

The director was only invented in the nineteenth century. So directors have only been around for 200 year,s and playwrights have been around since Sophocles and Euripides.

century directors years

There's a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime - a whole word for just being sad - about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they're going to die.

being-sad just-being flower

Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood. by Sarah Ruhl

Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

catharsis wounds childhood

A multivalent culture is an amazing place to be writing theatre. by Sarah Ruhl

A multivalent culture is an amazing place to be writing theatre.

theatre writing culture

In America I think it's much more full of disruption culturally; it's much more mysterious how we inherit culture here. We grab it where we can find it - we're insatiable - and there can be a sense here that it's not available to you as readily as it is in other cultures.

other-cultures america thinking

Attachment parenting is this theory that if you wear your baby around and you sleep with your baby and you breast-feed for a long time, the baby will be more attached to you.

attachment sleep baby

I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

childhood play people

Sitting down with younger women writers and saying, "This is what I do and you can do this" is hugely important.

sitting-down important sitting

Being dead is the most airtight defense of one's own aesthetic. by Sarah Ruhl

Being dead is the most airtight defense of one's own aesthetic.

aesthetic defense

I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.

parent writing thinking