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" Certain events make people come out of their little boxes and become part of the whole. "
George C. Wolfe
Little
Become
Events
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" 1985 - That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories. "
George C. Wolfe
Time
Memories
My Time
" Each actor, every single time you work with an actor, you have to come up with the language that's going to serve them. And that's what allows them to give the performance that you want to nurture inside of them and what you think they're capable of giving. "
George C. Wolfe
Time
Language
Performance
" A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing. "
George C. Wolfe
Song
Heart
Helicopter
" I think we all have a primal desire to know as much as we can to find out about where we come from. "
George C. Wolfe
Out
Come
Desire
" If I hadn't told stories, I would've been a historian. "
George C. Wolfe
Been
Stories
Historian
" Ultimately, theatre is about creating a sense of wonder, and I think wonder is achieved not by a kind of wide-eyed silliness but by being available to that which is most unknown, inside the material and inside yourself. "
George C. Wolfe
Theatre
Kind
Think
" You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor. "
George C. Wolfe
Language
Each
You
" My absolutely favorite time of working on a project is the time I spend not knowing what it is. Because the longer you live inside that period, the likelier you are to discover something new. "
George C. Wolfe
Time
Knowing
Live
" The best of any artist is in their art. "
George C. Wolfe
Any
Artist
Best
" Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it's a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times, I've tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately, it is a folk-art form. "
George C. Wolfe
Writing
Best
Mind
" I love working with actors who will just go, 'Oh O.K., let's try it and see where it goes,' and 'Let's see what we can discover.' "
George C. Wolfe
See
Working
Will
" In the early '90s or so, I drove my father to Providence, Ky., his hometown, and he was pointing out, 'That's where the doctor's office was,' and 'That's where we bought ice cream.' And he was pointing to empty lots. When you lose communities, what do you have? We often survive by remembering the stories. "
George C. Wolfe
Early
Father
You
" I could program a 'fabulous, I love it' kind of hit season right now. I'm more interested in breaking boundaries, telling a story, defying a truth that has been accepted. "
George C. Wolfe
Right
Kind
Love
" The worst thing when you're working is to say, 'I have a question,' and the other person goes, 'No! This is what it is.' That kind of rigidity is very challenging because musicals are constantly mutating. "
George C. Wolfe
You
Worst
Person
" As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me. "
George C. Wolfe
Past
People
Me
" I feel like I've been very blessed in the sense that I've had the veracity of spirit to not be stopped and, at the same time, the protective energy and the generosity of those who have come before me, who saw something inside of me and, therefore, invited me into rooms that I would not have been inside of otherwise. "
George C. Wolfe
Me
Generosity
Time
" Everybody wants to be remembered for the best of who they are. "
George C. Wolfe
Remembered
Everybody
Best
" All the things that can happen to an artist regardless of how prepared they are and how smart they are and hard-working they are and attractive - doesn't matter. There's always somebody cuter. There just is. "
George C. Wolfe
Artist
Always
Happen
" Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience. "
George C. Wolfe
America
Journey
End
" The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands. "
George C. Wolfe
Black And White
White
Black
" I've always tried to do shows in a filmic way. I like it when forms smack up against each other. "
George C. Wolfe
Way
Tried
Always
" To want to come to New York, you have to have a sense of wonder about the world and a foolish sense of worth about yourself. And I, too, had both of those things. "
George C. Wolfe
Wonder
You
World
" When I came to New York, I told everyone I was a writer/director, and they said, 'No.' There was a rule. You could be one or the other. They ordained me writer. But then I won the Obie for directing 'Spunk,' and the rules changed. "
George C. Wolfe
Said
New York
Rules
" I personally am a very big fan of 'Romeo + Juliet.' It had a visceral power to it that I thought was just exhilarating. It was a very arresting and very disturbing and deeply compelling version of the play. "
George C. Wolfe
Play
Thought
Just
" When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it. "
George C. Wolfe
Remember
Got
How
" I really don't find revivals very interesting because I like new work a lot. I feel like if you're going to pay me, then let me do what I do and let me try to solve some problems. Let me try to make something fly. Why would I do something that everybody has already done the hard work on? But that's me. Tons of people do revivals really well. "
George C. Wolfe
Problems
Hard Work
Fly
" When I was on dialysis, I willed myself to do 'On the Town.' It accesses my most childlike, joyful love of theater. "
George C. Wolfe
Myself
Most
Love
" Theater should address the stories of its communities, or I don't know why it's here. "
George C. Wolfe
Theater
Why
Stories
" Growing up in the South, I was raised to be a Negro boy. I was acutely aware how other people perceived me, and that informed my behavior. That worked for a period of time, but it could also be suffocating. "
George C. Wolfe
Time
People
Me
" My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater. "
George C. Wolfe
First
Museum
Play