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" Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender. "

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" There is a real affection for these human beings on these stage that O'Neill really had. Out of that affection comes a lot of humor, which is unexpected when you think of 'The Iceman Cometh.' "

George C. Wolfe

Unexpected

Affection

Humor

" I pride myself on being available to as many people's stories as I possibly can. "

" Anytime you create art, you create a mess. I mean, 'Hamlet' is a mess! "

" With actors, I have very close, intense working relationships with actors in theater. "

" I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent. "

" Everybody wants to be remembered for the best of who they are. "

" The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands. "

" 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. "

" The best of any artist is in their art. "

" 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. "

" When you're writing, in theory, everybody is serving you. When you're directing, you're serving everybody - in the guise of acting like everybody's serving you. But you're really serving the materials. You're serving the actors. You're in charge, but it's not free. "

" A lot of directors tend to manipulate actors' vulnerability to get what they want, and that can work. "

" I absolutely love working on musicals, but anytime I finish a project, I want to move on to something completely different. "

" Every single wave, when I was overwhelmed and poor and struggling in New York, there were these extraordinary people in New York who said, 'Come this way.' "

" AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath. "

" Broadway was very vital back in the '20s. There were probably close to hundreds of productions that opened up through the course of the year and through the course of a Broadway season. "

" Racists are deficient as human beings. "

" Commercial theater, in its agenda to appeal to everybody, is often at the expense of the unique vision of the artist. "

" One thing I tend to do is ask actors tons and tons of questions to try to get at what they're thinking but also to expose to them whatever box they've placed their characters in - to blow up that box so the journey can begin. "

" A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility. "

" I like to knock down walls and allow others to enter. "

George C. Wolfe

Down

Others

" 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

" Confidence comes in going on personal journeys in a public arena and feeling as though you have a right to do that. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you need to discover and not worry about how pretty the journey is. If you're aware of the pretty, you're not going to dig into the mess. "

" Always, when I do a play, there's got to be an equation of risks and potential failure. When you're working on a new play, it's like, 'How the hell do I do this, and do we have the time?' All of these huge questions engage, hopefully, the smartest part of me. And then when you're doing a revival, I went, 'Well, somebody's already solved it.' "

" I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful. "

George C. Wolfe

Than

" I think I am the first person of color to direct a major white play on Broadway. In 1993? That's astounding to me. And horrifying to me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The only rule of a musical is that it must maintain its buoyancy. "

" The hardest thing about a musical is making sure everybody is working on the same damn show. That is the monster. "