Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Theater is an old thing. It's thousands of years old. TV isn't. Film isn't. We're doing a really old thing. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Related Quotes:

" You get better at the thing you do by having to explain it to someone else. That, I think, totally makes my work stronger. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I was 23 when I wrote 'Neighbors,' and I definitely look back at it now and cringe a little bit. I was trying to understand what drama was. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I actually don't read the press. All the writers I admire were significantly reclusive, and I'm still trying to figure out how they got to a place where they didn't have to talk to press. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I seem to belong to a boom moment of playwrights, and I'm always curious about how we all got here and what comes next. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I have this thing called hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsies. It's incredibly rare. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" One of the most incredible and important things about the theater is that we're creating a safe space for all feelings, but especially, ugly feelings. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I go through phases of watching a ton of dance/performance, and I am bizarrely well-informed on the subject. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I identify as queer. I just don't know what any of these labels mean. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I have a borderline-embarrassing obsession with pop music. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" The first theater subscription I ever bought was the August Wilson season at Signature. I remember thinking a whole season to one playwright was a great way for a master to do a victory lap. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" 'An Octoroon' was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I'm writing about America's relationship to its own history. Race or not, it's a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" All my plays have these titles that are oddly tricky. I like that something can look like one thing but mean two different things. Language is really unstable in that way. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I wrestle in a big way with August Wilson's work in that I at times admire it and at times feel infuriated by it, which is weirdly more influential than loving someone entirely. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I don't hate people who colour-blind cast, but I hate people who colour-blind cast and pretend that they're not, who pretend that these bodies on stage don't actually carry specific meaning. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" The stuff I write about doesn't, like, necessarily leave people feeling warm and fuzzy. I'm writing in a territory that's, like, contested and full of prickliness. And I find that people project their problems onto me or something. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" My mother had a wall of degrees in our house, and she would walk me up to the wall and say, 'When you have this many degrees, you can tell me what to do.' "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I'm not a really firm believer in theatre that is 'about anything.' I don't think theatre can be about anything other than the people who show up and the value that they hold. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I spent summers with my mother's parents in Arkansas, where religion felt very present. My grandmother was Baptist, and my grandfather was Methodist. Double Southern whammy. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" My dream was always to have an experience where an audience member would turn to another audience member, a stranger, and be like, 'What did we just go through?' And, like, kind of begin to talk. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" I feel like I'm put in a position where I have to engage with what people bring to my work, which is an expectation for me to talk about race because it's not normal for a black writer to be writing in the theatre. "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" 'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams brings a tamale vendor on stage to simply say, 'Red hot!' "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

" How do we refresh our language? Why do we still use, like, a 150-year-old classification system to talk about people? It's so weird! We still call people black and white? "

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Black And White