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Being On A Film Set Is Like Being In Tech Forever. In Theater, When You Finally Finish Rehearsing, You Go Onstage And You Do The Lights And The Sets And You Make The Machine Of The Production Work. It Takes Usually About Ten Days In The Theater, Two Or Three Weeks If It's A Really Big Musical. I Mean, It's Hell On Earth. You Just Sit Around Forever While They Adjust The Lights. And Every Playwright With Half A Brain Runs For The Hills When Tech Starts Because It's So Boring, And You Don't Want To Talk To The Director Because The Director Is Running This Giant Machine.

-Tony Kushner

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Being On A Film

Tony Kushner

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Being On A Film Set Is Like Being In Tech Forever. In Theater, When You Finally Finish Rehearsing, You Go Onstage And You Do The Lights And The Sets And You Make The Machine Of The Production Work. It Takes Usually About Ten Days In The Theater, Two Or Three Weeks If It's A Really Big Musical. I Mean, It's Hell On Earth. You Just Sit Around Forever While They Adjust The Lights. And Every Playwright With Half A Brain Runs For The Hills When Tech Starts Because It's So Boring, And You Don't Want To Talk To The Director Because The Director Is Running This Giant Machine.

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I'm A Sort Of Political Person, And I Feel That There's A Kind Of Ineradicably Political Dimension To Theater, To All Theater, Whether It's Overtly Political Or Not.

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Theater Really Gets Damaged When There Is A Paucity Of Good Criticism Around.

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I'm In An Odd Place Right Now In New York Where I Routinely Get Trashed By Every Daily Drama Critic And Have A Few Allies Among Weekly/monthly Drama Critics, And You Sort Of Plot These Things Out And Figure It Out. But It's Just What Any Writer Goes Through, Periods Of Favor, Periods Of Disfavor. And The Trick Is Just To Keep Writing And To Not Let An Obsession.

Respect The Delicate Ecology Of Your Delusions.

The Computer, The Noise Of The Computer Feels Like Impatience. It's Sort Of The Sound Of Impatience To Me.

When I'm Writing A New Play, There's A Period Where I Know I Shouldn't Be Out In Public Much. I Imagine Most People Who Create Go Through Something Like This. You Willfully Loosen Some Of The Inner Straps That Hold Your Core Together.

I Try To Tighten My Heart Into A Knot, A Snarl, I Try To Learn To Live Dead, Just Numb, But Then I See Someone I Want, And It's Like A Nail, Like A Hot Spike Right Through My Chest, And I Know I'm Losing.

In A Sense, I Feel Like The Job Of The Artist At All Times Is Essentially The Same, Which Is Simply To Tell The Truth. I Mean, I'm Nervous About Any Prescriptions For What A Writer Should Or Shouldn't Do.

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You Become A Character In A Meta-drama Into Which Your Own Dramatizing Has Pitched You. The Rewards Can Be Fantastic, The Punishments Dismal; It's A Zero Sum Game, And Its Guarantor Of Value, Its Marker Is That You Pretend You Play It Solo, Preserving The Myth That You Alone Are The Wellspring Of Your Creativity.

And I Don't Consider Broadway The Acropolis Of Theatrical Art. I Mean Broadway Is Commercial - That's What It Is. It's Expensive Seats And A Lot Of Them That Have To Be Filled Every Night. Off-broadway And Off-off Broadway As Far As I'm Concerned Is In New York The Pride Of New York Theater.

The White Cracker Who Wrote The National Anthem Knew What He Was Doing. He Set The Word "free" To A Note So High Nobody Could Reach It. That Was Deliberate.

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Here's Another Piece Of Advice, Only Date People Who Have Read A Different Set Of Books Than You Have Read, It Will Save You Lots Of Time In The Library.

I Think I'll Always Be A Better Playwright Than A Pundit, But I Believe That Writers Should Be Public Intellectuals And That Theater, Even More Than Film, Is A Place Of Public Debate.

I Think That It's Worthwhile To Explore The Ways In Which You Write The Person That's Writing Your Plays As Opposed To Simply Assuming That It's All A Natural Process And There's No Design In It. Because Your Public Persona Is Designed, To A Certain Extent, And You Can Have Fun And Profit At Various Times Doing That.

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We All Romp About, Grieving, Wondering, But With Rare Exception We Mostly Remain Suspended In The Rhetorical Colloidal Forever That Agglutinates Between Might And Do.

I'm Fairly Certain When I Die That The Obituary Will Say, 'author Of 'angels In America' Dies.' Unless I'm Completely Forgotten, And Then It Won't Say Anything At All.

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Who Knows Better Than Artists How Much Ugliness There Is On The Way To Beauty, How Many Ghastly, Mortifying Missteps, How Many Days Of Granitic Blockheadedness And Dismaying Ineptitude There Is On The Way To Accomplishment, How Partial All Accomplishment Is, How Incomplete?

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