The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Playwrights are the most gregarious writers - to get our work done, we need actors, directors, set designers.
I'm always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.
A lot of people don't know that my background is completely classical. For a while there, I was all about Moliere and the Greeks and Brecht and Tennessee Williams.
I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.
I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television.
Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral.
I grew up doing theatre and spent a long time as a playwright. I still think very visually when I write.
Seeing the work of directors like Romeo Castellucci, Ivo van Hove, Thomas Ostermeier, and Simon McBurney and Theatre de Complicite, was, and continues to be, hugely important to me. To my mind, these are artists who are forging new languages of performance and storytelling, and their constant reinvention is very inspiring.
I love writing plays because they are living, fluid things that are energised by the producer, designers, musicians, actors and audience.
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