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Quote by Steven Dietz

“We're one of the last handmade art forms. There's no fast way to make plays. It takes just as long and is just as hard as it was a thousand years ago.”

Quote by Steven Dietz

Author

Steven Dietz
Steven Dietz

Steven Dietz (born June 23, 1958) is an acclaimed American playwright, director, and screenwriter. He is best known for his diverse body of work that spans comedy, tragedy, and suspense, often exploring themes of relationships, memory, and identity. His plays, including "Lonely West," "Fiction," and "The Secret Garden," have been widely performed in the United States and internationally. Dietz has taught at several universities and received multiple award nominations. His works are noted for their emotional depth and structural ingenuity, making a significant impact on contemporary American theater. more

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“I want to seduce the audience. If they can go along for a ride they wouldn't ordinarily take, or don't even know they're taking, then they might see highly charged political issues in a new and unexpected way. . . . The theatre is now so afraid to face its social demons that we've given that responsibility over to film. But it will always be harder to deal with certain issues in the theatre. The live event - being watched by people as we watch - makes it seem all the more dangerous.”

“All plays stem from personal experience. I was reading psychoanalytic lit for a couple of years, obsessively, in depth, and I got involved in analyzing everyone around me. . . . Eventually, all my friends' eyes began to glaze over when I started talking this way, and I got the hint that there might be something comical in it.”

“. . . it is true that language and forward movement in the cinema are jolly hard to reconcile. It's a very, very, difficult thing to do. . . . There is still a place in the cinema for movies that are driven by the human face, and not by explosions and cars and guns and action sequences . . . there's such a thing as action and speed within thought rather than within a ceaseless milkshake of images.”

“GOOD AS NEW was born out of the idea of writing a play where the stakes were high and the collisions were of a verbal nature. Also I wanted to write a play where people were smarter than I was, and more alive than I feel normally. I became interested in the idea of characters who would surprise me. I guess one could argue that nothing comes out of you that wasn't within you to begin with, but maybe there are ways to trick yourself into becoming more an observer or an advocate for the characters.”

“. . . I do think that deep down, a lot of my work is about people trying to make reasonable accommodations of situations that are insane or absurd. . . . At first I thought the events had power in themselves, that I would just present them. I really wasn't aware of the things that finally became central issues to me - the shifting alliances, the way people hardly even know they've shifted. That part of [A QUESTION OF MERCY] is very familiar to me in terms of my other plays.”