There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.
Mike NicholsRead
A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The essence of a play lies in its ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations.
Mike Nichols emphasizes that a play is essentially a mystery, devoid of direct narration, which invites audiences to interpret it in various ways. This openness to interpretation is not just a possibility but a necessity, as each play can evoke different meanings and emotions for different viewers, enriching the experience of theater.
Themes
TheaterInterpretationArtMysteryPlays
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a theater workshop to encourage discussion about interpretation.
More from Mike Nichols
All quotes →You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
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The thing about being an outsider... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.
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I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things.
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Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'
Mike NicholsRead
Things come in waves, and I'm always more interested in places like, for instance, Chicago, where people don't follow fashion. They're not galloping past your window on the way to the latest anything. They're living their lives. You do a play, they come and see it and say, 'That's nice', and then they go home.
Mike NicholsRead
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