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.
Mike NicholsRead
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.'
Interpretation
Great plays reveal their complexities gradually, requiring multiple readings to fully understand.
Mike Nichols emphasizes that exceptional plays are layered with depth, and understanding them isn't instantaneous. It takes time, reflection, and multiple encounters with the text to uncover its nuances and fully grasp its meaning.
In practice
During a theater workshop, the instructor referenced this quote to explain the complexity of the plays being studied.
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.
There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most actors, if you ask them if they play guitar, they'll say they played guitar for 20 years, but what they really mean is they've owned a guitar for 20 years.
Vinyl is the real deal. I've always felt like, until you buy the vinyl record, you don't really own the album. And it's not just me or a little pet thing or some kind of retro romantic thing from the past. It is still alive.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.
I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.
In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man - Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can't help it. Even if they don't believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible.
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