When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.
Interpretation
The struggle in storytelling can indicate deeper conceptual flaws.
David E. Kelley highlights the importance of a story's foundational concept, suggesting that if significant effort is required to make a story come together, it may be a sign that the underlying idea needs reevaluation. This reflects the belief that storytelling should flow with a certain ease when the core premise is sound and well-thought-out.
In practice
A writer referring to this quote while discussing the challenges they face in their latest project.
You've got to honor your relationship with your audience - that they sit down because they want to be entertained. And that doesn't mean you can't provoke them and antagonize them and challenge them in the course of the entertainment as long as you keep the entertainment part of the equation alive.
Some actors, I think, want to feel that they are as creative as the writer. And the answer is, frankly, they're not.
My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.
You get to thinking that because you've written 50 or 100 songs, you think maybe you know how to do it. But when they're not coming along, you're just as in the dark as you ever were. When they're coming along, there's nothing to it. Sometimes it's so easy, it's like you're a court stenographer.
One of the most incredible and important things about the theater is that we're creating a safe space for all feelings, but especially, ugly feelings.
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.
The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling--these are the tools of the dancer.
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