The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.
Interpretation
Staging a text transforms it from an ideal concept into a tangible experience.
This quote by Tom Stoppard emphasizes the transformation that occurs when a literary work is performed. The staging process alters the original abstract nature of the text, making it a real and dynamic event that engages the audience and brings the text to life in a way that is distinctly different from reading it in its raw form.
In practice
In a discussion about the significance of live performances, you can use this quote to illustrate how staging changes a text.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.
Do your art. But don't wreck your art if it doesn't lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy.
You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis.
A good design is not a democratic consensus.
What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
I'm always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.
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