Leslie Bricusse Quotes

Any play is hard to write, and plays are getting harder and harder to get on the stage.

Writing a play to get to Broadway and have a national tour is a sure way to write a terrible, terrible play.

I love writing plays because they are living, fluid things that are energised by the producer, designers, musicians, actors and audience.

I had some experience writing collaboratively when I wrote for the theatre.

The first thing I wrote was a one-act play that got accepted at a one-act play festival, and I was in it along with Nathan Lane and a couple of other very good actors.

When it comes to writing musicals, you write the best piece you can. Then, its destiny is in the hands of the actors and the director.

A play is not a play until it's performed, and unless it's a one-person play that is acted, directed and designed by the author, many other people will be deeply involved in the complicated process that leads to its performance.

If you are opening a play, a play that's really about something, a play that's really about ideas, you have to find a way to sell that play.

With Cold Sassy Tree having its first production, I saw no necessity to do anything other than produce it with the correct setting.

I think the only directing I'd be any good at is theatre directing. It's the only thing I can see myself doing.

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

I sit every once in a while and I think about plays and films I can do with William Petersen into our eighties. He's the most incredible scene partner I've ever had.

For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.

I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote called 'Potential Space.'

Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.

What you do, is you gradually become more and more experienced, and more and more realistic about dramatic tolerance, i.e. about how long the play should be.

But it has also enabled me to find my feet as a lecturer and a reader of my own plays to audiences who like to hear them; and that experience of immediate appreciation gives greater pleasure and more stimulus towards further activity than even the most laudatory of reviews.

I am so happy to be on a show with writing I wanted to participate in.

There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.

Theater is a gamble and a tough road.

When you're doing a legitimate play, if you have a company of 12, it's considered a big cast.

There is something pleasurable for an actor to produce something and not be in it.

When doing theater, you have to find great satisfaction in the small things. There's going to be a repetition and a redundancy night after night, but it's the small variations in those moments - a word, a tone of voice, the smallest sense of enlightenment that can happen in an instant onstage - that will be the most rewarding.

To see professional actors do my work, to take it seriously - that was the thing that made me think playwriting could actually be what I do. It's not a profession that has some sort of clear career track, like, 'This is what you do to be a playwright.'

I would absolutely be interested in doing a Broadway production if it was the right project. But my dream is to be writing pieces of theater for my best friends and putting on plays in New York City and seeing our vision come alive. I just hope to always be creating.