Dramatic Realism Quotes

'Funny People' is my favorite performance of myself to date. Even though it's a comedy and there are serious moments, I really felt like Leo felt like a real person. It didn't feel like I was playing myself. Whether it's a comedy or drama, I just try to make it as realistic as possible.

I'm an unashamed realist, and actually, I try to make whatever the script is the reality of that situation, even though it's fictional.

Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer.

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.

The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

I don't think I've ever written anything even remotely naturalistic. The closest probably would be seen as 'Frankie and Johnny,' and that's only 'cause they eat a sandwich and make an omelet in act two. But it's a romantic fairy tale, and I'm very aware of that. I don't think it helps the actors in my plays to lose themselves in the reality of talking to another person. A good McNally actor always knows he's in a play with an audience.

Eugene O'Neil created an American theater, and Tennessee Williams taught it how to sing.

In modern life, we hide behind ourselves. In Shakespeare, there's nowhere left to hide. It's life, larger than life, and every actor has to raise their game to get there.

All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real.

It's just that the characters are speaking their mind. As opposed to it just being an expression, they're actually saying what's on their mind, and that's something that Tennessee Williams is really famous for. Shakespeare does that and Tennessee Williams does that. You crave that, when you're an actor, for sure.

Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett to me are the most revolutionary.

All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.

American naturalism is what my indulgent actor side loves: a bit of Tennessee Williams, a bit of Clifford Odets, August Wilson - I would just love to tackle some of that.

The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.

When you find theater writing like in the theater on film but it's realistic, it doesn't matter who the character is, you want to do it.

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.

Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.

It's part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.

We're looking for a certain kind of realism or naturalism, and we go about it in different ways, but I think we're all striving for the same end result, which is to capture the patterns of conversations and how people interact in a very realistic way.

Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that.