Educators From The United States

"let's build what we become when we dream"

"...as i grew and matured i became more sensible and decided i would settle down and just become a sweet inspiration"

"Paint me Hopeful Paint Me Futuristic Paint Me Nikki I'm a Poet"

"History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened…"

"Politics is personal. That, however, doesn’t mean it’s ideological. It means that one cares about what she or he is doing, what he or she is writing…"

"We need food for the Soul We need poetry ... We deserve poetry"

"There is a game I must tell you of It's called Catch the Leader Lying (and knowing your sense of the absurd you will enjoy this) ... You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play"

"As a writer, one has to be willing to be wrong, willing to make mistakes. I’ve put everything on the table and accepted the fact that I may come up short. And, if (or when) I do, that’s okay."

"if trees could talk wonder what they'd say met an old man ...told me "girl! my hands seen more than all them books... at tuskeegee" ...met an old woman ..."sista" she called to me "...my feet seen more than yo eyes ever gonna read" ...if trees would talk wonder what they'd tell me"

"Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy"

"if it does not sing discard the ear for poetry is song if it does not delight discard the heart for poetry is joy if it does not inform then close off the brain for it is dead if it cannot heed the insistent message that life is preciouswhich is all we poets wrapped in our loneliness are trying to say"

"I do believe that character is a process, that truth is a process, and I am not interested in winning and losing…"

"…White racism is about people who don’t feel so bad about fixed things. But white racism is a fixed thing, and it is perpetuated because of fixedness. Anything that we can do that causes people to desire movement more than fixedness is going to disrupt racism…"

"The words are verbatim. The words are exactly what the people said. When I was a girl, my grandfather said, “If you say a word often enough, it becomes you,” and that’s really my technique. I really believe that if I learn exactly what somebody said, that I will find myself, as an actor, in a similar state of mind as them. I’ll never know what they’re really thinking, but I’ll have some of their feelings…"

"My life's work has been to go around America with a tape recorder trying to become America word for word. And I've met a lot of people who I disagree with. I've met a lot of people who you would think I would disagree with. But I have to say it's enriched my sense of being an American to reach out to people who are very, very different from me…"

"I remember feeling that if I don’t express this somehow, I’ll despair, I’ll go mad. Looking back, part of it was about trying to impose some kind of order in a process that was decidedly chaotic. Because of my profession, I tend to understand the world in words, in sequences of events. What I saw later was that I was trying to document as clearly as possible an emotional journey. And it felt important at the time that I remember it in its entirety and its complexity."

"There’s a legend in my family about my great-grandmother, who lived through the Cuban War of Independence and the Spanish-American War. The Spanish came to take over her farm when she was 16 years old and sent her family to internment camps. The legend is that my great-grandmother refused to go; she took her pet pig under her arms and walked up into the mountain to join the rebels. That’s as much of the story as I could ever get from anyone. I always had an image of this young woman finding a way to survive a terrible war. The play that I eventually wrote is not her story, but it’s certainly infused with her spirit…"

"I wanted to really be sure that the play never became a play about how to grieve…And in order to accomplish that I needed the play to remain in this time of confusion and chaos."

"We’re not allowed in an open way, in a public way, to talk about our grief and our experiences, our challenges, or our failures, which is what I tried to do."

"I was trying to write a play about race, in real time — at a time when that topic was shifting more than I’d witnessed in my lifetime. Seismic shifts…"

"The conversation makes me crazy, and I haven’t been in very many places where I have had conversations with people of color who don’t agree with me. It feels like the most dismissive and dangerous shrug-off of a phenomenon that has not gone away; how can you be post-racial in a society proven to have huge economic disparity between races? And attitudinally?..."

"Almost always when I write, the characters and the story dictate the structure, and I don’t know what it will be until the play tells me what it will be. But I look at it now and it makes all the sense in the world because the whole conversation about race is so disjointed and disconnected, and it’s so hard for us to hold on to it, so it makes sense that a play about something that’s so slippery wouldn’t be in a well-made play structure…"

"Every time I start a play it sort of comes from a theme or a question or something that kind of pisses me off, and then I build from there and think about how a piece can live on stage..."

"A lot of my language is always slightly heightened—I’ll throw in alliterations, rhymes, play with onomatopoeia, people speaking over each other. I think it’s fun to be able to do that in theatre. Language is one of our biggest resources, so why not have fun with it?..."

"Get younger people to imagine what life was like back then, in ways that can touch their own experience. They’ll see people all along have had challenges and lives similar to their own."

"I feel black women, specifically, have a history of being erased in terms of their literary contributions in America’s literature. In a lot of ways that’s true for women of color in general, so I think the most important part is to keep these women’s voices alive and active and circulating…"

"I’ve found that there’s this idea of what a black experience is, and because I write what’s outside of what’s been allowed to be on stage, there’s a questioning of authenticity, which is beyond maddening. For a white producer, executive, artistic director [etc.] to tell me that my work isn’t black enough… I’m losing my mind…"

"That title, I think, really captures the need to travel through life in an artistic sense, in a personal sense, a creative sense. I embrace that title . . . like the different types of ways that people can catch things…"

"My motto when I was writing this was ‘replace judgment with curiosity’."

"It’s much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you’re representing people in a truthful way. These characters are purely fiction—they’re inspired by people I met—which I think gave me a certain amount of leeway that I wouldn’t have had otherwise were it a verbatim piece."

"The thing is, I can’t control that built-in bias because it’s going to exist. What I can do is reflect the world through my very unique prism and perhaps people will be able to relate. I can’t control how it’s received, nor do I want to control how it’s perceived. What I want is for people to go into the theatre and in some way their perception is shifted, so that if they do enter with their biases, perhaps they won’t leave with them."

"We go in and try to be completely transparent with them: I am not a journalist, I’m a playwright, and I’m developing a piece that is creative and not going to be solely based on their lives but inspired by conversations that we have."

"If the action of The Bridge Party moves at what might at times seems to be a snail’s pace, it is because I want the audience to experience the characters as full human beings, not as abstractions or stereotypes…"

"I have to totally credit that to my mother. There were two children. I was the only girl. And she just always talked to me. She would tell me things that happened to her … her dreams, her past … it’s like the monologues in my plays, it really is. Because her stories were loaded with imagery and tragedy, darkness and sarcasm and humor…"

"Sometimes, if people aren’t part of the majority, we tend to get flat portrayals of them."

"The world is always in a turmoil over skin color. The hatred that people feel, I’m not able to articulate it."

"Patience and perseverance are key. Cultivate a spirit of generosity. Find your tribe of collaborators and keep working with them. Trust your gut. Stay true to your vision. Seek mentorship…"

"To me, they’re the greatest generation. My parents and their friends, to me, have qualities that I don’t have, my children don’t have. They’re very imaginative, hardworking people. They created so much. My mother could teach all day, and then she could come home and cook a perfect dinner, and her house always looked perfect. They had qualities, I think, that are just so admirable."

"Oh, the stories—those are an amalgam. I don’t think she would’ve defined herself like that, but my mother was a great storyteller. She always held me captive. She smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, and she’d always say, “Adrienne, I wanna tell you something.” She is just all over my whole writing career. And my father, because he gave speeches. Really, everything I write is a kind of mixture of his speeches, and her telling me all these stories about Georgia."

"If I could change one thing about U.S. theater, theater companies would produce a wider, broader range of plays by women and men who fully represent the cultural complexity of twenty-first century U.S. culture. Theatergoers would then have access to a huge selection of diverse theatrical worlds that would challenge, entertain, delight and intrigue them…"

"This story contains many elements of my journey as a writer. As a Spanish-American, I gain much of my inspiration from the Latin world and often write about how the Anglo and Latin worlds collide, intersect and transform each other. I also draw huge inspiration from my father's Spanish family of artists. Dealing with loss has also been an area I've continually explored as a writer…"

"It’s a 21st-century play…The overarching theme is, how do we find peace in the present? Through love, understanding and learning about our cultural and religious differences."

"I had long contemplated the failure of the Negro to strike one solitary blow for his own freedom during the War of the Rebellion, when he might easily, by an uprising, have plunged the South into chaotic impotency, thereby compelling the return of Southern soldiers to defend their hearthstones. Many Northerners desired just such an event. But the Southern Negro not only did not rise in vindictiveness but even toiled in the field, worked in factories and mines, and built fortifications for his masters. ... In other words, the Negro forged and repaired the chains for his own bondage when he should have, by revolting, ignited a monster conflagration in the rear of the Confederacy, which would have consumed it much earlier than it was."

"You ugly enough to keep ants out of a picnic, mister."

"I’m in the last October of life looking for a few more Aprils. I don’t want to remember no more."

"Sitting around bullshitting ain’t no problem for Man, who can ignore his own heart and treat his own with all kinds of trickerations and cruelty to twist the truth so he can get what he wants, shutting off parts of his mind to let evil run things. But no Animal can do that, for Animals is Higher Orders, and we speak in Thought Speak, which don’t allow but so much wiggle room when it come to truth and consequence."

"When I was a kid, my mother told me about the time my sister got lost at the circus in New York in Madison Square Garden. ... She said out of the throng of people, suddenly after looking for a long time, she said a cop just appeared and he was holding my sister's hand — she was a little girl. My mother never forgot that picture in her mind. We never see those stories about each other. And I think the writer who wants us to have a better life must take on the responsibility of showing us those kinds of stories."

"She smiled a little bit. “Most of us has a desire to mind other folks’ business,” she said. “That’s the child in you, Butter, not the man.”"

"Now he wanted more. That’s the problem with Smelly Ones. They got one thing Animals don’t got. They got ambition."

"You can’t become a good writer unless you have the ability to see that everybody is seeking to ease his or her pain, and everyone’s pain is relative. Blondes don’t really have more fun. There’s always someone who’s going to be bigger or faster or stronger or a better writer or singer or architect than you are. But accepting you where you are is one of the things that fiction helps you do."