Top 100 George C. Wolfe Quotes December 17, 2020 by Krista Aniston Leave a Comment “The world doesn’t see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.”― George C. Wolfe“Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It’s about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it’s ‘Angels in America’ or ‘Lucky Guy’ or ‘Normal Heart,’ you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.”― George C. Wolfe“I love working with a set designer because, in many respects, you meet the set designer before you meet the actors. So it’s a chance for me as a director to figure out what I’m thinking and to explore how the space is going to actually be activated.”― George C. Wolfe“Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it’s a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times, I’ve tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately, it is a folk-art form.”― George C. Wolfe“In the early ’90s or so, I drove my father to Providence, Ky., his hometown, and he was pointing out, ‘That’s where the doctor’s office was,’ and ‘That’s where we bought ice cream.’ And he was pointing to empty lots. When you lose communities, what do you have? We often survive by remembering the stories.”― George C. Wolfe“There are a lot of people who will tell you I’m very ruthless. I’m very fierce. If I feel I’m right, if I feel I’ve been violated, then I am like a warrior from hell!”― George C. Wolfe“Racists are deficient as human beings.”― George C. Wolfe“I absolutely love working on musicals, but anytime I finish a project, I want to move on to something completely different.”― George C. Wolfe“I was raised to believe that other people’s suffering was my responsibility.”― George C. Wolfe“Each actor, every single time you work with an actor, you have to come up with the language that’s going to serve them. And that’s what allows them to give the performance that you want to nurture inside of them and what you think they’re capable of giving.”― George C. Wolfe“Always, when I do a play, there’s got to be an equation of risks and potential failure. When you’re working on a new play, it’s like, ‘How the hell do I do this, and do we have the time?’ All of these huge questions engage, hopefully, the smartest part of me. And then when you’re doing a revival, I went, ‘Well, somebody’s already solved it.’”― George C. Wolfe“The wonderful thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. The worst thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. That dynamic is thrilling and challenging every time you make a show.”― George C. Wolfe“I personally am a very big fan of ‘Romeo + Juliet.’ It had a visceral power to it that I thought was just exhilarating. It was a very arresting and very disturbing and deeply compelling version of the play.”― George C. Wolfe“Anytime you create art, you create a mess. I mean, ‘Hamlet’ is a mess!”― George C. Wolfe“I’m more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.”― George C. Wolfe“I love Kabuki, Noh theater and bunraku.”― George C. Wolfe“When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it.”― George C. Wolfe“In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they’re next to each other.”― George C. Wolfe“I could program a ‘fabulous, I love it’ kind of hit season right now. I’m more interested in breaking boundaries, telling a story, defying a truth that has been accepted.”― George C. Wolfe“I pride myself on being available to as many people’s stories as I possibly can.”― George C. Wolfe“As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ or ‘Hamlet’ and look beyond the specifics of it – whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person – to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.”― George C. Wolfe“I think I am the first person of color to direct a major white play on Broadway. In 1993? That’s astounding to me. And horrifying to me.”― George C. Wolfe“The Public Theater requires one to be very public, and writing requires one to be very private.”― George C. Wolfe“There is a strange kind of parental pride when ‘Topdog’ ends up on Broadway, or ‘Elaine Stritch.’”― George C. Wolfe“To want to come to New York, you have to have a sense of wonder about the world and a foolish sense of worth about yourself. And I, too, had both of those things.”― George C. Wolfe“If you have the talent and passion and commitment, you shouldn’t be locked out of the room.”― George C. Wolfe“Our lives are connected in ways we can’t imagine. They’re connected even before we know they’re connected.”― George C. Wolfe“AIDS is a shared truth – it’s not selective in its wrath.”― George C. Wolfe“Certain events make people come out of their little boxes and become part of the whole.”― George C. Wolfe“I like to knock down walls and allow others to enter.”― George C. Wolfe“When you’re writing, in theory, everybody is serving you. When you’re directing, you’re serving everybody – in the guise of acting like everybody’s serving you. But you’re really serving the materials. You’re serving the actors. You’re in charge, but it’s not free.”― George C. Wolfe“When I was on dialysis, I willed myself to do ‘On the Town.’ It accesses my most childlike, joyful love of theater.”― George C. Wolfe“When ‘Jelly’s’ went out on tour, no one really wanted it. It was undersold. And I knew if I gave ‘Noise’ to someone else, they would sell it as ‘Stomp’ with little dancing black boys.”― George C. Wolfe“Producing has empowered me as an artist in a specific way. It’s forced a certain kind of maturity.”― George C. Wolfe“Commercial theater, in its agenda to appeal to everybody, is often at the expense of the unique vision of the artist.”― George C. Wolfe“There’s no place more theatrical than history.”― George C. Wolfe“The only rule of a musical is that it must maintain its buoyancy.”― George C. Wolfe“A lot of directors tend to manipulate actors’ vulnerability to get what they want, and that can work.”― George C. Wolfe“You’ve got to make the rehearsal room very safe. You can’t bully people, because if you bully people, they’re going to freeze and lock up.”― George C. Wolfe“I’m interested in exploring how an individual maintains a sense of power in a world that tends to make individuals feel powerless.”― George C. Wolfe“Generally, the realm in which black playwrights have been allowed to achieve success has been social realism or musicals.”― George C. Wolfe“I’ve always tried to do shows in a filmic way. I like it when forms smack up against each other.”― George C. Wolfe“It may take a while, but I think ‘On the Town’ has the potential for us to break down the boundaries between the traditional theatergoer who may have fond memories of the musical and those with a ‘Broadway-is-not-for-me’ agenda.”― George C. Wolfe“When ‘The Normal Heart’ first appeared, the sense of urgency was so important.”― George C. Wolfe“I think we all have a primal desire to know as much as we can to find out about where we come from.”― George C. Wolfe“Doing any kind of culture in America in which you are not trying to affirm a European aesthetic is war.”― George C. Wolfe“I don’t go, like, ‘Hmm, I’m now going to create something for the black community.’ I just feel this compelling urge. I just feel myself drawn to stories that I feel have a potency and immediacy.”― George C. Wolfe“I feel like I’ve been very blessed in the sense that I’ve had the veracity of spirit to not be stopped and, at the same time, the protective energy and the generosity of those who have come before me, who saw something inside of me and, therefore, invited me into rooms that I would not have been inside of otherwise.”― George C. Wolfe“I’m convinced whenever something opens on Broadway, it’s a miracle. It’s a miracle that people survived.”― George C. Wolfe“The rules I sort of live by for my theater career, which I hope to live for my film career, is that if there’s something that intrigues me or fascinates me, or I don’t know how to do it, then I should do it.”― George C. Wolfe“I’m perpetually interested by living in places as an artist confronting challenges I’ve never confronted before and approaching them with as much craft and humanity as I can.”― George C. Wolfe“It’s easier to be cynical and edgy and tough rather than overly emotional.”― George C. Wolfe“I feel like I’m edgy and I’m funny and I got this bite, this outrageousness.”― George C. Wolfe“I’m the most democratic fascist you’ll ever meet. I listen to everybody, and then I make a decision.”― George C. Wolfe“I want to create a theater that looks, feels, and smells like America.”― George C. Wolfe“Theater should address the stories of its communities, or I don’t know why it’s here.”― George C. Wolfe“Broadway was very vital back in the ’20s. There were probably close to hundreds of productions that opened up through the course of the year and through the course of a Broadway season.”― George C. Wolfe“I love and I’m intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.”― George C. Wolfe“Something that can be so vital at one point can be inconsequential at another. I’m just intrigued by that phenomenon.”― George C. Wolfe“I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It’s why people write stories. It’s peoples’ grave markers.”― George C. Wolfe“When I came to New York, I told everyone I was a writer/director, and they said, ‘No.’ There was a rule. You could be one or the other. They ordained me writer. But then I won the Obie for directing ‘Spunk,’ and the rules changed.”― George C. Wolfe“I viewed black musicals before ‘Jelly’ as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.”― George C. Wolfe“’Jelly,’ more than any black musical before it, celebrated the majesty, the purity, the joy of so many artists who are unable to fully embody these same qualities in their own lives.”― George C. Wolfe“The best of any artist is in their art.”― George C. Wolfe“You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.”― George C. Wolfe“With actors, I have very close, intense working relationships with actors in theater.”― George C. Wolfe“A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility.”― George C. Wolfe“The worst thing when you’re working is to say, ‘I have a question,’ and the other person goes, ‘No! This is what it is.’ That kind of rigidity is very challenging because musicals are constantly mutating.”― George C. Wolfe“Everybody wants to be remembered for the best of who they are.”― George C. Wolfe“At the end of the day, ‘Shuffle Along’ is about people coming together and making something extraordinary – and history not necessarily being kind to them. It’s about the love of necessarily being kind to them. It’s about the love of doing, regardless of the consequences.”― George C. Wolfe“If I hadn’t told stories, I would’ve been a historian.”― George C. Wolfe“I came to New York to write and direct, and when I got here, a lot of my rage came out.”― George C. Wolfe“Surviving failure is one thing. Surviving success is… is challenging, with the consequences and what you lose along the way.”― George C. Wolfe“All the things that can happen to an artist regardless of how prepared they are and how smart they are and hard-working they are and attractive – doesn’t matter. There’s always somebody cuter. There just is.”― George C. Wolfe“Confidence comes in going on personal journeys in a public arena and feeling as though you have a right to do that. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you need to discover and not worry about how pretty the journey is. If you’re aware of the pretty, you’re not going to dig into the mess.”― George C. Wolfe“Every single wave, when I was overwhelmed and poor and struggling in New York, there were these extraordinary people in New York who said, ‘Come this way.’”― George C. Wolfe“There is a real affection for these human beings on these stage that O’Neill really had. Out of that affection comes a lot of humor, which is unexpected when you think of ‘The Iceman Cometh.’”― George C. Wolfe“I think there’s an aspect of my soul, of my personality, that’s very suited to directing. I like being in the room with actors; I love creating a safe space and a chaotic space for the discovery to take place. I love creating a sense of community.”― George C. Wolfe“Ultimately, theatre is about creating a sense of wonder, and I think wonder is achieved not by a kind of wide-eyed silliness but by being available to that which is most unknown, inside the material and inside yourself.”― George C. Wolfe“One of the things I learned very early on was that if you cast the show correctly, and if you’ve created the right energy in the room, the solution is also in the room. The solution doesn’t necessarily come from someone, but if everybody is working in a very steadfast and rigorous way, then everything you’re looking for is in the room.”― George C. Wolfe“One thing I tend to do is ask actors tons and tons of questions to try to get at what they’re thinking but also to expose to them whatever box they’ve placed their characters in – to blow up that box so the journey can begin.”― George C. Wolfe“The hardest thing about a musical is making sure everybody is working on the same damn show. That is the monster.”― George C. Wolfe“Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.”― George C. Wolfe“Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it’s rhythmic control. You’re crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender.”― George C. Wolfe“1985 – That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories.”― George C. Wolfe“I love working with actors who will just go, ‘Oh O.K., let’s try it and see where it goes,’ and ‘Let’s see what we can discover.’”― George C. Wolfe“My first play, ‘The Colored Museum,’ was done in ’86 at the Public Theater.”― George C. Wolfe“To me, ‘Show Boat’ was the first American musical, the first to have the real texture of this country.”― George C. Wolfe“A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn’t necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.”― George C. Wolfe“You can go see ballet in its purity; you can go to a recital to hear music by itself. But what the American musical does so thrillingly is bastardize these forms into something that is exhilarating and compelling and deeply moving.”― George C. Wolfe“’You Gotta Have Heart’ is one of the most ridiculously perfect, amazing musical comedy songs ever.”― George C. Wolfe“A lot of ’20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence.”― George C. Wolfe“Certain things come to me; I just become intrigued by them and want to live inside them.”― George C. Wolfe“My absolutely favorite time of working on a project is the time I spend not knowing what it is. Because the longer you live inside that period, the likelier you are to discover something new.”― George C. Wolfe“I was obsessed with New York early on. I was watching sitcoms that were set in or around New York, like ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show.’ I was always very fascinated with the people who were on ‘What’s My Line?’ and I always had an incredible obsession with the city.”― George C. Wolfe“If you love theatre, do theatre wherever you can, because theatre is theatre, and you can experience it anywhere.”― George C. Wolfe“I really don’t find revivals very interesting because I like new work a lot. I feel like if you’re going to pay me, then let me do what I do and let me try to solve some problems. Let me try to make something fly. Why would I do something that everybody has already done the hard work on? But that’s me. Tons of people do revivals really well.”― George C. Wolfe“Growing up in the South, I was raised to be a Negro boy. I was acutely aware how other people perceived me, and that informed my behavior. That worked for a period of time, but it could also be suffocating.”― George C. Wolfe“The black experience, which has nothing to do with my play ‘Angels in America,’ allowed me to understand the Mormon character. He was the character that couldn’t come out to his mother. It allowed me to understand emotional and closeted behavior, because you’re so acutely aware of how you’re perceived.”― George C. Wolfe“On different projects, different pieces of you will show up. Sometimes it’s surprising which piece shows up.”― George C. Wolfe
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