Richard Foreman

It’s true, I don’t like the real world.

From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything.

If I wasn’t in the theater, I would be a hermit.

Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.

One does not devote one’s life in art to shock an audience.

I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do.

What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.

I’ve been trying to figure out for at least the last 10 years how to force myself into something more risky.

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.

I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not… well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre.

So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience’s response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don’t care about the audience’s response, I’m making them for myself. But I’m making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.

Quite the opposite. I might fall on my face, but I feel born again.

I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.

All the dialogue on tape, and we’d play the tape in performance. Then I thought it’d be interesting if the actor’s repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we’d get a web of language.

As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.

I’m there to make a kind of theatrical music that is desperately missing in my life. And if other people don’t like it, I’m very unhappy, but I can’t do anything about that.

Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.