I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. Theyโre pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isnโt a wound being excavated from childhood.
Sarah RuhlI would never be essentialist about sexuality and structure, but I do think there's a way in which this male-arc has been talked about as the only structure, and kind of a stand-in for even the word structure, instead of looking at other forms.
Sarah RuhlNo one likes kids. We say we do, and we take pictures of pregnant women for People Magazine, but really they're commodities - we hate them around, we hate them on airplanes, we consider them a grand imposition and almost a style choice.
Sarah RuhlThe director was only invented in the nineteenth century. So directors have only been around for 200 year,s and playwrights have been around since Sophocles and Euripides.
Sarah RuhlTheatre is, at its roots, some very brave people mutually consenting to a make believe world, with nothing but language to rest on.
Sarah RuhlI think you have to have your own expectations of yourself and your own sense of purpose and your own intrinsic pleasure in the task. If you don't, you will drive yourself off a cliff because your fortunes will rise and fall, and if you identify too closely with that, you really will go insane.
Sarah Ruhl