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 think theatre is a democratic act and I think writing a play is not a democratic act. I think we should give writers more leeway and space to write the thing they want to write, and then we should produce the play, multiple times, and let them re-write it.
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 RuhlWhat I really value about being a writer is that I can go to rehearsal when I want to, and then, when I need to be at home writing or with my kids, I go home.
Sarah RuhlIn America I think it's much more full of disruption culturally; it's much more mysterious how we inherit culture here. We grab it where we can find it - we're insatiable - and there can be a sense here that it's not available to you as readily as it is in other cultures.
Sarah RuhlIt was important to me that people know that you can make plays and raise children at the same time - for other mothers, for other parents, for other women considering having children and who want to be working and thinking and contemplating and making things while they're raising children.
Sarah Ruhl