David Rabe Quotations

Often my characters don't know what the issues of the play are. They think they're doing one thing, but something else is actually orchestrating their lives.

I never found a professional environment that made the production of plays efficient. Teamwork is demanded, but there are very few teams.

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

My writing was liberated once I abandoned acting.

Sometimes it's learning how the play wants to function rather than imposing something on it. For me, that's the thrill in directing.

There's no demand for a body of work, though writers will be criticized for not having produced one.

I wrestled with my Catholicism for a long time. It took a long time to escape. It began with a sense that it was repressive, stern, judgmental. It was passionate, but it was terrifying. There were individual priests and nuns who were helpful, but the religion was cold.

I get a sentence, an idea, an image, and I start. I don't know anything beyond it. I follow it.

It was a roller-coaster process. For a long time I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't writing with an outline. And, rare for me, I wrote scenes out of sequence. . . . I didn't understand the play when I wrote it. It was something I'd give in to. It happens to me periodically. I give over and write whatever comes to me and I don't know what it means and then I do. It's thrilling.

. . . I do think that deep down, a lot of my work is about people trying to make reasonable accommodations of situations that are insane or absurd. . . . At first I thought the events had power in themselves, that I would just present them. I really wasn't aware of the things that finally became central issues to me - the shifting alliances, the way people hardly even know they've shifted. That part of [A QUESTION OF MERCY] is very familiar to me in terms of my other plays.