black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn’t you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

Beth Henley

Plays are so much more special if they’ve never ever had a production, but I think you can really work on a play and make it better with each production.
BETH HENLEY

Play Special Thinking
But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn’t a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don’t have to be very smart.
BETH HENLEY

Character Smart Writing
I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.
BETH HENLEY

Community Mother Play Theatre
That was always my inclination, to start on a new play before the other one gets done, because at least you’ll have something to go back to if that play gets trashed.
BETH HENLEY

Done Inclination Play
That’s what I like about [smoking] . . . taking a drag off of death, Mmm! Gives me a sense of controlling my own destiny. What power! What exhilaration! Want a drag?
BETH HENLEY

Destiny Giving Smoking
I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I’d rather write plays.
BETH HENLEY

Couple Play Writing
But here’s the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
BETH HENLEY

Copyright Novelists Poets
In movement class, you had to lie on the floor and get your alignment in to pass the class.
BETH HENLEY

Class Lying Movement
My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana.
BETH HENLEY

Louisiana Lucky Play
And all writing is creating or spinning dreams for other people so they won’t have to bother doing it themselves.
BETH HENLEY

Creating Dream Writing
Part of that is that New York has proved to be too much fun for me to live and work; I love New York so much.
BETH HENLEY

Country Live Work
There are probably brilliant people, geniuses, alive today who don’t even know how to say, “Hello, how do you do?” because their minds are absorbed with electronic images.
BETH HENLEY

Live Mind People Today
It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.
BETH HENLEY

Enlightening Kind Playwright
Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to and watch the directors direct.
BETH HENLEY

Director People Pigs
The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.
BETH HENLEY

Christmas School Writing
The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan Kingsley or Kathy Bates who are better than your play.
BETH HENLEY

Art Glorious Play

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn’t you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn’t you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Beth Henley Quotes