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 HENLEYThe impetus behind going to graduate school was a year after graduating from college spent in Dallas working at the dog food factory and Bank America and not having met success in my chosen field, which at that point was being an actress.
More Beth Henley Quotes
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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.
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I love writing for the screen.
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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.
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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.
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And all writing is creating or spinning dreams for other people so they won’t have to bother doing it themselves.
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It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.
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I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the phone.
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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.
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I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.
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My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana.
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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.
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I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.
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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.
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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.
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I’m very into the first production of the show.
BETH HENLEY