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I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.

Beth Henley

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
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
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.
BETH HENLEY

Mother Phones Talking
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
I love writing for the screen.
BETH HENLEY

Love Screens Writing
I was just restless with being in school; so I went out to Los Angeles.
BETH HENLEY

Country Restless School
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
I tried to start a theatre in LA and failed miserably, but I was probably not meant to raise money.
BETH HENLEY

Money Raise Theatre
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
I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.
BETH HENLEY

Divorced Own Wretchedness
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 did write a couple of original screenplays, but I’d rather write plays.
BETH HENLEY

Couple Play Writing
The 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.
BETH HENLEY

College Dog School
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
I’m very into the first production of the show.
BETH HENLEY

Firsts Production Show
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
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
I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.
BETH HENLEY

Community Mother Play Theatre
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
It’s really interesting that whenever you do something that is so out of character, like having an emotional outburst, that you don’t get in trouble.
BETH HENLEY

Character Emotional Interesting
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
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
It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.
BETH HENLEY

Enlightening Kind Playwright
It’s called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn’t realize what a rage I was in.
BETH HENLEY

Sister Winter Years
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

Class Long Thinking

I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.

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I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.

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