Quotes from Theresa Rebeck

I let action rise out of character, really.

I write a lot because, if I don't, I start to panic, and I calm down when I write.

When I go to Ohio to visit relatives on holidays, I am often astonished by the level of casual dismissal offered up by way of discussion.

The movies are all about visual, and television is all about character and dialogue.

I'm actually interested in poor behavior. I'm interested in what drives people to poor behavior.

Everyone pays lip service to this whole idea of doing more new plays, and nobody ever does it.

My son is a musician who next year will be attending the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts in New York City, which his mother helped him get into by making him practice all the time.

I am curious about a lot of things. I'm perplexed and engaged.

Because I'm an American woman, and I write straight plays, it's always been sort of assumed I would never be done on Broadway. But that was never the goal.

So in case there was any doubt, I am here to report that having a play on Broadway does not suck.

It's one of the central problems of American culture: telling you if you're younger, more beautiful, more famous, whatever, that then you'll be happy.

I see how the Midwest distrusts the East Coast. The Midwest sees itself as morally superior. The Coast sees itself as intellectually superior. And the two are actually the same thing.

Spielberg read the 'Understudy' and decided that was the voice he wanted to write 'Smash.' He wanted a story that had humanity and humor and high-stakes dreams.

I make my life with New York stage actors, and I love them. They're the best actors on planet earth.

In America, the average playwright makes less than a receptionist in a non-profit theatre. We don't have decent health insurance - or any health insurance at all.

The economics of theater are painful. I still think that the theater community should be looking much more rigorously at how to let the playwright keep the money they make.

Is the American theatre allowing itself to become irrelevant? The problem isn't that playwrights aren't being paid enough. It's that theatres all over America are looking towards New York to tell them what new plays to do.

There's a thing that happens to Midwesterners - we spend a lot of time talking about having a different set of rules about manners. I don't know about ethics, but certainly about manners, what you would say and what you wouldn't say. And that is not very East coast.

I have admiration for people who can do it well - the guys who wrote 'Cheers' and 'Frasier.' They created sort of a blissful comedic universe.

A lot of times, I think people feel that new plays are suspect, and actually, I don't know where that came from. I completely disagree with it!

We need theatre that is contemporary, lively and relevant, and the only way to do that is to take care of our playwrights and produce their plays.

Why is being a female having an agenda any more than being a misogynist - which David Mamet most certainly is?

Some of my family goes back a long way in Denver.

Sometimes I feel that my job on earth is to put Julie White through horrible things, watch her writhe and then recover.