Richard Foreman Quotes

• Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feel, Trying, Used

• All the dialogue on tape, and we’d play the tape in performance. Then I thought it’d be interesting if the actor’s repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we’d get a web of language.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Thought, Play, Actor

• As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Emotional, Too, Over

• From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Now, Everything, Through

• I’m there to make a kind of theatrical music that is desperately missing in my life. And if other people don’t like it, I’m very unhappy, but I can’t do anything about that.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Anything, Kind

• I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not… well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Real, Escape, Bizarre

• I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Trying, Honest, Coming

• I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in School, Group, High

• My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feeling, Play, Expression

• I’ve been trying to figure out for at least the last 10 years how to force myself into something more risky.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Myself, Trying, Last

• Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Right, Started, Actors

• It’s true, I don’t like the real world.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in True, Real

• If I wasn’t in the theater, I would be a hermit.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Theater

• So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, Start, Decided

• One does not devote one’s life in art to shock an audience.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Art

  Tags in Audience, Shock

• There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Art

  Tags in Ever, Made

• Quite the opposite. I might fall on my face, but I feel born again.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feel, Again, Face

• What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Day, New, Kind

• Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience’s response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don’t care about the audience’s response, I’m making them for myself. But I’m making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Myself, Care, Real

• You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.

  Richard Foreman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Wanted, Actually, Stay

Richard Foreman (21)

Birth:	10th June, 1937
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Playwriter

About

Richard Foreman is an American playwright and avant-garde theater pioneer. He is the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.

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Today's Anniversary - 23rd November

Births

• 1896 - Klement Gottwald
• 1773 - Lord Jeffrey
• 1911 - Marjorie Pay Hinckley
• 1987 - Nicole Polizzi
• 1945 - Dennis Nilsen

Deaths

• 1979 - Merle Oberon
• 1992 - Roy Acuff
• 1973 - Sessue Hayakawa
• 1991 - Klaus Kinski
• 1995 - Louis Malle