Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman
Marsha Normanis an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play 'night, Mother. She wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway musicals as The Secret Garden, for which she won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, and The Red Shoes, as well as the libretto for the musical The Color Purple and the book for the musical The Bridges of Madison County...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth21 September 1947
CountryUnited States of America
I feel that I speak the musical language.
I grew up at the piano, and I longed to write musicals.
When ''night, Mother' opened, I did not know how long it would be before I would have another show on Broadway.
Jesus was a suicide, if you ask me.
After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, 'OK, that's enough for you. Now go away.' What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as ''night, Mother.'
If I had not had music in my life, I would be the neurasthenic vision of the playwright.
My view is that musicals are love stories with great final scenes. It's just that simple. Musicals are also conflicts between two worlds. And by those criteria, 'The Color Purple' is actually exactly the kind of story that makes for a great musical. Yes, it's got hard stuff in it, but so does 'Les Miserables' and 'Phantom of the Opera.'
In the theater, when people hear that you're writing a play, they want to know what it's all about, whether there's a role for them. You write it fairly quickly, and it becomes a group activity before you're really ready to have company.
Art is how a culture records its life, how it poses questions for the next generation and how it will be remembered.
I'm just not having a very good time and I don't have any reason to think it'll get anything but worse. I'm tired. I'm hurt. I'm sad. I feel used.
During the day, our souls gather their ... impressions of us, how our lives feel. ... Our spirits collect these impressions, keep them together, like wisps of smoke in a bag. Then, when we're asleep, our brains open up these bags of smoke ... and take a look.
What's so good about a heaven where, one of these days, you're going to get your embarrassing old body back?
When you fight something long enough, it becomes a center pole right in your life and you count on it to be there to fight with.
Success is always something that you have to recover from.