Richard Greenberg
Richard Greenberg
Richard Greenbergis an American playwright and television writer known for his subversively humorous depictions of middle-class American life. He has had more than 25 plays premiere on and off-broadway in New York City and eight at the South Coast Repertory Theatre, including The Violet Hour, Everett Beekin, and Hurrah at Last...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth22 February 1958
CountryUnited States of America
bank people playwright steadily
I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go steadily and smoothly.
commission era hundred scripts
I started in the era when Hollywood reveled in being the most cost-inefficient industry on the planet. They used to commission a hundred scripts for every one they made.
believe closer possible
When you're writing plays, it's possible to believe you don't have any real world skill. When you're adapting, it is really all about the mechanics, so you feel closer to, I don't know, an accountant or someone who has a body of information. It's not all about temperament.
coast revise time usual
My usual route is, I do a play at South Coast Rep, then there's time between and I revise it, and then I take it to New York.
time
By the time I started writing plays, Broadway was never an expectation, so it's never been central.
conveying entire life onstage sort time trying
I'm sort of anti-Aristotelian. I want to get an entire life onstage while conveying a sense of how time feels, how unstoppable it is, and how we don't really know what's going on because as we're trying to weave, it's weaving us.
I like the Mets. I'm interested in the Mets.
felt fully touchstone
For some reason, 1968 is a touchstone year for me. I think it was the first year I felt fully conscious.
slower
I do think the past changes at a slower rate. It sits a little more still for its portrait.
occur scenes sequence tends
I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.
settings
The implication is that these settings would actually be hospitable to life,
rupture
The idea of a rupture between acts occurs in a number of my plays.
But you don't have your druthers in life, do you?
ambition play crafts
A play gets on Broadway by fluke. And you don't even start out with that ambition. When I do a play, the intention is just to put it up somewhere.