Tracy Letts
Tracy Letts
Tracy Lettsis an American playwright, screenwriter and actor who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County and a Tony Award for his portrayal of George in the revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth4 July 1965
CountryUnited States of America
book simple lasts
My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love.
cutting important want
What they frequently want to do with a movie is, they want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks. And valleys are important; the valleys make the peaks stand out.
thinking helpful kind
I'm kind of perverse in that I think pessimism is helpful. My pessimism is my own kind of patriotism. My dissent.
writing next hell
I never know what the hell I'm writing about, I never know what the next thing I'm writing about is, I never have a plan.
mom brother dad
You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past.
like-you failing feels
If you feel like you're in control of everything, and then things aren't going well, you feel like you're failing.
hell knows
I like Shakespeare, but I never know what the hell is going on.
decision boss lists
In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.
affinity greater knows
I don't know what it says about me that I have a greater affinity with the damaged. Probably nothing good.
kids thinking childhood
Sometimes my family thinks I've made my childhood a bit more Dickensian than it was, and it probably wasn't all that bad. But I was uncomfortable as a kid.
giving-up giving soul
A certain giving up of control is good for the soul.
hell entertaining ifs
If you're not entertaining, what the hell's the point?
writing character shoes
Well, one of the things we're supposed to be able to do as playwrights is write from a place of empathy, get into another character's shoes and experience things both mundane and tragic. And people don't -- like me right now -- people aren't necessarily the most eloquent when trying to express their emotions. I guess I feel as a playwright that those people deserve a voice, too, a voice that isn't so articulate that they themselves can no longer identify with it.
real mean night
I mean there’s a certain finality about a movie, when it’s done it’s done – that raised eyebrow in that moment will always be that raised eyebrow. Whereas a play only lives as a blueprint for a performance on any given night. There’s a reason you can eat popcorn and watch a movie and you can’t do that in the theatre. Theatre you have to lean in, you have to tune your ear to the stage and participateI respond to heat. And blood. And humanity. The cold experience is not for me. I’ve always enjoyed all the real people in a room together in the theatre.