Diane Paulus Quotes

Art cannot be looked at as an elite, sacred event anymore. It has to be embraced as an accessible, popular form, which is what I believe theater is at its roots.

Politics, to a degree, is about legislation, administration. You can’t be there in the trenches.

I grew up with a beautiful gold harp sitting in our living room. My older sister played it.

It’s freeing to not be caught up in your own personal baggage.

I listen to music, I read scripts, and I know pretty intuitively if I can unlock it in a way. It’s actually very liberating when you understand that not everything is for you.

I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t even know what tomorrow brings. When I’m teaching, obviously I’m in town for the class every week.

I think actually what keeps the intensity manageable – it’s a little counterintuitive – is that it’s changing all the time. Every week is different for me.

I think every theater in America wants a younger audience… and you can’t just hope to have a younger audience, you have to program things that audience is going to connect with.

In Elizabethan England or classical Athens… theater was at the center of, not culture, but society and politics and religion and civic engagement. Those things have a different audience.

My generation of director has no illusions that we are going to be fed and cared for by subsidized theater in America.

I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.

The musical theater is a glorious and distinctly American innovation in the history of theater.

Being a director, whether you’re in rehearsal or you’re in auditions or you’re in a creative meeting, is so much to me about being present in the moment. There’s a sense of time stopping.

I had this epiphany that I like the interaction with people. I wanted to make things happen at a grassroots level.

As a director, I never feel that I have the answers.

Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.

I knew ART was was going to give me this opportunity to expand my role as a director and finally let me have a seat at the table where I could get involved in these policy discussions and producing discussions and, frankly, the financial discussions.

For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it’s all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that’s the definition of spectacle.

Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It’s about tempo and change and pulse, whether you’re doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.

I am always looking for what piece, what artists, what playwrights, what directors, what subject matter is going to catalyze an audience.

I’m always interested in looking – historically – at how theater can animate history and how all of that can make us engage with our lives in an enriching way.

When you’re a freelance director, you are hired to create the art, and it kind of stops there.

I give so much of myself to my work; I want to be with people who are going to be there with me.

At the core of what I’m doing is a belief in the audience, a belief that populism doesn’t mean dumbing down theater, but rather giving the audience a voice and a role in experiencing theater.

We’re a depraved civilization. All this technology, all the computer games and the iPhones… nobody will sit for art anymore. What a dismaying state of humanity.

I want an audience that will come sitting forward in their seats.

Theatre and opera were always the twin kingdoms that I felt I had to conquer, because they were my parents‘ favorites.

I’m always interested in working with people who are good team players – that are selfless that way in their interests and dedication to the project.

I think in our culture there’s been a tendency for people to blame the audience. There is a tendency in our industry to say, ‘The audience has left the building. People don’t want culture anymore.’

The mission of the A.R.T. is to expand the boundaries of theater through works of the canon and the new works of tomorrow.