American - Playwright | December 29, 1984 -
I feel like I'm put in a position where I have to engage with what people bring to my work, which is an expectation for me to talk about race because it's not normal for a black writer to be writing in the theatre.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
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I don't hate people who colour-blind cast, but I hate people who colour-blind cast and pretend that they're not, who pretend that these bodies on stage don't actually carry specific meaning.
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I wrestle in a big way with August Wilson's work in that I at times admire it and at times feel infuriated by it, which is weirdly more influential than loving someone entirely.
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I'm not a really firm believer in theatre that is 'about anything.' I don't think theatre can be about anything other than the people who show up and the value that they hold.
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I actually don't read the press. All the writers I admire were significantly reclusive, and I'm still trying to figure out how they got to a place where they didn't have to talk to press.
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The stuff I write about doesn't, like, necessarily leave people feeling warm and fuzzy. I'm writing in a territory that's, like, contested and full of prickliness. And I find that people project their problems onto me or something.
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My dream was always to have an experience where an audience member would turn to another audience member, a stranger, and be like, 'What did we just go through?' And, like, kind of begin to talk.
ExperienceDreamGoKindTalkTurn
I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold.
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My mother had a wall of degrees in our house, and she would walk me up to the wall and say, 'When you have this many degrees, you can tell me what to do.'
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'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams brings a tamale vendor on stage to simply say, 'Red hot!'
LifeLoveRedEndMy LifePlay
I go through phases of watching a ton of dance/performance, and I am bizarrely well-informed on the subject.
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I have a borderline-embarrassing obsession with pop music.
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