"From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything"
About this Quote
A certain kind of New York bravado hums in Foreman’s double stamp: “absolutely everything.” It’s not just youthful boasting; it’s a self-mythology built out of attendance. Foreman, who would become a key figure in American avant-garde theater, frames his artistic origin story as an act of total consumption: the city as an all-you-can-see buffet, the self as a camera left running.
The repetition is doing the heavy lifting. “Everything” isn’t literal, it’s a claim to authority. If you’ve seen it all, you’re licensed to reject it all, remix it all, or diagnose it as stale. That matters for Foreman’s later work, which often feels like an argument with theater itself - with realism, with narrative comfort, with the audience’s desire to be carried. The quote establishes the prerequisite for that argument: he didn’t arrive as an innocent iconoclast. He arrived as someone who did the homework, obsessively, and then decided the syllabus was wrong.
There’s also a time-stamp here: “New Dramatists,” early twenties, New York as an overwhelming machine of scenes and subcultures. The subtext is hunger mixed with anxiety: see everything now, before the doors close, before you pick a lane, before the city picks one for you. It’s a memory of apprenticeship rendered as conquest - and a hint that the avant-garde, at its core, is often born from overexposure.
The repetition is doing the heavy lifting. “Everything” isn’t literal, it’s a claim to authority. If you’ve seen it all, you’re licensed to reject it all, remix it all, or diagnose it as stale. That matters for Foreman’s later work, which often feels like an argument with theater itself - with realism, with narrative comfort, with the audience’s desire to be carried. The quote establishes the prerequisite for that argument: he didn’t arrive as an innocent iconoclast. He arrived as someone who did the homework, obsessively, and then decided the syllabus was wrong.
There’s also a time-stamp here: “New Dramatists,” early twenties, New York as an overwhelming machine of scenes and subcultures. The subtext is hunger mixed with anxiety: see everything now, before the doors close, before you pick a lane, before the city picks one for you. It’s a memory of apprenticeship rendered as conquest - and a hint that the avant-garde, at its core, is often born from overexposure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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