"I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?"
About this Quote
DeLillo is needling the romantic idea of the solitary author-god. A script feels finished because the page ends, but he’s pointing at the moment authority collapses: when language leaves the safe, flat control of paper and enters bodies, space, and time. “Only the beginning” isn’t motivational; it’s almost ominous. The playwright discovers the work isn’t a sealed object but a volatile set of instructions.
“What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?” is DeLillo’s sly way of naming everything the writer can’t fully foresee: an actor’s breath that changes a line’s temperature, blocking that turns subtext into slapstick or menace, an audience’s mood that reassigns meaning in real time. Theatre is literature forced to share the room. The question carries the anxiety of translation: the script is a model; the production is the weather.
In DeLillo’s broader universe, that loss of control is the point. His novels orbit mediation, spectacle, and the way public systems (news, crowds, performance) distort private intention. Here, the stage becomes a miniature of that cultural machine. The line also flatters theatre’s peculiar power: unlike prose, it can’t pretend to be purely interior. Once the work occupies “three dimensions,” it becomes social, contingent, and exposed to misreading - which is also how it becomes alive.
The intent isn’t to humble playwrights so much as to remind them what they’re really making: not a text, but an event.
“What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?” is DeLillo’s sly way of naming everything the writer can’t fully foresee: an actor’s breath that changes a line’s temperature, blocking that turns subtext into slapstick or menace, an audience’s mood that reassigns meaning in real time. Theatre is literature forced to share the room. The question carries the anxiety of translation: the script is a model; the production is the weather.
In DeLillo’s broader universe, that loss of control is the point. His novels orbit mediation, spectacle, and the way public systems (news, crowds, performance) distort private intention. Here, the stage becomes a miniature of that cultural machine. The line also flatters theatre’s peculiar power: unlike prose, it can’t pretend to be purely interior. Once the work occupies “three dimensions,” it becomes social, contingent, and exposed to misreading - which is also how it becomes alive.
The intent isn’t to humble playwrights so much as to remind them what they’re really making: not a text, but an event.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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