Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Foreman

Foreman is describing the drug of precision: a world so obsessively built it starts to compete with ordinary reality. The stammering self-correction - "seemed real yet not... well" - matters as much as the content. It performs the sensation he is chasing: immersion that never settles into comfort. The audience is pulled in, then reminded the floor can drop out at any moment.

As a playwright who helped define the postwar avant-garde (and as the founder of Ontological-Hysteric Theater), Foreman isn’t praising realism; he’s praising a counterfeit that exposes the seams of the original. "Meticulous" and "detailed" are the bait: craft, architecture, the hard labor of making a stage picture feel inevitable. Then comes the twist: the more exact the construction, the more "bizarre" it becomes. That’s classic Foreman logic. Excess order doesn’t produce clarity; it produces estrangement, like a room arranged too perfectly to be lived in.

The subtext is a quiet critique of naturalism and psychological storytelling. Foreman’s theater often treats narrative as a trap and attention as the real subject. The "escape" he names isn’t into fantasy but into an alternate operating system for perception, where detail overwhelms meaning and the mind is forced to notice itself noticing. He wants the spectator to experience art as an engineered hallucination: credible enough to enter, unstable enough to make you question why you ever confuse coherence with truth.