"I write my plays to create an excuse for full-tilt acting and performing"
About this Quote
There is something deliciously blunt about Bogosian admitting that the play is, for him, a pretext. The “excuse” is the tell: he’s not romanticizing writing as sacred transmission or playwrighting as civic sermon. He’s naming theater as a machine built to justify embodied risk. The script isn’t the cathedral; it’s the set of keys that lets him floor it.
“Full-tilt” carries the adrenal implication of a performer who wants the stage to feel slightly dangerous, like the work could spill past taste or politeness if it needs to. That phrase also hints at Bogosian’s lineage: the downtown, monologue-driven, character-swarming tradition where the actor becomes a one-person switchboard for American voices, tics, hustles, and hungers. His plays have often functioned like a series of possessed channelings rather than tidy, well-made dramas. The intent isn’t to demonstrate craft so much as to create a legal framework for intensity.
The subtext is a quiet argument with literary theater. Bogosian is saying the point of drama is not merely ideas on paper; it’s the live transaction: breath, sweat, a room recalibrating in real time. That’s also a shrewd cultural position for an actor-writer in an era that increasingly treats performance as content. By foregrounding “performing,” he insists on the primacy of liveness, the human engine in the spotlight. The play becomes an alibi for presence - and a dare to the audience: keep up.
“Full-tilt” carries the adrenal implication of a performer who wants the stage to feel slightly dangerous, like the work could spill past taste or politeness if it needs to. That phrase also hints at Bogosian’s lineage: the downtown, monologue-driven, character-swarming tradition where the actor becomes a one-person switchboard for American voices, tics, hustles, and hungers. His plays have often functioned like a series of possessed channelings rather than tidy, well-made dramas. The intent isn’t to demonstrate craft so much as to create a legal framework for intensity.
The subtext is a quiet argument with literary theater. Bogosian is saying the point of drama is not merely ideas on paper; it’s the live transaction: breath, sweat, a room recalibrating in real time. That’s also a shrewd cultural position for an actor-writer in an era that increasingly treats performance as content. By foregrounding “performing,” he insists on the primacy of liveness, the human engine in the spotlight. The play becomes an alibi for presence - and a dare to the audience: keep up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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