Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Foreman

The line lands like a confession disguised as a shrug: take away the theater and you don’t get a different career, you get disappearance. Foreman isn’t romanticizing solitude; he’s naming theater as an oxygen supply. The blunt conditional “If I wasn’t...” makes the stage less a choice than a survival mechanism, and “hermit” isn’t a cute eccentricity so much as a threat of total retreat from the social world.

In Foreman’s context, that tracks. As the architect of Ontological-Hysteric Theater, he treated performance as a lab for consciousness: jagged images, dense text, interruptions that refuse easy empathy. That work is famously suspicious of conventional “connection,” yet this quote reveals a paradox at the core of his project. The man who dismantles theatrical coziness also admits he needs the theater’s apparatus to stay in contact with people at all. Theater becomes a mediated intimacy, a controlled exposure. It’s not community in the wholesome sense; it’s a constructed arena where alienation can be handled, shaped, even enjoyed.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the idea of art as mere self-expression. Foreman implies that without a formal structure - rehearsal, collaborators, the deadline of an audience - his inner life would calcify into private rituals. The stage, with all its public risk, keeps the hermit instinct from winning. It’s a line that makes “experimental” feel less like an aesthetic badge and more like a personal necessity: a way to live among others without pretending that living among others is easy.