Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Foreman

Foreman’s line lands like a dare: theater not as entertainment but as a barometer reading at the edge of a historical fever. “My play” is pointedly singular, but the ambition is totalizing - “ultimate expression” suggests he’s not offering an opinion about decline so much as staging it in concentrated form, like a distilled toxin. The phrase “my feeling” matters as much as “Western civilization.” Foreman isn’t claiming to diagnose the West with sociological certainty; he’s confessing to a lived dread, a sensibility shaped by the late 20th century’s churn of media saturation, political fatigue, and the creeping sense that inherited narratives no longer bind.

“Twilight” does heavy lifting. It’s less apocalypse than dimming: a slow loss of contrast where values blur, attention frays, and meaning becomes harder to hold. That aligns with Foreman’s avant-garde practice and his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, where fragmentation, overload, and self-conscious artifice don’t merely depict modern life; they recreate its cognitive weather. The intent isn’t to preach “civilization is falling,” but to make audiences experience the sensation of living inside that falloff - the jittery, half-awake feeling that culture has become an endless switchboard with no central signal.

The subtext is also a defense of difficulty. If the civilization is in twilight, then clarity, comfort, and linear storytelling can start to look like complicity - nostalgia as anesthesia. Foreman’s claim insists that form is political: the play’s structure becomes the evidence, not the lecture.