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Audio Podcasts

Podcast 1 - Actor Larry Coen
Listen below or download the MP3.

Podcast 2 - Director Scott Edmiston
Listen below or download the MP3.

Podcast 3 - Actress Marianna Bassham
Listen below or download the MP3.

Acts of Hope

Craig Lucas in his own words

"I'm an abandoned baby. I was literally left on the back-seat of a parked car in a gas station. With a little note pinned onto me."

"Deep down most artists I know know full well that art and artists are born in trauma. Painful, scary things kick our innate talents into gear, otherwise why would we ever put up with all the mishegas and bullshit and naysaying. We have to express these things, no matter how, no matter what: that loneliness and injustice and untrammeled sense of ourselves! I was here, goddammit! Listen up! Look!"

"I've been lucky enough at one time or another to be an actor, singer, puppeteer, magician, poet, film critic, playwright, screenwriter, theater director, movie director, opera librettist and book writer."

"In college I was a poet. My teacher Anne Sexton chanted at me: 'Make it strange!' Use words to shock us back to the truth and immediacy of our own experience."

"As technology penetrates deeper and deeper into the space between us, theatre remains as much in the now as any art form could ever be - alive as a kiss."

"I love actors and nothing makes me happier than being in a rehearsal room with actors. I told my boyfriend once that it was the closest one could get to being in an orgy while remaining clothed, because you are in a room with all these interesting, sexy, smart, talented people and you are all collectively sharing intimacy and creating something that is a consensual act."

"From Greek tragedy to our own largely unseen ones, man's ability to choose his or her countenance in the face of fatal blows is the noblest testament to our deepest humanity. Suffering may be inevitable, but what we do about it is not."

"My lover, my best friend, my closest colleague over decades, my mother, my father-in-law and several dozen other friends and colleagues all died rather horrible deaths in rapid succession, and I did not find myself ascending into a compassionate, giving place, but instead a significantly meaner and less generous one."

"The trouble with experience, of course, is you have to have it yourself, you never take it on faith."

"Everything that is worth doing artistically is scary. I have had the best results in my life as an artist by going past what I think is my limit, by putting myself in some danger. That's the place I trust the most. I often fall on my face. But I prefer that to writing the same play over and over."

"I do think that that's our job as artists, to show the mess of life and to shine a light into people and to never ever - ever - ever judge them."

"I think understanding is the important thing. That's the nature of drama - people doing the wrong thing. There'd be no play, you know, if everybody did the right thing."

"The act of writing is itself an act of hope. Art isn't therapy, but when you face terror, you have the primary building blocks out of which to create art. You need to have optimism and pessimism, wariness about life and hopefulness about life."

Compiled by Suzanne Bixby. Photo by Peter Bellamy.