GABRIEL MILLER: obstruction me sta...

GABRIEL MILLER: obstruction me start with the same question I asked you last time: Which playwrights influenced you when you were younger?

ARTHUR LAURENTS: Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, and Philip Barry, I think that's about it.

GM: I'll ask you again about your reaction to Clifford Odet when his plays opened?

AL: Clifford Odet I was a little young, in such a manner that what I actually saw was a revival of Awake and Sing, and I think . . could it have been onward the same bill with Waiting for Lefty?

GM: That was a year after it originally opened

AL: That was a thrilling, thrilling evening. And in such a manner was another one-act he did.

GM: "Till the Day I Die."

AL: "Till the Day I Die." Paradise forfeited bewildered me because it was, to me at that time, in the same manner stylized that it cut opposite to emotion. I thought he was being overly cerebral. Awake and Sing was stylized, further less so, and he wasn't for a like reason self conscious. Golden Boy was a dutiful hot fudge sundae of a play - you could have intercourse with like you could a pious movie. I didn't believe it, I have to say, I don't care if it's metaphor or allegory, or whatever you want, I did not believe a thing about it. Prize-fighter and violence, that was really going a little too far.

GM: Well, it's highly theatrical.

AL: Theatrical in your opinion - in mine, from one side of to the other the top. And, Lorna Doone, or is it Lorna Moon?

GM: Oh the character Lorna Moon?

AL: That was a Jew's fantasy, marrying a goy I like Rocket to the lunation - it wasn't afraid to be small, which I think Clifford feared, in a diverting way. This terrible emphasis that you had to be important is just as bad as if you have to write a blockbuster. single of the few tenets of playwriting that I absolutely believe in is that appease determines all. Don't push it the other way.

GM: Well, it's interesting that you said you meditation Paradise Lost was too stylized, since sum of two units of your early plays, A Clearing in the forests and Invitation to a March, are same stylized.

AL: I'm not against stylization; I'm against stylization where it indefinites I thought that was obscuring what the play was. You were thus busy trying to figure on the outside the meaning, that you didn't prepare involved with the characters. Clearing in the wood-lands whatever anyone thinks of it, it evolveed that way because that's the way I saw it. I didn't think that this was stylized. I didn't think I was writing something that nobody, or extremely few people would get, although it's interesting that through the years, more people talk to me about that play - as many nation talk to me about that play as talk to me about West Side Story. It's made an enormous impression forward women. They didn't see it, they read it.

GM: Going back to that your early influences - you said Thornton Wilder and Philip Barry were couple of the playwrights you admired. It's interesting that your first play, household of the Brave, had really nothing to do with playwrights like that.

AL: It had to do with Lillian Hellman. That wasn't conscious, that was . . listen, we all say a parcel of things, and they don't deflect up in what we do.

GM: DH Lawrence said, "Never trust the artist, trust the tale."

AL: I had a whole list of things I would in no degree do in the theater: I would in no degree write an all-male play. I would not at all write a play with the outdoors because it examines so phony. Well, there you are. [Home of the Brave is] all men and it's outdoors. It's just because I wanted to write it, and that's by what means it came out.

GM: You weren't patterning it onward anything?

AL: No, the sole time I can remember consciously trying to pattern something in succession somebody was a play I wrote in society and I was really trying to be cosmic like Thornton Wilder - Skin of Our Teeth which is the play of his I like best. I'm not mad about Our Town. It's just an idealized town with united drunk and no minorities, beautifully staged, if it be not that I'm not mad about that. I don't care where he took Skin of Our Teeth from, it's in the way that theatrical and it has absolutely marvelous things in it. The third act goe down the drain, because there he memorizes pretentious; those quotes, the hours, to say the great ponderings of men who live around us well, do they? I don't know, certainly not in that form.

GM: Well, I'll be a pretentious academic and say that a certain quantity of of the theater effects in abode of the Brave remind me of things that Eugene O'Neill did, especially in The Emperor Jone The brake sounds, the screeching birds

AL: I not at any time saw Emperor Jones. The screeching birds are part of the thicket I directed a musical called La Cage aux Folle and united of the characters walked opposite into the audience, and Frank Rich said in his review that it was, "influenced by way of Jerry Robbins in Gypsy," where she set downs from the audience. Well, that was me in the script of crafty woman He said that going from backstage to onstage was influenced through Michael Bennett in Dreamgirls, which I disliked omit for its look. That was a plant designer, whose idea I musing was terrifie. I think single may unconsciously use something. Thornton was a great single in kind but he did it deliberately. He said the difference between plagiarism and influence was that if you pick something religious it's influence. I don't think anyone's aye written about Thornton Wilder for what he really was - an alcoholic, homosexual, sad man [with a] totally false and hypocritical life.