Tracy Letts
Tracy Letts
Tracy Lettsis an American playwright, screenwriter and actor who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County and a Tony Award for his portrayal of George in the revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth4 July 1965
CountryUnited States of America
hard harder puts work
You don't work as hard to watch a movie. You work harder to watch a play, so what the audience puts into it is interesting.
box illinois lab next originally produced seat written
'Killer Joe' was originally written in 1991 and first produced in '93 at the Next Theater's Lab - a 40 seat black box theater in Evanston, Illinois - back when I was getting started. I was just 25 and I had been acting for awhile, but it was my first play and the one that really got me noticed, especially by Steppenwolf.
great
I don't have a great face for camera.
movies
I don't write plays for them to be turned into movies.
onstage people seen success theater town
I'm just a Chicago actor who's a playwright. Even with the success of 'August,' the people in town who come to our theater know me by sight, because they've seen me onstage so much.
action lives moving natural onstage screen spoken stage turn unnatural word
It's not a natural translation, transition, to take something from stage to screen. Onstage your action is communicated through the spoken word primarily, and on screen it's communicated through pictures. So it's always been kind of unnatural to take something that lives on the stage and turn it into moving pictures.
hope playwright sustain
One of the things you hope you've done as a playwright is create roles that can sustain different interpretations.
access afraid films great grew hot kid plays tin virginia
I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'
certainly experience good helped helps roles
I think my experience as an actor helps me to write anything. It certainly helped me to write 'August Osage County.' It helps me to write any play that I'm working on because I think one of the things I do well is write good roles for actors.