Lee Breuer Quotations

I feel that people who would think it goes too far don't understand what the intent is. One has to build a bridge to the present.

It's like we're going to a kindergarten with those little chairs ? but the women don't fit. The doll concept of life was the men's world, and their idea was to try to fit the women into it, to cut them down to size ? to put them in little wigs, with eyelashes and makeup and make them fashion items in this particular world ? so they could control it.

It's an attempt to do speaking opera. What I'm doing can work against the melodrama and the music, and parody the melodrama. In the love scenes, the men are picked up by the women ? the men are swept off their feet ? so I can get a lot of comedy from it. It's a comedy of opposition.

This certainly steals an acting style that was used in the clubs in Munich in 1900 and picked up by (playwright Bertolt) Brecht. We associate it, and rightly so, with some of the high melodrama that was used for silent films. So sometimes, with this style of acting and the piano in the background, you get the idea that you're in a silent film melodrama.

The fact of it is that the men's world was actually smaller than the women's world. I wanted to demonstrate this simply by showing the relative size of the feminine power. As much as these men boss these women around, as much as fate made them small to make their men big, the fact is that the whole control factor was illusory ? it just needed an anarchist like Nora to strike the match that burned up the illusion.

Ibsen wrote a kind of Times best seller; he wasn't 100 years ahead of his time -- he was 10 years ahead. It was the feminist anthem of its time -- the YMCA of feminism.