Kenny Leon Quotations

I don't have to make up what I love about Atlanta, ... This is going to be genuine, honest and heartfelt.

We've lost a great writer, I think the greatest writer that our generation has seen and I've lost a dear, dear friend and collaborator,

To try talking about my relationship with August and the contributions of that man, I get very emotional just thinking about it,

The play has taken on a greater height of spirituality. He didn't make it. That was a painful thing, but it feels absolutely right that we are here. His family is here. His people are here.

When you have a chance to work on something that's live and the audience is breathing the same air as the performers, it makes the work seem more immediate and more alive than if we were watching it through a screen or a filter or a box. I love that.

To see the joy of an audience watching the work and connecting to the work and understanding something about our connectedness to each other as human beings, that's immensely gratifying.

encompasses all the strength and power that theater has to offer.

The same energy and effort he gave to 'Jitney,' 'Fences' and 'Gem of the Ocean' is here. In spite of his health issues, he's coming at it like a fighter, a soldier. I have been impressed and amazed.

The same energy and effort he gave to 'Jitney,' 'Fences' and 'Gem of the Ocean,' is here. In spite of his health issues, he's coming at it like a fighter, a soldier. I have been impressed and amazed.

August's accomplishments are unsurpassed - to me, the only writer to come close is Shakespeare, ... He has been the epitome of American theater for the last 23 years. He's defined it. His plays not only serve an artistic purpose, but they also serve a social purpose because they look at ourselves as Americans.

Absolutely, ... but he'd have to be totally committed and shut down the businesses. He couldn't do anything else. He'd have to say, 'For these five or six months, I have to be about looking at and studying August's work.' It would definitely take some work, but I think he could do it.

It's the ultimate universally engaging play, ... It was important to have 20-year-olds and 80-year-olds in the audience, to have blacks and whites in the audience.

I want to be a champion of African American work, but I'm defined by more than race,

In casting somebody like Puffy and having him bring in all his fans, you get the people in the hip-hop generation to see the play,

I'm from the South and I really studied Tennessee Williams, ... I love plays that are poetry-based, but last year, when all those Williams plays went to Broadway ('A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'The Glass Menagerie'), it didn't occur to producers to ask me if I was interested.

I never think about putting my stamp on anything, ... If someone watches a play and they don't see the hand of the director in it, if it's seamless and seems effortless, then I will have achieved what I'm after. I want folks to sit and hear August's music.

By the end of the run, people were talking about the play, ... A young generation of people came to that play expecting to see Puffy or Clair Huxtable. When it was over, people were saying, 'Who is Lorraine Hansberry? I want to read her. I want to know who she is.'

He's my hero because he's not only the anchor of my career, he's my growth as a man.

He put our history in a storytelling context and put a human face on those people who were free from slavery but had no jobs. He gave his characters big voices, when the broader community thought they had little voices, that they had nothing to say.

You will not be a footnote in American history. We guarantee the young kids will know who August Wilson is.

You will not be a footnote in American history.