Lydia R. Diamond

Lydia R. Diamond (born April 14, 1969) is an American playwright and professor.

Quotes

 * I was trying to write a play about race, in real time — at a time when that topic was shifting more than I’d witnessed in my lifetime. Seismic shifts…
 * On her work Smart People in “AN INTERVIEW WITH LYDIA R. DIAMOND” in Huntington Theatre Company (2010)


 * The conversation makes me crazy, and I haven’t been in very many places where I have had conversations with people of color who don’t agree with me. It feels like the most dismissive and dangerous shrug-off of a phenomenon that has not gone away; how can you be post-racial in a society proven to have huge economic disparity between races? And attitudinally?...
 * On how she disagrees with the term “post-racial” in “AN INTERVIEW WITH LYDIA R. DIAMOND” in Huntington Theatre Company (2010)


 * Almost always when I write, the characters and the story dictate the structure, and I don’t know what it will be until the play tells me what it will be. But I look at it now and it makes all the sense in the world because the whole conversation about race is so disjointed and disconnected, and it’s so hard for us to hold on to it, so it makes sense that a play about something that’s so slippery wouldn’t be in a well-made play structure…
 * On how the theme affected the structure of her play Smart People in “An Interview with Lydia R. Diamond” in The Interval (2016 Feb 16)


 * I’ve found that there’s this idea of what a black experience is, and because I write what’s outside of what’s been allowed to be on stage, there’s a questioning of authenticity, which is beyond maddening. For a white producer, executive, artistic director [etc.] to tell me that my work isn’t black enough… I’m losing my mind…
 * On authenticity and the Black experience in “An Interview with Lydia R. Diamond” in The Interval (2016 Feb 16)