Personal Life
Robert Patrick was born to migrant workers in Texas. Because his parents moved around the southwest constantly, looking for work, he never went to one school for an entire year until his senior year of high school in Roswell, New Mexico. The only cultural constants in his life were books, movies, and radio. His mother made sure he learned to read, and arranged that he start school a year early. Unsocialized due to constant displacement, he always made poor grades, and dropped out of college after two years. Having experienced no live theatre but a few school shows, he fell in love with stage work while washing dishes at the Kennebunkport Playhouse one summer. Stopping off in New York on his way back to Roswell, he stumbled into the Caffe Cino, the first underground or Off-Off Broadway theatre, on September 14, 1961. He remained there working for free in any required capacity, supporting himself with temporary typing jobs while observing and participating in the production of dozens of plays. Having long been a poet, in 1964 he got an idea for a play, "The Haunted Host," and because of the casualness of the Cino, was allowed to mount it almost at once. It was something of a success, and playwrighting became his main focus.
Read more about this topic: Robert Patrick (playwright)
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“... feminism is a political term and it must be recognized as such: it is political in women’s terms. What are these terms? Essentially it means making connections: between personal power and economic power, between domestic oppression and labor exploitation, between plants and chemicals, feelings and theories; it means making connections between our inside worlds and the outside world.”
—Anica Vesel Mander, U.S. author and feminist, and Anne Kent Rush (b. 1945)
“I have given the best of myself and the best work of my life to help obtain political freedom for women, knowing that upon this rests the hope not only of the freedom of men but of the onward civilization of the world.”
—Mary S. Anthony (1827–1907)