At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
To me, the job of a playwright is to explore and bring to light our lives. You can't hold back; you have to give in to this. Sometimes, you say things people don't want to hear.
I don't consciously start writing a play that involves issues. After it's done, I sit back like everyone else and think about what it means.
In my game, you get brokenhearted a bit. You do a play, get a bad review in the papers... actors are sensitive; you think of all the work you've done, and it breaks your heart, but you learn to shrug it off and to carry on.
You write a play mostly out of yourself. There's a need to get a certain thing down.
Sometimes the better the writing, the harder it is to play because you really want to service it. It's hard to be that quick and articulate in life. You've got to try to make it seem discovered, you know, not rehearsed.
There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.
I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.
Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.
Every so often you read a play and a character just speaks to you - almost seems to speak through you, in fact.
I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.