Everything Sholom Aleichem talks about in his plays and his short stories is about people, family, man's relationship with his God, the breaking down of tradition.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Stories hold conflict and contrast, highs and lows, life and death, and the human struggle and all kinds of things.
As the character talks and moves, the world around him is slowly revealed, just like dollying a camera back for a wider look at things. So all my stories start with a character, and that character introduces setting, culture, conflict, government, economy... all of it, through his or her eyes.
In order to appreciate a great man, we must know his surroundings. We must understand the scope of the drama in which he played - the part he acted - and we must also know his audience.
Each play I write has its own unique origin story.
All I had, originally, were pages of Nolan's dialogue. I think his character serves the story in a nice way. He's a Greek chorus for the goings-on in the Hamptons.
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.
'Brahmotsavam' is a love story set in a family backdrop... It's all about relationships people have on different levels.
From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays.
Every play I write is about love and distance. And time. And from that we can get things like history.