The stuff I write about doesn't, like, necessarily leave people feeling warm and fuzzy. I'm writing in a territory that's, like, contested and full of prickliness. And I find that people project their problems onto me or something.
My mother had a wall of degrees in our house, and she would walk me up to the wall and say, 'When you have this many degrees, you can tell me what to do.'
'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams brings a tamale vendor on stage to simply say, 'Red hot!'
I go through phases of watching a ton of dance/performance, and I am bizarrely well-informed on the subject.
I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold.
I have a borderline-embarrassing obsession with pop music.
All my plays have these titles that are oddly tricky. I like that something can look like one thing but mean two different things. Language is really unstable in that way.
Something that happens to me is that I'll write a play specifically from my own experience, and then I'll inevitably be told that I'm being tunnel-visioned about it. People always ask, 'What about that other race? Or discrimination toward those people?'
Family dramas are tough, as a playwright. Most stories are about characters going on a trip or a new character coming to town, because that's how you learn information about them. But with family, they all know each other already. There's years of history in every interaction.
All of my work is sort of fed by a question, a need to understand the world and why the world is what it is.
Things just kind of stick with me, and writing, for me, is always an investigation into my own feelings about them. I wonder why things stick to me, and I try to synthesize those into a dramatic experience in some ways.
