The people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration.
The great thing about 'Vera Stark' is that my research was watching movies, screwball comedies, so I could literally sit back and relax.
I am a Tony voter; it is an honor that I take seriously. Each season, I enter the process with a degree of enthusiasm and optimism, which dissipates as I slowly plow through show after show.
My hobby is raising my children.
If the Tony Awards want to remain relevant in the American theater conversation, then they need to embrace the true diversity of voices that populate the American theater.
I've been asked a lot why didn't 'Ruined' go to Broadway. It was the most successful play that Manhattan Theatre Club has ever had in that particular space, and yet we couldn't find a home on Broadway.
American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.
Broadway is a closed ecosystem.
What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.
I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.
It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way.
My parents are avid consumers of art, collectors of African American paintings, and have always gone to the theater. My mother has always been an activist, too. As long as I can remember, we were marching in lines.
I always thought of my mother as a warrior woman, and I became interested in pursuing stories of women who invent lives in order to survive.
My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.
Here's the dilemma of the modern age: There used to be actions that workers could take, in the form of a strike. But now, that's being pre-empted by lockouts. They don't even have that leverage to protect their jobs.
I need a release from whatever I'm writing.
Each play I write has its own unique origin story.
In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.
Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.
I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother's gaze.
