A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts.
In 1980 I sent a play, 'Jitney,' to the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, won a Jerome Fellowship, and found myself sitting in a room with sixteen playwrights. I remember looking around and thinking that since I was sitting there, I must be a playwright, too.
I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.
In the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright - and you can also see it with Mies - they make new ground by raising the ground. Frank Lloyd Wright did it so beautifully with the Robie House. The roof becomes almost a new ground.
But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.
Edward Albee, the premier dark playwright of the American theater, would show up at rehearsal and quote his favorite lines from 'Auntie Mame'. He would stand at the back of the theater, not facing the stage, and sort of conduct the music of his play.
If you are in an Edward Albee play, you say Edward Albee is the greatest playwright of all time... If you're in an Israel Horovitz play, you say Israel Horovitz is the greatest playwright of all time.
The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.
