If you’re a theatre artist, especially a playwright, you need to be a combination smack dealer/Baptist preacher/pimp to make it. Your work has to promise narcotic thrills, spiritual salvation and sensual earthy pleasure...there should be a rawness to theatre, a sense of danger and an affirmation that life is worth living and that telling stories is magnificent. I believe that propaganda is the opposite of art. I stand against putting labels on human beings, against any form of segregation by gender identification, race, ethnicity, heritage, religious beliefs or sexual orientation. My heroes are John Lewis, Robert F. Kennedy, Sylvia Plath, Ben Hecht, June Christy, Fred Hampton, Charles Schulz, Norman Rockwell, Duke Ellington, Harvey Milk and Martin Luther King Jr.