I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and, in the course of a peripatetic childhood, lived in Minnesota, Georgia, Puerto Rico, Georgia again, and finally the Bronx, where I went to the Bronx High School of Science. I attended Harvard College, where I graduated with honors in Applied Math and Physics. This was followed by a year of wandering around Europe at Harvard’s expense, and then, after being expelled from the Iowa Writers Workshop (!), by theater school at Ohio University, where I got an M.F.A. in Playwriting. I then returned to the Bronx and a long lonely period in which nobody seemed to understand the sort of fusion of dance and puppetry and masks and music and theater that I was doing. Nevertheless, I kept writing.

I’m really thrilled that, with the arrival of a new young generation of theater artists and audiences, there’s been a wonderful explosion of interest in my work, both in the United States and internationally. There have now been 17 productions of my plays (which used to be described as “unproducible”), most recently Francesca in Leiden, The Netherlands, and The Woman from the Sea, which was commissioned by Terry Schreiber and directed by him in New York City.