The main thing:
It has got to Bop and it has to Wail. Rhythm and Emotion.

Secondary:
Most of the plays I write and appreciate are about people trying to connect. Usually, they fail miserably. I find human frailty and misfortune darkly funny. Existential themes, a strong dirty laugh, raunch is good, theatricality on balance with the story. Spectacle and silence. Characters that we all know, or want to know, or would enjoy seeing destroyed.

All the rest:
PLOT/STORY Follows CHARACTER.
CHARACTER reveals itself through ACTION.
Autonomy of SCENE: each its own free-standing vehicle containing the Where and What is happening, and with Who, their individual intentions - my aim is to make all these elements clearly discernible.

In my playwriting I am trying to get the words to sound right, so they sing, and get the moments true, so they are really like something that happened, or happens all the time, or could never have happened, or I wish would happen, or would be humorously horrible if it really happened.

I have a pretty swell ear for American dialogue and a keen appreciation of structure and form, am a mostly self-taught storyteller and script maker-mender- collaborator. I read many plays and novels. I watch movies, silents, black and white and foreign, and first release stuff too. I take classes and workshops. I am a member of writing groups. I have seen thousands of live performances. I have acted in and directed many plays. I feel that when plays are not read aloud to strangers in public they are incomplete. Dramatic art in a vacuum, by oneself, is the biggest obstacle and dissatisfaction all playwrights face. I tell great stories, or good stories, or stink bombs, but without a hearing, it is as if they never existed; just a bucket of spit, without an audience. I write plays for people I have never met, about people I can not forget, some that do not exist.