I’ve been a playwright for many years. I’ve also published fiction and creative nonfiction in literary magazines and written for several television series. But at my core, I’m a playwright, a theater artist. I’ve had nearly 20 plays produced in New York and around the country, several of them on commission, many of them based on real events. For example, Little Rock is a musical based on the 1957 desegregation crisis in that Arkansas city; An American Journey is a story of the shooting death of a young black man by a white Milwaukee policeman, the 20 years of cover-up, and the subsequent trials; Steps in Time: Scenes from 1840 Baltimore takes place in the rooms of an actual restored house in that city (two separate audiences travel from room to room as the scenes unfold). But it’s not just the “facts” that interest me in such work: it’s also the intersection of cultures in American society, the seemingly unavoidable clash between and/or convergence of “the races” in this society—“race,” of course, being that economically convenient 18th/19th century social construct. How to make sense of America through the lenses of characters who by their nature have their own goals, needs, desires, obsessions that must negotiate not only the private but also the public at every turn. Of course, stories of African American life and family will always remain important to me. But what also interests me more and more at this point in my work are the larger spaces outside of family—or how family spills out into such spaces—and the ways such stories of journey and struggle and their accompanying themes can be explored theatrically. For example, my latest play, Modern Minstrelsy, moves through more time and space than any play I’ve written thus far. It’s big and meta-theatrical, with two stories, two dramatic journeys, vying for agency, for primacy. I guess you can say that I always want more as a playwright, I hunger for it: more time, more space, more license, more discovery.