While preparing my play Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night for production, I heeded Suzan-Lori Parks’s challenge to excise stage directions and communicate physical action in dialogue. The script transformed, and became ‘director-proof.’ Yet, in seeming paradox, it also became director-friendly. Now, in all my work, I minimize stage directions in order to open doors for directors, actors and designers to exercise artistic agency when breathing my words to life. A successful collaboration has, at its essence, the deliberate giving up of control.

Although artists’ creations originate in our inner recesses, they are not meant for us. Ultimately, a play belongs to the audience, in their experience of it, and in the emotions and memories they carry away. I view my plays as gifts for others. Some are funny, some bloody, and some flummox. But they can never waste an audience’s or a collaborator’s time. This requires rigor and honesty. I must not find satisfaction in first impulses without testing them. The actors of Poland’s Teatr Zar spent eight years crafting three one-hour plays. Each moment is not the first idea, but the twelfth or fifteenth. The more I revise my play Mount Misery, the more precise and nuanced it becomes. Early scenes that seemed critical now demand amputation.
I am fascinated with unexpected combinations and obscure encounters. For example, Mount Misery occurs on Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home; in 1834, it was a plantation where adolescent Frederick Douglass was a slave. This is becoming a hallmark of mine. I want to create theater that is difficult, if not impossible, to convey in a novel, tv or film.

Fundamental to my work is learning: about new audiences, new ways to collaborate, new theatrical and artistic languages and forms, research into new content. I delight in learning about things previously unknown to me, and through the theater, sharing them. Through learning, I can enrich and push the field and the art form. My future as a theater artist will involve a continual evolution of curiosity.

Learning implies listening, which is emerging as a central theme in my work. I must listen to my intuition, to my characters, to my collaborators, to the play itself. I mustn’t force a rigid outcome onto something that, while grown inside of me, will ultimately live out of my mind and hands. By listening, I connect with people very different from myself, which enriches my work, and those who touch it.