My life changed at Murphy’s Grill.

I was there with my old friend Michelle, drinking liberally and, as was our habit, arguing about politics. This was years ago, so I don’t remember what we argued about, but I do remember how passionately we fought. Facts and figures, assertions and refutations - words spilled out of us as quickly as alcohol spilled in. Hours slipped by. The Grill closed. And we said our amicable goodbyes, neither of us having done anything to change the other’s opinion in the slightest.

I stumbled back to my car and thought about the futility of every political argument I’d ever had with Michelle. What was the point of it all? Hours of talk that always brought us back to wherever we began. In that moment, however, the issue suddenly became clear to me: Michelle and I had fundamentally different visions of the world. And both of us thought the others’ vision was susceptible to rational persuasion. But that just wasn’t true.

And that’s when my thoughts turned, of all places, to Dostoevsky.

I was much younger then, out of work and down on my luck. Having too much spare time on my hands, I filled up my days reading the novelists I had never gotten around to in college. Dostoevsky was my current obsession. Although I loved his skill as a story-teller, there was something about his world-view I resisted: Dostoevsky held that beliefs were more important than reason. For him, our most important truths came from a place beyond rationality, and reason was limited in its ability to alter those beliefs.

I denied this with every fiber of my being. However, as I stood in the parking lot of Murphy’s Grill, I began to think that Dostoevsky might be right.

Now that I’m older, I’m even more convinced of Dostoevsky’s insight. Beliefs come to us first; reason comes afterward to justify our beliefs. And this truth extends to much more than politics - we inscribe our lives in deep stories that border on the mythic. Our sense of ourselves and our place in the world, our vision of what the world is and ought to be – all this is fundamental to how we structure consciousness. And all this comes to us through intuition first.

This has become my primary subject matter as a playwright. I want to follow Dostoevsky’s lead in exploring how our deepest beliefs inform the course of our lives. I enjoy putting my characters in pressurized situations that force them to discover what they truly believe or otherwise challenge the beliefs they profess to hold. What does it take to get someone to change a belief? How and why do people act contrary to their beliefs? Which beliefs enrich our lives and which inhibit them? Can the same belief enrich our lives in one context but inhibit us in another? All this is deeply fascinating to me.