Theatre is an art form that delights the mind. I’ve never considered it a delivery system for emotions, a slapper-and-tickler to make people feel what they wouldn’t feel otherwise. Occasionally, however, I’m surprised by goose bumps when I re-read passages in my own work. Such discoveries are welcome. Those are parts I got right.
I’ve never been able to write off the top of my head. Writers’ retreats on remote islands or wooded mountaintops don’t appeal to me; I need a library. I prefer to write about things that have already happened. My greatest need is not to create events but to digest them.
My earlier plays turn on the action of writing itself. The main character is usually a writer shaping a story, but the story pushes back, shaping the writer in turn. The writers in my plays appropriate fragments of the real at their cost. As a reader of other writers, I’m struck first and hardest by those fragments of the real: I pick at them like crumbs on a path that (it seems) must lead back to a recognizable human. I’ve written about Flaubert, Moliere and Emily Dickinson this way. Dickinson was by far the hardest nut to crack.
My recent plays present dissimilar people living or working near one another, the original, pre-political meaning of “community.” One play was set in a French apartment building, another in an Egyptian pyramid. The characters don’t have the luxury of interacting only within “communities” of like-minded individuals. They negotiate their interaction with people unlike themselves because there’s no alternative: proximity is permanent. Proximity trumps all.