Story tellers must offer fictions that are truer than the facts. We require sacred houses strong enough to hold personal tales with collective import. There should be ridiculousness, euphoria and preposterous absurdum, scandal, indecency, and monstrous malevolence. There must be room to face the truth of atrocity, the sorrow of displacement, and the tightrope of precarity. I write for theater because I believe that humans are born to tenderness and intimacy; that love, and its complications are still worth the trouble. And I write for theater because it is a place where I can appreciate how survival is a deeply creative act.