A number of years ago I was cooling my heels in the spare office of a theater company run by a friend while I waited for him to read the grant application I had written for him. The room looked like it had been hastily abandoned, and lying on the floor, splayed open, face down, was a copy of A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK FOR THE ACTOR by Bruder, Cohn, et al. I had never heard of it, and I didn't consider myself primarily an actor, but it was something to read, so I started reading.

I had read Uta Hagen's book and struggled through much of one of Stanislavsky's tomes, but this book won the prize for truth in advertising. It is exceptionally practical and can be put to use by actors at every level of experience and ability immediately. In essence, it asks the actor to consider what task they have to perform when they enter the stage, and to decide on a metric to decide if it has been accomplished, PROVIDED that that metric is measured by what another person does. That is, you must accomplish a goal which embraces another character. That is the "game" you are playing.

The book lays out a system of analysis which it would be wise to work out in writing, at least in the early stages of mastering the system. But it means that, in order to be a character, you must (a) do things that (b) affect other people.

I may not have been an actor, but within a few years I became an English teacher, and it occurred to me that the Handbook was a great methodology to analyze character as an audience member, better than a purely literary analysis. I taught it to students and sometimes we even played with putting it into practice.

And over the years it began to lodge in my head as a description of character universally, not only in the theater, but in life as well. To be fully-rounded, to be a person, you must do things that have affect other people.

In order to do those things, one must choose to do so, and along the way there will be many other choices. And soon you can understand acting, and indeed the creation of character, as an accumulation of choices. Thus, one can understand a person, real or fictive, not as a bundle background details, prejudices or quirks, but as a network of choices, and the sum total of those choices IS a person's character.

This is what interests me as a playwright. I'm not much interested in regionalisms or types, politics, or identities. Choices. What were their choices? Now, choices may be based on identities or on physical characteristics. Someone who is afraid of being too prominent because of their ethnicity or their size (large or small) might make particular choices based on those conditions. But the condition is not the stuff of drama, only the choice.

So of course, I am drawn to stories of moral and ethical choices. If they are clear and easily made, there is no story. A story is made of hard choices, of contradictions and ambiguities, of conflicting priorities and interests. Shakespeare wrote the greatest drama in the language about a person who delayed and avoided making a choice as long as they could.

Choices make us what we are. That is what I write about, what I can't help writing about. The principled choices, the inadvertent choices, the unacknowledged choices, the grudging choices, the bitter choices, the regrettable choices, all of them. It's an enormous landscape and a rewarding playpen.