Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.

You get to the point where your demons, which are terrifying, get smaller and smaller and you get bigger and bigger.

Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.

The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.

I write for myself and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there.

I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities.

So somehow, things that seem extraneous to the play in reality are not. The scene lasts 37 minutes, and you only need 12 minutes of that for the plot. But if you pull the rest of it out, it's not my play.