Here's the problem: we are living in a time when the act of reading is changing. The nature of a reader's attention is changing. The capacity for deep literary engagement is changing.

If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.

Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

I started to understand that for me, art was no longer about self-expression but about creative engagement with the world. I started to respond in an excited way to making work inside an industry and not feeling the constraints of audience expectation as some kind of thing that I should avoid.

I don't know what it's like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the thing that bonds you as opposed to being Jewish from Poland, or Jewish from Hungary.

I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it.