When you're dealing with a symbol in a realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audience's mind to work on both levels, symbolically and realistically. But we're trained so much in pure, realistic theater that it's difficult for us to handle things on two levels at the same time.

All plays are social comment to one extent or another.

I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, "what they can live with," and more on an examination of the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view.

I suppose if you simplify things, it's going to make it easier to understand.

The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and has nothing to do with the public area... the performance of the work one creates.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about.