I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money?

I think that some of these plays are lost in this new horror called development, which is a place for dramaturgs to say "let me tell you what your play means," and the life gets sucked out of a play.

You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy.

Oh god, I'd just hate it if a certain dramaturg got a hold of a Pinter play, for example, which are all mystery and all music. That's how the life get's sucked out of plays.

The imagination says listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice. I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril.... The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.

New Orleans was a thrilling place of all kinds of races, it was a dangerous place. It was really and truly the only international city on the continent of North America. There were all different races and everything was celebrated, and it was a place of difference, and everybody was different and it was so odd, the minute that America took over, the minute that the Louisiana territory became part of the United States of America, instantly you were either black or white. There was no nuance. and so a free man of color who could own property was suddenly not allowed to.

People rewrite the play so much to make it palatable to the audience, to make something clear, that they just deaden it. Like it was left it in the oven too long.