When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.

A play that forces us to question our moral responsibility to the victims of human rights abuse.

I need a release from whatever I'm writing.

I think that when you're first shaping the play and trying to find a character, the initial actors that develop it end up imprinting on it - you hear their voices, you hear their rhythms. You can't help but to begin to write toward them during the rehearsal process.

It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way.

Hopefully this is going to be a trend, the beginning of a movement to reclaim theater for the artist and not commerce. I think there's a level of fatigue. Artists are tired of having to create work that's then coopted by commercial demands. When you begin souping up the car, the car no longer feels like your own.

African American women in particular have incredible buying power. Statistically, we go to the movies more than anyone. We have made Tyler Perrys career. His films open with $25 million almost consistently.