Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts.

I'm always very self-conscious and assume the way faith or religion might come up in my plays will seem very harsh to people of faith, or who are currently practicing.

As playwrights, as poets, we have to look to ourselves, listen to our guts for the final answers about what changes to make. Everyone has advice about how to end your play differently. And it's not about right or wrong. At the end of the day, it's your baby and you know what's best.

So much of great American drama has been about a certain kind of dysfunctional family, and maybe my interests are in the kind of strange dysfunction that exists even among deeply functional families.

The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.

In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one's heart sank.

I guess we all feel like underdogs. I remember being a freshman at Brown University and not knowing what a WASP was. We were reading an Edward Albee play, and - it was just a moment of accepting, certainly that I wasn't very worldly, but also that a lot of the plays that I'd been reading, let's say other kinds of family plays, were speaking a foreign language.