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.

Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.

There's this unspoken history that exists between any mother and daughter, no matter how deep and loving the bond is, twenty-five years of being raised by someone, there's a kind of deep history which means that there are shortcuts to getting on each other's nerves.

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.

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.

Priests are very interested in theater in New York! It's this lovely reminder that priests are just people, too, who need to be entertained.

Suddenly you're at church and you hear someone pray, "For gays and lesbians, that they might realize their [sins]...." That's happening less and less now, but all it takes is one of those when you're nine, ten, eleven, twelve - and it's hard to describe to people who aren't, because of course if you're not gay, an eleven- or twelve-year-old wouldn't even remember that that happened.