What makes the voice pathetic is that it doesn't know what kind of people it's reaching. Us. No one hears it, except us. This Age wanted heroes. It got us instead: carefully constructed, but immobile. Subtle but, unfit to take up the burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but not sufficient.

The theater requires an essential gullibility that you can't get through life without having. If all you can feel is skepticism-well , you meet people like this. Run away from them. They're not good people.

We can't just stop. We're not rocks-progress, migration, motion is... modernity. It's ANIMATE, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for.

We all romp about, grieving, wondering, but with rare exception we mostly remain suspended in the Rhetorical Colloidal Forever that agglutinates between Might and Do.

The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

I love musicals but it's very, very different. It's really just a different form than serious drama, and has very different rules and a completely different set of characters and requirements and ambitions. It maybe shouldn't be as separate as it is, but it's got a different history. In terms of serious drama, I think you'd have to say that you could break it down essentially into the narrative realist tradition and experimental theater.

A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.