As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln.

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.

People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.

It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing.

Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.