Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.
My mother was working on her college degree throughout my childhood, and being the youngest in the family, that meant being dragged to a lot of her classes. She majored in playwriting, so I was exposed to theatre from a very young age, and it was just the most magical world to me.
There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.
Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting.
But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn't a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don't have to be very smart.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Playwriting isn't a calling so much as it is a hazing process.
One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.
I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.
