Playwrights From The United States

"The dramaturgy of audiences and communities is crucial: how they think, how they hear stories, how they relate to the theatre…That was an interesting curve. Not having lived in the Midwest, I found that it’s segregated, it’s tribal."

"As a director, I was able to journey into these plays, find myself, and realise the worlds the playwrights have written…I find my inspiration and my passion in other writers and their versions of this country and this world."

"I probably am a playwright first, and a director second. But, since I do a lot of directing sometimes, it's an almost equal thing. Writing is very exciting to me because I'm able to control the world that I want to create. And, as a director, you go into another world, and you kind of help flesh out a world that other people have created..."

"I can only respond as an artist, because that’s what I am. I’m not going to become a politician all of a sudden. I am a politician in terms of the plays that I write, the way I embrace culture, the way I embrace characters that, in my particular case, have to do with the Latino world. And I embrace the Latino experience…"

"The reasons that I stayed in theater are very personal. I think Asian-American stories can be best served in a place where you can tell them the most, and for me, where I can see that happening is in novels and in plays, because it's more easily done. In plays, anyone can do it, so the opportunities to tell Asian-American stories are infinite…"

"I am an American writer. I’m not a white American, but I’m writing American stories."

"I write as a person, as a woman, as an Asian American, and, if I fulfill my political obligations in being honest, then great…"

"when 9/11 was taking place in the U.S., few journalists, except people like Ariel Dorfman, few of them mentioned that there was another 9/11 that took place in Chile created by the terrorism that the United States government, in a way, was supporting through the CIA...Dorfman wrote a wonderful editorial in The New York Times, an op/ed about two or three days ago, and he said that Pinochet's dirty dealings with his money were found because through the Patriot Act they discovered that he had money in the Riggs Bank, and he became like a terrorist that stole $8 million, but he also says that it was the same secrecy that Pinochet governed that allowed him to steal the money. So secrecy is dangerous no matter how you look at it, and he was talking the secrecy of the Patriot Act."

"In terms of being an Asian American writer, I'm mixed race. I think there are issues about being racially mixed that are different that for people who are Japanese-American, or Korean-American, or Chinese-American in background. People don't know where I come from. My father is Japanese. My mother is Latina. There is a line in the play, "I look at you and I don't know what i'm seeing." I think a lot of people look at me and don't know what they're seeing. There are issues that people who are of mixed heritage deal with that are complicated in terms of finding their home in a specific ethnic group."

"Sometimes you feel where it was trying to go down. There’s a residue feeling and so it lasts a little bit longer. Even after you stop choking, you still feel it inside your throat. There’s something about theatre where I want to not be able to get up, walk out and go: ‘Oh, that was nice,’ but really have to engage with it as I go home and think about it and work over what I felt about it. That’s the type of theatre I like.”"

"At that time the army had just been integrated in the States. And it was one of the few industries that offered black people the possibility of advancement if you did a good job. Most industries didn’t have that then: you were the last hired and the first fired. He was in Vietnam and we were sitting waiting, and we were luckier than some because he was able to come home and live a pretty good life."

"We’re just getting out of domestic situation plays in which we were examining our lifestyle. We’ve been portrayed as a unique, complex kind of people…and there’s a lot more that we can bring to the public. The truth is we do everything."

"My father's Japanese and my mother's half Spanish, half Cuban, but I grew up in a household where we spoke English. I learned about my family in bits and pieces. There are things that still peek out in the telling, like my father's sister will tell me something he neglected. I think you find out about the mysteries of your origins in unexpected ways."

"I can never predict what is going to capture my interest and draw me to create. I think it comes primarily from curiosity. I like to play the “what if” game with subjects. “What if slaves owned by Jewish families adopted that religion?” “What if a family living in the proposed footprint of Lincoln Center in 1959 were completely devoted to Jerome Robbins and his work?” “What if a straight guy became a drag queen?” That leads to the next important question of “why?” And then “who?” And so on."

"A lot of people want to tell me their stories, and it’s not just the people who were alive back then. Though the play deals with AIDS, it’s about more than just the epidemic. It deals with things that plague gay men now. It’s very much about addiction, too. And the audience’s experiences run the gamut. And these audiences feel emboldened in the best way possible to not keep secrets. And they feel like they trust us enough to tell us their stories. It’s a beautiful thing."

"I think it is dangerous to run away from history. I am much more interested in looking at something difficult and really fraught with a lot of problems and then challenging it from a close perspective, as opposed to just not dealing with it when creating the characters or the story."

"Making art, any art, you are in some way trying to imitate life, and the ways in which that succeeds or fails is fascinating to me…"

"The words are verbatim. The words are exactly what the people said. When I was a girl, my grandfather said, “If you say a word often enough, it becomes you,” and that’s really my technique. I really believe that if I learn exactly what somebody said, that I will find myself, as an actor, in a similar state of mind as them. I’ll never know what they’re really thinking, but I’ll have some of their feelings…"

"My artistic mandate up to that point had always been: “I’m not going to talk about things close to myself. I want to go into vital issues about people who you never hear or see”…And I watched my own family’s dynamics, my own dynamics amongst my kin, and the dynamics of how these cultures had merged, and interacted, and clashed. And I just found the absurdity of our familial dynamics..."

"I think that’s a goal in all my plays honestly, to get into the personal, but to have a macro ramification, or to look at things that people can look at as a statistic or stereotype in one way, and to make them have to spend time with a person that they may even end up relating to a little in some strange, tiny way, to see the complexity of something they might have thought of as something simply statistical and “over there somewhere.”"

"I got interested in children who fall through the cracks…We love to think these kids fall through the cracks because there is something wrong with them or their parents. I think all children are beautiful and smart."

"I feel like when I do a play the first time it simply let's me know what I have to do. I do all the things, I make all the cuts, and I really see it for the first time…"

"I’m most excited about being ‘in the room.’ To me, as a theatre artist, it is really one of the best feelings in the world."

"The moment any of us claims we do not care is the moment we cease to see what is human and valuable and savable in each other and in ourselves…"

"And there is such a difference in the stories that came from when they were in Africa and the ones they told in America, where their lives were so much rougher. And they keep going back and forth between these two worlds, until finally they get to the dawn, and they are somewhat strengthened so that they can keep going…"

"…White racism is about people who don’t feel so bad about fixed things. But white racism is a fixed thing, and it is perpetuated because of fixedness. Anything that we can do that causes people to desire movement more than fixedness is going to disrupt racism…"

"I have to say though it’s made it easier for white people to seek me out because I am half-white to ask me what they would be afraid to ask a mono-racial Asian American. I generally have intriguing, sometimes difficult, conversations with people about race…"

"The play is my gut's response to stories that have to do with my own bloodline. I think it is a great luxury and adventure to be able to dive into one's own history, one's own lineage, psychology and story, and illumine and at the same time fictionalize it."

"My life's work has been to go around America with a tape recorder trying to become America word for word. And I've met a lot of people who I disagree with. I've met a lot of people who you would think I would disagree with. But I have to say it's enriched my sense of being an American to reach out to people who are very, very different from me…"

"I’m an artist. I write plays. So my first call — to the heavens, to battle — usually involves a call to create in the midst of so much destruction."

"I do believe that character is a process, that truth is a process, and I am not interested in winning and losing…"

"I also learned how they hungered for education. We take it for granted nowadays, that we get free education. That was major, that they didn't have it, and when they had it they passed it on with whatever they knew. After reconstruction, even if they only had a second grade education, they passed it on. The fact that everyone was hungry to learn to read and write was an amazing thing to realize…"

"To me the play is never just the play but it’s the whole journey to it."

"My mother said I was a weird child. I had about 15 imaginary friends and talked to myself, a lot. I still do sometimes - I love the power of pretend. Now I channel all those voices into my characters. It's probably a saner outlet."

"[All of the characters] are composites. You’re looking at what could be. There’s theatrical truth to it, which is: maybe this isn’t verbatim, but it’s within the realm of possibility…"

"I’ve found that there’s this idea of what a black experience is, and because I write what’s outside of what’s been allowed to be on stage, there’s a questioning of authenticity, which is beyond maddening. For a white producer, executive, artistic director [etc.] to tell me that my work isn’t black enough… I’m losing my mind…"

"In theatre, people do that all the time. There’s always going to be somebody who wants their own sense of justice, especially with this. They have their own sense of justice that explains if someone else’s is true. Speak for me, speak to me. I want you to tell me who did what. We don’t know who did what within those individual moments. Who was right? Who was wrong? Whatever that means. It’s not, for lack of a better term, that black and white."

"We’re not allowed in an open way, in a public way, to talk about our grief and our experiences, our challenges, or our failures, which is what I tried to do."

"Almost always when I write, the characters and the story dictate the structure, and I don’t know what it will be until the play tells me what it will be. But I look at it now and it makes all the sense in the world because the whole conversation about race is so disjointed and disconnected, and it’s so hard for us to hold on to it, so it makes sense that a play about something that’s so slippery wouldn’t be in a well-made play structure…"

"The outsiders. I’m interested in the people that don’t necessarily fit and the thing that gives you permission to be uncomfortable. I like dark work because you’re forced to learn about certain things…"

"I don’t think anyone understands the Asian Americans’ place amidst this white and black culture. There’s something very specific to being Asian American that other peoples aren’t getting, and we haven’t learned how to define it, even amongst ourselves. We’re the Other. We’re always the Other, we can be here forever and we’re still foreign. We’ve impacted the culture, but third, fourth, fifth, sixth generations and still, you walk down the street and someone will look at you, and you will be foreign. That is what disturbs me."

"If you are looking for a sense of justice, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m telling many truths. I don’t have to represent."

"I’m the most peaceful when I go to Hawaii because I fit in there as a biracial or “hapa” person. No one there questions my Asian-ness, and in fact, I feel my ethnicity is embraced and accepted…"

"She doesn’t speak like I speak, because something happens to your chords when you look at the neck. Something has happened. But it was that face that really informed who she is. For me, it was all about the physicality. I had to meet that face. And it’s interesting because that face didn’t show up until the day before my first day on the set…"

"I always say that I’m a writer who writes more from place than race."

"I was trying to write a play about race, in real time — at a time when that topic was shifting more than I’d witnessed in my lifetime. Seismic shifts…"

"Sometimes, if people aren’t part of the majority, we tend to get flat portrayals of them."

"The conversation makes me crazy, and I haven’t been in very many places where I have had conversations with people of color who don’t agree with me. It feels like the most dismissive and dangerous shrug-off of a phenomenon that has not gone away; how can you be post-racial in a society proven to have huge economic disparity between races? And attitudinally?..."

"To me, it’s always been a matter of: Do your homework and be committed to the extent that you can capture that world. I think I’m open."

"I wanted to really be sure that the play never became a play about how to grieve…And in order to accomplish that I needed the play to remain in this time of confusion and chaos."