Playwrights From The United States

"There are fundamentally two schools: You stand where you are and demand that actors come to you, or you go to where they are. It’s not just with actors, it’s designers, too. You go to where they are and you try to cajole, woo, seduce, engage, empower them to go on the journey that you think they should. I generally employ [those methods], because I really believe that if you force an actor to do something, there’s a piece of them you never get back…"

"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."

"We went to the visual and the acting. You would lose some jokes if you didn’t speak both languages, but you didn’t lose the thrust."

"The teenagers have been sucked into American culture overnight, while their parents are concerned with preserving roots."

"If the action of The Bridge Party moves at what might at times seems to be a snail’s pace, it is because I want the audience to experience the characters as full human beings, not as abstractions or stereotypes…"

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

"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…"

"I feel black women, specifically, have a history of being erased in terms of their literary contributions in America’s literature. In a lot of ways that’s true for women of color in general, so I think the most important part is to keep these women’s voices alive and active and circulating…"

"That title, I think, really captures the need to travel through life in an artistic sense, in a personal sense, a creative sense. I embrace that title . . . like the different types of ways that people can catch things…"

"I wrote it from a standpoint of an actor. Some playwrights, they forget about the actor and they write impossible things, you know, so that you're forced to change your costume in a second -- [laughs] -- because the playwright never thought of that. But as an actor, you think of those things, and I thought I wrote it from the actor's point of view because I also acted in the play, and that's a hard thing to do; to act, concentrate on one part when you, you've written the whole, other parts…"

"A lot of my language is always slightly heightened—I’ll throw in alliterations, rhymes, play with onomatopoeia, people speaking over each other. I think it’s fun to be able to do that in theatre. Language is one of our biggest resources, so why not have fun with it?..."

"Get younger people to imagine what life was like back then, in ways that can touch their own experience. They’ll see people all along have had challenges and lives similar to their own."

"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."

"I was not really of the barrio, but the barrio was an important part of my life. Spanish was my first language; English was the language of my reading world. This was the world I lived in—an idealistic world, and unreal world that filled my senses with hopes, with joy and identification…"

"Deep in my psyche, I am no different than any American—I have a greater command of their language than they do. I am a composite of all of the heroines in the books I’ve read—legendary, mythological, fictional ones. I wonder if I am real? I want to be!"

"I’ve always been at the peripheries of the Chicano Movement because the Chicano world does not consider me Chicana enough. They, however, respect me as a writer…"

"It’s like a fairy tale…[Fairy tales] give you a context in which to talk about some things that you’re experiencing in your day-to-day. Theatre works in the same way—if it’s good theatre. When it’s well-crafted, well-honed, it opens wounds for the purpose of encouraging conversation while also giving us the tools with which to have that conversation."

"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."

"Black people have had to become great at seeing ourselves where we are not present because that’s where we grew up. I see myself in Downton Abbey. Even before they introduced the black character, I was right there. Some weeks I was upstairs, some weeks I was downstairs! But it is different when you have a character who looks like you, so I’m glad to have plugged that gap a little bit."

"When I was a child, poverty was a common suffering for everybody around me. A common suffering is a richness in itself."

"I am the white woman character, black woman character. I am the black man character, the white man character…I have to stand in that person’s shoes."

"I did, not only because of that, but also because there was no value placed on education in my family. My mother just assumed I was smart, and I had glasses so I was called “four eyes,” and I was always reading a book, and so the outsider feeling came from the fact that I really loved school…"

"Both of them come from birth. I was born black and gay. I was not socialized to be gay. I always knew I was different; I was always interested in something that a lot of kids were not into…"

"…White people playing people of color is not new; what is new is people of color are now [able to] own their own authenticity. White theater was created to reflect their audiences and white theater must deal with [changing audiences and perceptions]. … I think it’s about what the story requires, and what happens when you cast someone who could not be believable and who could not tell that story…"

"My motto when I was writing this was ‘replace judgment with curiosity’."

"It’s much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you’re representing people in a truthful way. These characters are purely fiction—they’re inspired by people I met—which I think gave me a certain amount of leeway that I wouldn’t have had otherwise were it a verbatim piece."

"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.”"

"There's so much Aztec in the Chicano culture that you feel in California and even here in New Mexico. But the rest of South America has so many European blends. Europe is really the old continent and corrupt. I think that that's what makes Mexico so much more interesting."

"The thing is, I can’t control that built-in bias because it’s going to exist. What I can do is reflect the world through my very unique prism and perhaps people will be able to relate. I can’t control how it’s received, nor do I want to control how it’s perceived. What I want is for people to go into the theatre and in some way their perception is shifted, so that if they do enter with their biases, perhaps they won’t leave with them."

"When I’m writing, I can see myself in all of the characters I write."

"“I’m tired of lip service…There’s a lot of: ‘We really want to do this’, and then I realise they just don’t listen. They say they want your voice, but when you use your voice, they don’t want to do anything you say."

"It shocked me and concerned me how quickly we criminalize and don’t give second chances to young men of color, and particularly young African American men…"

"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."

"The thing that drew me to Forster most specifically, I think, looking back on it, was I was picking up on what I would call 'the vibrations’…And 'the vibrations' were a closeted gay man in the early 20th century, at that time, speaking to a closeted gay boy at the end of the 20th century."

"There is also the inheritance to younger gay men, of the generation that is coming up right now, of a responsibility and a debt to the generation that came before them…The generation that fought tirelessly to be able to walk down the street and hold your partner's hand, to kiss your husband in public, to get married, to just truly be accepted for being who you are and loving who you love."

"I had been reading Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, which talks about mass incarceration and mass incarceration being the new Jim Crow. But I really believe education is also the new Jim Crow right now because there is so much segregation in education, and there’s an excessive system of have and have-nots. So I was first and foremost interested in exploring the school-to-prison pipeline because of how personally it affected some people in my life."

"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."

"Oh, the stories—those are an amalgam. I don’t think she would’ve defined herself like that, but my mother was a great storyteller. She always held me captive. She smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, and she’d always say, “Adrienne, I wanna tell you something.” She is just all over my whole writing career. And my father, because he gave speeches. Really, everything I write is a kind of mixture of his speeches, and her telling me all these stories about Georgia."

"“Survival isn't lying down and saying, oh, poor me. It's finding ways to live and keep your light shining in the midst of the darkest circumstances.”"

"To me, they’re the greatest generation. My parents and their friends, to me, have qualities that I don’t have, my children don’t have. They’re very imaginative, hardworking people. They created so much. My mother could teach all day, and then she could come home and cook a perfect dinner, and her house always looked perfect. They had qualities, I think, that are just so admirable."

"Immediately after you get into that stage of relaxation, think of a situation before you were ten years old. Let's just say there's somebody sick in your house, and you go into your memory to see what happened. When I do that, I remember the kind of shoes I was wearing. You remember your favorite shirt, your favorite dresses and things that you wore and how it felt. That someone was sick in your house absolutely connects you to whatever relationships you had. You don't really "think" about it. In this way, what comes out is really true."

"I have to totally credit that to my mother. There were two children. I was the only girl. And she just always talked to me. She would tell me things that happened to her … her dreams, her past … it’s like the monologues in my plays, it really is. Because her stories were loaded with imagery and tragedy, darkness and sarcasm and humor…"

"The world is always in a turmoil over skin color. The hatred that people feel, I’m not able to articulate it."

"We go in and try to be completely transparent with them: I am not a journalist, I’m a playwright, and I’m developing a piece that is creative and not going to be solely based on their lives but inspired by conversations that we have."

"Meaningful communication is an aspect of who we are as human beings. You don’t need to know exactly what everyone’s saying word for word to hear it, to see people living in a different world and to hear that they don’t speak American English. And you know, I think people will think, “I get what’s going on,” and that’s what’s awesome…"

"This story contains many elements of my journey as a writer. As a Spanish-American, I gain much of my inspiration from the Latin world and often write about how the Anglo and Latin worlds collide, intersect and transform each other. I also draw huge inspiration from my father's Spanish family of artists. Dealing with loss has also been an area I've continually explored as a writer…"

"It’s a 21st-century play…The overarching theme is, how do we find peace in the present? Through love, understanding and learning about our cultural and religious differences."

"If I could change one thing about U.S. theater, theater companies would produce a wider, broader range of plays by women and men who fully represent the cultural complexity of twenty-first century U.S. culture. Theatergoers would then have access to a huge selection of diverse theatrical worlds that would challenge, entertain, delight and intrigue them…"

"Patience and perseverance are key. Cultivate a spirit of generosity. Find your tribe of collaborators and keep working with them. Trust your gut. Stay true to your vision. Seek mentorship…"

"What happens is this: when we come to believe that the only way to make change is to murder one another, the idea of “the other” makes less valuable the human life it possesses. As a consequence, we can kill the “other” and not feel guilty. Unfortunately, human beings spend too much time rationalizing that war is right under certain circumstances; that it’s okay to threaten and kill other human beings."