I've Seen An Awful Lot Of Plays

There Are Lots Of Young Vital Playwrights Who Are Experimenting, And These Are The Plays That People Who Are Interested In The Theatre Should See. They Should Go Off Broadway. They Should Go To The Cafe Theatres And See The Experiments That Are Being Made.

Well, When I Was Six Years Old I Decided, Not That I Was Going To Be, But With My Usual Modesty, That I Was A Writer.

About Four Years Ago I Made A List, For My Own Amusement, Of The Playwrights, The Contemporary Playwrights, By Whom Critics Said I'd Been Influenced. I Listed Twenty-five. It Included Five Playwrights Whose Work I Didn't Know, So I Read These Five Playwrights And Indeed Now I Suppose I Can Say I Have Been Influenced By Them. The Problem Is That The People Who Write These Articles Find The Inevitable Similarities Of People Writing In The Same Generation, In The Same Century, And On The Same Planet, And They Put Them Together In A Group.

In The Two Or Three Or Four Months That It Takes Me To Write A Play, I Find That The Reality Of The Play Is A Great Deal More Alive For Me Than What Passes For Reality. I'm Infinitely More Involved In The Reality Of The Characters And Their Situation Than I Am In Everyday Life. The Involvement Is Terribly Intense.

You're Alive Only Once, As Far As We Know, And What Could Be Worse Than Getting To The End Of Your Life And Realizing You Hadn't Lived It?