You Want To Dance With Me, Angel

True, I Don't Begin With An Idea For A Play - A Thesis, In Other Words, To Construct The Play Around. But I Know A Good Deal About The Nature Of The Characters. I Know A Great Deal About Their Environment. And I More Or Less Know What Is Going To Happen In The Play.

As A Playwright, I Imagine That In One Fashion Or Another I've Been Influenced By Every Single Play I've Ever Experienced.

When I Was Fifteen I Wrote Seven Hundred Pages Of An Incredibly Bad Novel - It's A Very Funny Book I Still Like A Lot. Then, When I Was Nineteen I Wrote A Couple Hundred Pages Of Another Novel, Which Wasn't Very Good Either. I Was Still Determined To Be A Writer. And Since I Was A Writer, And Here I Was Twenty-nine Years Old And I Wasn't A Very Good Poet And I Wasn't A Very Good Novelist, I Thought I Would Try Writing A Play, Which Seems To Have Worked Out A Little Better.

The Condition Of The Theater Is Always An Accurate Measure Of The Cultural Health Of A Nation. A Play Always Exists In The Present Tense (if It Is A Valuable One), And Its Music -- Its Special Noise -- Is Always Contemporary. The Most Valuable Function Of The Theater As An Art Form Is To Tell Us Who We Are, And The Health Of The Theater Is Determined By How Much Of That We Want To Know.

The Act Of Writing Is An Act Of Optimism. You Would Not Take The Trouble To Do It If You Felt That It Didn't Matter.