'An Octoroon' was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I'm writing about America's relationship to its own history. Race or not, it's a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically.
One of the most incredible and important things about the theater is that we're creating a safe space for all feelings, but especially, ugly feelings.
How do we refresh our language? Why do we still use, like, a 150-year-old classification system to talk about people? It's so weird! We still call people black and white?
The first theater subscription I ever bought was the August Wilson season at Signature. I remember thinking a whole season to one playwright was a great way for a master to do a victory lap.
At the end of the day, most people just want to be valued. They want to feel they have put their time to something that will seem to have been of value when they die.
Theater is an old thing. It's thousands of years old. TV isn't. Film isn't. We're doing a really old thing.
Somehow, whenever we think about race or blackness in relationship to art, we always come in kind of nervous. We always think someone's about to be punished or accused of something.
My dream was always to have an experience where an audience member would turn to another audience member, a stranger, and be like, 'What did we just go through?' And, like, kind of begin to talk.
I spent summers with my mother's parents in Arkansas, where religion felt very present. My grandmother was Baptist, and my grandfather was Methodist. Double Southern whammy.
I have this thing called hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsies. It's incredibly rare.
I identify as queer. I just don't know what any of these labels mean.
I was 23 when I wrote 'Neighbors,' and I definitely look back at it now and cringe a little bit. I was trying to understand what drama was.
I seem to belong to a boom moment of playwrights, and I'm always curious about how we all got here and what comes next.
I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them.
You get better at the thing you do by having to explain it to someone else. That, I think, totally makes my work stronger.
I feel like I'm put in a position where I have to engage with what people bring to my work, which is an expectation for me to talk about race because it's not normal for a black writer to be writing in the theatre.
I don't hate people who colour-blind cast, but I hate people who colour-blind cast and pretend that they're not, who pretend that these bodies on stage don't actually carry specific meaning.
I wrestle in a big way with August Wilson's work in that I at times admire it and at times feel infuriated by it, which is weirdly more influential than loving someone entirely.
I'm not a really firm believer in theatre that is 'about anything.' I don't think theatre can be about anything other than the people who show up and the value that they hold.
I actually don't read the press. All the writers I admire were significantly reclusive, and I'm still trying to figure out how they got to a place where they didn't have to talk to press.
