Playwright's Notes

February 10, 2008

Curved moon in the cold sky, great wind filling the void.

Stephanie asked me for a playwright’s statement for the program. This is what I sent:

Playwright's Notes

In addition to writing plays, I teach the writing of them, and one of the hardest things to convey to students is that when it is going right, it is also going easy. Each of the plays in this series, Edward the King, Gilgamesh, and Hat, was written in two or three weeks (though Gilgamesh has since been revised into a full-length play), amid the myriad distractions and demands of ordinary life. This is not to brag on my own prowess as an author, but rather on the insistent desire of the material to be known. The lines flowed from my fingertips onto the computer screen because they wanted to be said. I am grateful to that joyful fluidity, as well as still being a little amazed by it. I’ve worked on other pieces for long months, and I’m hard put to see that the intense and prolonged labor invested in them made them any better than those where I simply waited for internal necessity to flower forth almost (but not quite) automatically.

I want to thank Bruce Robert Harris and Jack Batman who plucked Edward the King out of the slushpile and gave it a staged reading at Gayfest in New York last spring, and a full production to open the GayfestNYC festivities this May. I want to thank them for the obvious reasons, but also because on opening night the play ended just after ten and I didn’t get back to my hotel room until 3 AM, having walked all the blocks around Broadway and 7th Avenue fifty times, wallowing in the effervescent, silly-making happiness of the moment. I want to thank my partner in this enterprise, Mickey Hanley, for having the idea to do this festival, or, rather, the conviction that it actually could be done. She is one of the best directors I know, and the iffy proposition of co-directing ended up easy, because everything she did was right, and where I needed to put my two cents in, she was patient. Additionally, I would never have thought to write of Queen Hatshepsut if she hadn’t put the idea in my head. Please, if you have ideas for plays, tell your playwright friends. Writing is effortless compared to the strain of getting ideas for what to write.

My actors are what you’re going to see on stage filling their mouths with my words, and I reserve a full measure of love and respect for them. I can’t imagine them being any better-- inventive and perceptive, skilled and adaptable, scandalously good-looking. If I write a better play next time, it will be because I know there are actors who can act it.

Finally, I want to thank Asheville, because–let’s face it–in what other city with fewer than two million people could something like Crown of Shadows happen? You can go to NC Stage one night, ACT another, Enigmatic a third, and see such radical visions that you might as well be on different planets. It’s a great way to live. Really.