175 Playwrights

Andrew Rosendorf 

Don Nigro 

Barton Bishop

Peter Parnell 

Gary Sunshine

Emily DeVoti

Kenny Finkle 

Kate Moira Ryan

Sam Hunter 

Johnna Adams

Katharine Clark Gray

Laura Eason

David Caudle 

Jacqueline Goldfinger

Christopher Chen

Craig Pospisil

Jessica Provenz 

Deron Bos

Sarah Sander

Zakiyyah Alexander

Kate E. Ryan 

Susan Bernfield

Karla Jennings

Jami Brandli

Kenneth Lin

Heidi Darchuk

Kathleen Warnock

Beau Willimon

Greg Keller

Les Hunter

Anton Dudley

Aaron Carter

Jerrod Bogard

Emily Schwend

Courtney Baron

Craig  "muMs" Grant

Amy Herzog

Stacey Luftig

Vincent Delaney

Kathryn Walat

Paul Mullin

Kirsten Greenidge

Derek Ahonen

Francine Volpe

Julie Marie  Myatt

Lauren Yee

Richard Martin Hirsch

Ed Cardona, Jr.

Terence Anthony

Alena Smith

Gabriel Jason Dean

Sharr White

Michael Lew

Craig Wright

Laura Jacqmin

Stanton Wood

Jamie Pachino

Boo Killebrew

Daniel Reitz

Alan Berks

Erik Ehn

Krista Knight

Steve Yockey

Desi Moreno-Penson

Andrea Stolowitz

Clay McLeod Chapman

Kelly Younger

Lisa Dillman

Ellen Margolis

Claire Willett

Lucy Alibar

Nick Jones

Dylan Dawson

Pia Wilson

Theresa Rebeck

Me

Arlene Hutton

Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas 

Lucas Hnath

Enrique Urueta

Tarell Alvin McCraney

Anne Washburn 

Julia Jarcho

Lisa D'Amour

Rajiv Joseph

Carly Mensch

Marielle Heller

Larry Kunofsky

Edith Freni

Tommy Smith 

Jeremy Kareken 

Rob Handel

Stephen Adly Guirgis

Kara Manning 

Libby Emmons

Adam Bock 

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Liz Duffy Adams

Winter Miller

Jenny Schwartz

Kristen Palmer

Patrick Gabridge 

Mike Batistick  

Mariah MacCarthy

Jay Bernzweig  

Gina Gionfriddo

Darren Canady

Alejandro Morales

Ann Marie Healy

Christopher Shinn

Sam Forman 

Erin Courtney

Gary Winter

J. Holtham

Caridad Svich

Samuel Brett Williams

Trista Baldwin

Mat Smart

Bathsheba Doran

August Schulenburg

Jeff Lewonczyk

Rehana Mirza

Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

David Johnston

Dan Dietz

Mark Schultz

Lucy Thurber

George Brant

Brooke Berman

Julia Jordan

Joshua Conkel

Kyle Jarrow

Christina Ham

Rachel Axler

Laura Lynn MacDonald

Steve Patterson

Erin Browne

Annie Baker

Crystal Skillman

Blair Singer

Daniel Goldfarb

Heidi Schreck

Itamar Moses

EM Lewis

Bekah Brunstetter

Mac Rogers

Cusi Cram

Michael Puzzo

Megan Mostyn-Brown

Andrea Ciannavei

Sarah Gubbins

Kim Rosenstock

Tim Braun

Rachel Shukert

Kristoffer Diaz

Jason Grote

Dan Trujillo

Marisa Wegrzyn

Ken Urban

Callie Kimball

Deborah Stein

Qui Nguyen

Victoria Stewart

Malachy Walsh

Jessica Dickey

Kara Lee Corthron

Zayd Dohrn

Madeleine George

Sheila Callaghan

Daniel Talbott

David Adjmi

Dominic Orlando

Matthew Freeman

Anna Ziegler

James Comtois

I Interview Playwrights Part 175: Andrew Rosendorf

Andrew Rosendorf

Hometown: McLean, VA.

Current Town: West Palm Beach, FL.

Q:  Word on the street is you have a play at Florida Stage in the fall. Tell me about that.

A:  That street is all about getting the word out. I have to be careful what I tell it.

Last May, Florida Stage commissioned me to examine the water shortage in South Florida. I’m not from Florida so I knew very little about its history. Essentially, I had to go from being an ignorant American to someone who understands the complexity of the political and environmental issues that face Florida, the United States, and the world. The result is Cane – a play that examines how a state that was once drowning in water is now so dry. If I’ve done my job, the issues all take a backseat to a very specific human story i.e. no talking heads. And, I’m using Florida as a microcosm for the issues involving water that are currently facing the world.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  There are a few things I’ve been kicking around at various stages. I’ve worked at a sleep-away summer camp for more than half my life, so I (like many) have a camp play in me. I do feel summer camp has been romanticized while the truth of the situation gets lost. I’m getting close to being finally able to write my version.

I’ve also become fascinated by social media. I’m interested in how it affects the way we now are touching one another. Is it bringing us closer together or actually isolating us further?

Lastly, I’m bandying about a short film that I haven’t found the right way to describe yet. It has to do with how we derive pleasure from pain...I know how that sounds... It scares me...on many levels...why I feel I have to write this...

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  Oh man. My childhood. Does that mean I can no longer claim that I’m a child? You know, I’ll share this because I think it is my way of answering this question: I don’t remember much of my childhood. I had thought that this was common for most people, but only within the last five years have I learned that it’s not. I remember images or get flashes of moments when I see something or hear something or smell something that reminds me of a moment, but as quickly as it appeared it disappears. I think this inherently influences – consciously & subconsciously – why writing was the way I had to go.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  The worry of producibility. I understand it. I get it. I wish it wasn’t there.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  This is going to be an uncreative list: Arthur Miller, Eugene Ionesco, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Tony Kushner, Sarah Ruhl, & Aaron Sorkin

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Playwrights that have a handle on their story and find the best theatrical way to tell it. Knowing that the story could be told no other way. That the structure is influenced by the story. And theater that uses everything at its disposal – not for spectacle but because it’s in support of the emotion.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Two things. The first is to emotionally risk in your work. When this was first told to me, it seemed as if I was stupid. Why hadn’t I figured that out? The more vulnerable you are in your writing the more it will connect with an audience. The more it will set your writing apart.

The other is not to preplan. Do your character work. Know what you want to explore. Research when you need. Have some plot ideas and signposts. But as soon as you start writing trust the subconscious. Just be there with the characters. Don’t impose or impede them. It’s worrisome, exhilarating, frightening. Inevitably your characters will take over and say something or do something that is a hundred times better than if I had their every moment planned out.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Jack’s Precious Moment by Sam Hunter which is now being produced through P73. I’ve only just begun to get to know his work and man am I blown away and inspired by what he’s doing. And Janine Nabers. Full disclosure – she and I went to grad school together. She’s sorta been all over the place this year from the Soho Writer/Director Lab to a Dramatists Guild Fellowship to Sundance. Amazing writer...taught me so much. I’m a wee bit in awe, but don’t tell her I said so.

I Interview Playwrights Part 174: Don Nigro

Don Nigro

Q: Hometown, Current Town:

A: I was born in Canton, Ohio (I think where the hospital used to be there's a theatre now) and now live by the woods just outside Malvern, a small town in east Ohio where my father was born. His parents were Italian immigrants. My mother's family were pioneer folk and I think at least one Delaware or Wyandot lady is also in there somewhere. I hope so, anyway.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I've found it's bad luck for me to talk about what I'm writing until I'm almost done. Hemingway said that if you talk about it, you kill it, and that's the case with me, although perhaps it's different with sane people. I'm not superstitious about it, but somehow talking about a play while I'm right in the middle of writing it seems to shut the door that leads to that bizarre subterranean place where all the good stuff comes from. I just finished a play called Mysterium in which Freud and Jung are on a boat in the middle of the ocean at night having an increasingly shrill disagreement about which one of them is hysterical when the Nazis start manning the life boats.

Q: How many plays have you written? If my count is correct, you have 48 plays published by Sam French. Does anyone else come close to that? Is it possible that you have written more plays than anyone else ever has?

A: You're correct that Samuel French has published 48 volumes of my plays so far---but some of these are collections, so the total number of published plays is more like 135, I think. But French has also recently added all the as yet unpublished ones to its online catalogue, so the total number available for leasing through them is now at 322, I think. I know that sounds like a lot, but you have to take into consideration that I have nothing else to do here but watch the squirrels. Lope de Vega wrote about 1800 plays, so I don't think I'm going to catch up. In fact, I don't write all that quickly. It's taken me ten or fifteen years to finish some plays. If they don't feel right I put them aside and pick them up again next week or next year or whenever. It doesn't really matter how much you write, as long as you're completely immersed in it while you're writing it. You just sort of trust the voices and see what comes out. It's the way I investigate the world.

Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A: I wrote about this in a play called The Dark. I'm four years old, helping to dust my books and toys in my room when suddenly my brain just goes to this other place, and I realize, this isn't me, I'm not this child with this name living in this house, I'm actually somebody else entirely. I'm---and then my mother is shaking me and saying, Hey, where were you? and I'm sitting there with the dust rag in my hand trying to remember where I just was, what my real name is, only I can't. I had those experiences, gradually less and less intense, all through my childhood, that sensation of having come from another place, of almost being able to remember who I really was. Some years later, I took a wrong turn in a building and stumbled into an empty theatre, and suddenly had this intensely eerie feeling that I was back there, in that other place before I was born. It still feels like that to me.

Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A: I think the American confusion of a thing's value with its ability to generate capital is tragic, and has always crippled and polluted the theatre here. Hit and flop are code words for profit and loss. This is an enormously short-sighted way of looking at art, which is an investigation into possible truths through imagination. The imagination comes first. Everything else in civilization follows from that. Theatre is the imagination made flesh. A society that sees art as trivial makes itself systematically stupid and ultimately destroys itself.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Shakespeare and the Jacobeans, Chekhov, and a lot of British and Irish drama from about 1950: Beckett and Pinter, early Bond and Arden, Peter Barnes, Stoppard. Non-dramatic work that's been important to me: Yeats, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Proust, Borges, and that masterpiece of surrealism, the King James Bible. Also Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: You can find sudden, numinous, stunning, riveting theatre in the oddest places, often not where you're expecting it at all. It can happen just about anywhere. And even when it's misguided and inept, there's often something weirdly holy about it, in odd moments, if you just look, and give yourself to it. As Yogi Berra said, You can see a lot if you observe.

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: Don't take my advice.

I Interview Playwrights Part 173: Barton Bishop

Barton Bishop

Hometown: Tampa, FL.

Current Town: Astoria, Queens, NY.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’ve got a new play going up in the fall here in NYC, via the good and wonderful people at the New York Theatre Experiment. It’s called Up Up Down Down. The title’s a video game thing, a reference to the Konami cheat code from the original Nintendo days, but it’s also a reference to bipolar disorder (well, lookit that, that there works on TWO levels!). It’s about geeks and terrorism and video games and family and paranoia. And it’s a love story. It should be great!

And I recently(ish) finished a play trilogy I was working on for quite some time. That was cathartic in all sorts of ways. I originally thought they were three separate pieces, but, I’ve decided to insist that (and I may be shooting myself in the foot here..) – whatever happens, wherever, whenever, however – the plays receive their world premiere as a whole, as a trilogy, in rep.

With the initial writing of those scripts sort of wrapped up (for now), I’m tinkering away on several new projects. One is a play about a socially impossible Southern blogger, a fanboy of all things geek who finally finds the love of his life only to lose her to a small zombie uprising. So now the uprising is over, the zombies are quarantined on an island, things are back to normal, and our guy’s got her chained up in the basement and he’s trying to keep her a secret and keep her alive, hoping they find a cure. It’s a whole letting go thing, playing with how the inability to move forward after a loss can devour you and those around you. Literally. And – as of now – I’m playing with having it move back and forth between “before” and “after,” so we can see the reality of their relationship contrasted with how he’s romanticizing it now that she’s (sort of) gone, forgetting all the things that weren’t working, etc.

I’m also working on a new play about a hipster high-school music teacher who discovers her existence is an accident in the space-time continuum and that she has to be “deleted” in order to stop the universe from tearing apart. Pardon the pitchtastic way of talking about it, but I’ve been thinking of it as a kind of It’s A Wonderful Life and Our Town meets LOST thing.

So yeah... I’m hoping to have a readable draft of one of these projects wrapped up by the end of the summer.

You know, it’s the ongoing tug-of-war, though, the day jobs, the side gigs, etc, finding that balance, trying to figure out which hands to bet on… I mean – I’ve held down my financial fort for the last 7 years by adapting anime into English. I don’t speak Japanese, I get rough (and usually hysterical) translations and I rework the dialogue / adapt it. Depending on the company and the project, I sometimes end up rewriting the material entirely, tweaking the narratives, characters, backstories, changing stuff around… It’s kinda fun because I have to work with the pre-existing animation so it’s an exercise in working within strict limitations. I often say it feels like doing that New Yorker caption contest at 30 frames per second. The work has actually taught me a lot about dialogue structure. But – you know, this was one of those gigs that I fell into after grad school and I thought, “cool, I’ll do this for a while.” ….and then somehow it’s 7 years later and I’m working on what MIGHT be my 400th episode…

I’m also writing for a video game company right now, which is a geek dream come true, I won’t lie. I’m actually incredibly excited about the gig. I’ve always been passionate about the medium and where it can go. I’ve been a lifelong gamer, owned almost every console since the Atari 2600… In a lot of weird ways, I feel this deep personal connection to gaming, it’s like - We were childhood friends. We took our first baby steps together. We grew up together. We matured together (though both of our maturations are arguable). We had sex with an alien hooker while driving an Ice Cream truck 95 miles an hour against freeway traffic in order to escape the Zombie Pig Cops From Mars together. So many memories.

But – so yes – to try to bring it all back – I sometimes (and I think a lot of writers I know feel this way) find myself trying to figure out what to focus on, how to divide my creative energies, etc… You know – “in this crazy modern world of ours.”

I’ll admit it, the question “what are you working on now?” can actually send me into a neurotic panic, within seconds I’m going “I don’t KNOW! I can’t DECIDE, I don’t know WHO I AM, I don’t know what I should BE DOING!! WAAAAH! GIVE ME BEER AND ICE CREAM”

….But then I calm down and remind myself that I’m one of those people who thinks variety is a good thing. Especially for writers. It’s good to hop around, step away, come back… It’s that whole breathe in / breathe out thing. Everything can inform everything. And there’s no rush.

Um.

Did I answer the question?

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  I ran away from home once. But I wasn’t allowed to cross the street, so I just wandered around my block until I got hungry. Then I went home.

Wait, no. I’m not sure I like what that says about me.

I’ll tell you another one – In fifth grade, this dickhead in my class walked up to me and said “Hey, did you know that if you put an F in front of your name, it would spell fart!?” And I informed him that, “No, actually, it would spell FBart.” The kids around us laughed. At the dickhead. It was in this moment that I realized the true power of the wit. It was great. And then the dickhead beat the hell out of me.

I had no idea what was cool when I was a kid. Here’s another story – When I was in, like, fourth grade, I committed my first theft. I stole a cassette copy of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required album from a friend’s dad. I think I was hoping it would have “In The Air Tonight” on it. It didn’t. Either way, I thought it was the best thing ever. I even asked my mom if I could get my hair cut like Phil’s. She informed me that Phil’s “haircut” was called a receding hairline bordering on baldness and that I didn’t want that. I didn’t care, I thought Phil was a badass. He looked so intense and awesome. Fortunately, I soon went on to discover R.E.M. and Zeppelin and New Order and straightened myself out.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  I would magically find a way for theatre companies to not have to rely on the failing not-for-profit model.

Oh! - ..and I’d make directors and actors and artistic directors and producers subject to ongoing talkback and feedback sessions in which me and my playwright friends (and an audience, of course, free admission!) can tell them how we think they can fix their work and better do their jobs.

No, no, I’m kidding, I’m kidding, I’m kidding! …Calm down, YOU! It was a joke!

But really – less development crap. Edward Albee once said “The best way to support a young playwright is to produce her first five plays.” That’s as true as it gets. A reading can only get you so far. But I think most plays reach that point – and I think this happens relatively early on in the process – where they need more than a reading. A play needs a director and some designers and some actors, all of whom are coming together and giving the play more than just a few quick hours trying to figure out where to put the music stands and whether or not there’s going to be bottled water. Everyone involved needs to get to know the play as intimately as the playwright knows it, to give it the same respect and consideration, and, really, to have something at stake. Just like the writer has something at stake. The best rewrites I make are the ones I make during rehearsal. Because a trust system starts to form, I don’t know – something kinetic and binding happens during rehearsal that just can’t happen in a reading. The conversation stops being “We might do this play if you make it more like this,” and it becomes “Shit, we’re ALL in this, this thing is happening, let’s do what we can to make it rock.”

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Anyone who made it happen or is making it happen or is gonna make it happen someday.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Live nude theatre!!

..No…

….Um…

You know, I imagine I might’ve – at one point had a list of prerequisites. Rules For Enjoyment. I don’t know anymore, I honestly don’t. It’s on an “I know it when I experience it” basis. I will say that honesty is nice. And I tend to respond to sincerity of heart in whatever form it takes. I’m definitely a heart guy. I don’t really respond to intellectual or aesthetical exercises if there’s no heart beating at the center of it all. I feel like real heart is the one thing you can’t fake. Everything else is wallpaper.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Find a creative home. Find the people who know you and who get you and who get what you’re going for. They can’t be Yes People, though. They have to challenge you. But the most important thing is that they know you and they get you. Don’t bother too much with the people who don’t. If you do and you’re not careful, they’ll turn you into something you’re not.

I Interview Playwrights Part 172: Peter Parnell

Peter Parnell

Hometown: Douglaston, Queens, NY

Current Town:  Manhattan

Q:  What are you working on now?


A:  I’ve been working on two stage musical projects. One is a new book for a musical from the 1960s called “On A Clear Day You Can See Forever”, originally written by Alan Jay Lerner, with music and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane. It’s a project the director Michael Mayer approached me about doing. The other is a new musical, for which I’m writing the book, with music and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, for Susan Stroman to direct. So, although I’ve never worked on a musical before, I’m starting at the top.

Q:  You're the head of the membership committee at the guild. Why should every playwright join the Dramatists Guild?

A:  There are many reasons. One of the foremost is that, although we’re not a union, we’re the only organization in the country which advocates for playwrights in concrete ways, including offering free legal advice, as well as informing them of the current standards regarding many types of play contracts. The Guild is also active in rigorously defending copyright, and in protecting playwrights with regards to ownership of their work. There are many areas which, whether you’re a beginning or more experienced playwright, it’s important to know about. What are your basic rights regarding a production? What does it mean to have approvals of production elements? What kind of billing and royalty payments are you entitled to? What does it mean to sign over a portion of your play’s future income to a third party, and how obligated are you to do so? Some of these and other issues are undergoing changes right now, and the Guild is at the forefront of the conversation. And I should add this isn’t only about the so-called Commercial Theater. It’s about the not for profit arena, from the major LORT theatres to the smallest theatres – anywhere, in fact, that you’ve written a play for a paying audience. But—and this is more of an emotional argument, I guess – we all know that playwrighting can be a tough profession, and is also collaborative, in that your allies in getting your vision across are actors, directors, and designers. But who understands best what it’s like to be the person who first faced the blank page? Other playwrights. We’re all part of a community that can offer strength – and understanding, and comfort—in numbers.

Q:  You adapted the novel of the Cider House Rules into two stage plays. What is the challenge of adapting someone else's work and how do you decide what to leave in and what to take out?

A:  I’ve worked on a couple of projects that involved adapting source material.

Cider House was one, and it came with a fairly specific mandate. Tom Hulce, who loved John Irving’s book, had brought it to Jane Jones, who had founded a theatre company in Seattle called Book-It, which used the complete narrative voice in dramatizing various short fiction for the stage. Book-It had never done a full-length novel before, and knew they needed a writer to help shape, and then dramatize, this enormous, picaresque book. So, I knew from the beginning that I had an acting company, and, once Dan Sullivan at Seattle Rep got excited about the idea, a theatre in which to put the play on. Tom, Jane and I decided early that needed two plays to tell the story. The challenge for me was finding a theatrical style that was faithful to John’s voice, but allowed for dramatic rather than fictive movement. It took me a long time to find it. When I did, it was by starting to dramatize a small section of the book I felt most comfortable with, and dissecting it, doubling back over John’s repetitions and rhythms. I had remembered reading an unfinished Thornton Wilder play, The Emporium, based on a Kafka novel, (but set in an orphanage and a department store!) It was wonderful, and it had a style that felt right for Irving’s novel (not only, but partly, because it, too, is set in an orphanage). This section ultimately became the second act of the first evening (which was in three acts).


I wrote a lot more of Cider House than we could use, but of course we couldn’t dramatize all the characters and events that take place in the book. But we got in a lot. Both evenings combined took eight hours in Seattle. When we went to the Taper, we cut it down to six.


There’s an aspect of mimicry that happens with this kind of adaptation. You have to become so familiar with the original voice, it has to become so a part of your bones, that you feel you can create as if you were the author himself. Something very touching happened after John Irving saw Cider House. There’s a moment in the second play, in Dr. Larch’s death scene, in which he imagines ballroom dancing with some of the many women who he saved (and, most importantly, one he didn’t save, who haunts him throughout the play). John told me that the ballroom dancing surprised him because, though he never put it in the novel, his original notes had contained this characteristic of Larch’s, that he loved to ballroom dance. It was as if I had gone into John’s head, and pulled this image out.


Q:  Besides having plays on and off Broadway and in large regional theaters, you have worked extensively in TV drama. How does one navigate between the two worlds and how do you find time to do both?

A:  When I was starting out as a playwright, there was still a bit of a stigma attached to writing for TV. I didn’t actually work on a TV script until Aaron Sorkin and John Wells invited me to be a part of The West Wing in 1999. By that time, more and more playwrights were becoming involved in both being on staff and in writing pilots. Now, I think we’ve entered a kind of new golden age in writing for TV, and cable shows especially are finding provocative, exciting ways to tell stories. And it’s important for a playwright to learn the techniques of TV writing, if only to make a living while you’re working on your next play. I find the forms quite different, but that may be more because of the kinds of plays I write. Writing for TV is a job, and highly collaborative, and you’re often not the final arbiter of what gets on the screen (including your credit). But, you learn how to work quickly when you need to, and how to solve creative problems quickly, and you can get paid nicely for your time. These are not necessarily bad things.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  When I was in fifth grade, I wrote and starred in a school play called Captain Goodwill’s Friendship Tour. I don’t remember very much about it, except that at the climax of the show, when everybody was expecting the main character to return to America, and sing “America the Beautiful”, I had him stay in England and sing “For He Is An Englishman” from H.M.S. Pinafore. Even then I was an Anglophile, and even then, though I didn’t know it, I was already gay. But the thing I remember most about it was that, after I got cast as the lead in my own show, my best friend, Jeffrey Cohen, called me up and, trying to disguise his voice, told me that if I accepted the role of Captain Goodwill, I’d be beaten up the next day outside of class. I knew it was Jeffrey who called, and after I told my mom, she called Jeffrey’s mom (who told her for some reason Jeffrey was now crying), and SHE insisted Jeffrey get on the phone and apologize to me. Which he did. What did this teach me? To always be prepared for a bad review from SOMEBODY, I guess. It may also help account for an unhealthy inhibited narcissism (rather than an unhealthy but at least uninhibited narcissism) that has made possessing naked ambition an area of conflict for me my entire life.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Anything that works.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  To write, and not be afraid of rewriting. To try to keep in mind what originally excited you about an idea, and to also be willing to let go of it. To listen to those you really trust, but also stand your ground. In other words, stay flexible. And if somebody invites you somewhere, always say yes.

I Interview Playwrights Part 171: Gary Sunshine

Gary Sunshine

Hometown: Seaford, New York

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A: I've been in LA since November working as a staff writer on HBO's "Hung." Right before I left home, I did a workshop of my new play at New Dramatists called GOOD DEEDS FOR A WEARY WORLD, and it was recently workshopped again at Theatre of NOTE in LA. And I just finished up a screenplay for Starry Night Entertainment called MOSCOWS, about a secretly wealthy young librarian and her obsession with her college acting teacher.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A: When I was about 11, I was cast as the Scarecrow in the Maplewood Day Camp production of "The Wizard of Oz." I was a tiny kid with a big head and a really big voice, which may explain why the drama counselor gave me a song from "Pippin" to sing--one usually performed by a 70- year-old woman. For the slow, sad verse at the top of the song, they had me sit at the lip of the stage a la Judy Garland, and sing into a microphone with a long cord. And then they had me burst to my feet and belt
out the chorus "Oh, it's time to start living, time take a little from the world I'm giving..." The Maplewood Day Camp audience ate it up (at least in my memory of this). This has always felt like a seminal experience. It made me love theater, love connecting with an audience, and, most likely, it made me pretty gay.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A: I'd go back to the time when plays didn't have to be considered perfect to go up, because it was more important for as many voices to be heard as possible, and not much money was riding on each production. I'd minimize "development" because ultimately, you don't learn all that much about your play from readings--you learn from productions.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Chekhov. Albee. Sondheim. Kushner. Fornes. Used to be Beckett but I think the older I get, the more reluctant I feel to face what he has to say about the world. I hope that changes for me.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A: Funny, I wanted to say "theater that looks and sounds nothing like TV" but if it's done well, I could care less. Theater that tells the truth and makes me pant.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: Connect yourself to creative "homes"--where you feel safe enough to write in ways you'd never imagined. Get your work out there and build up a community of peers whom you can share the process with and make theater with.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Watch HUNG on HBO this summer!