My play gUnTOPIA, a dark satirical comedy, tackles America’s gun culture. I’m currently working on a play based on an incident in the life of the French author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I also have rewritten an earlier play called Book of Leaves. 

From anywhere and everywhere and everything. My imagination pulls ideas out of the aether and I jot down whatever strikes me as interesting.  Eventually I settle on one I feel an emotional tug toward and that I think would make a compelling story. Occasionally, I do set out to write about a specific subject. For instance, my play Jade Heart about a single white American woman who adopts an infant orphaned Chinese girl was based loosely on my youngest sister’s experience in adopting one of these “lost girls.”

Not really. I did dub a film once long ago while I was living in Mexico City. I answered an ad in the paper for a voice actor and got the job.  I worked in a sound booth at the famed Estudios Churobusco alongside veteran actors from L.A. who had traveled south of the border to pick up whatever work they could catch as catch can.  It was a Spanish film aimed for TV distribution in Canada called Los Amantes Jovenes (The Young Lovers). If you ever come across it, the sexy voice of the lead amante is mine.  I’ve also taken acting classes. Before I had cancer surgery that removed a sizable chunk of my tongue and left me with a speech disability, I was studying voice with a woman who had trained in England. I was all set to start auditioning when the universe decided that it had other plans for me.

Many of my favorites count among the usual suspects. Miller, Williams, O’Neil, Hansberry, Beckett, Wilson, Pinter, Hellman, Shaw, Stoppard, Wilde, Shanley, Wasserstein, the Greeks, and of course the Bard. The list goes on. It’s an eclectic bunch, and it’s deuced hard for me to narrow it down.

Being able to hold an audience. If the dramatic conflict in a play flags, it loses its forward drive. Audiences will quickly get restless or bored. A blatantly idiotic plot point can take people out of it, leading to them to mutter, “Oh, come on! That’s ridiculous and would never happen.”. A play that lacks coherent narrative structure that rambles all over the place can also turn an audience against it. Once any of these happens, there’s no getting them back. Their suspended disbelief will have plummeted to the stage, and the play will fail. For me, the story is the thing. A play has to have a solid spine, a recognizable arc. Character comes next, followed by dialogue, in my opinion.

I wrote something for The Roustabouts Theatre Company’s website that I think answers the question: “Theatre lives in the moment. It embodies the risk and suspense of real human drama. When I watch a play I take it personally. I feel a relationship with every character. Theatre more than imitates life; each performance of a play needs hearts to beat, lungs to breathe, and muscles to move. It brings to life on stage a world of the imagination, but it also recreates in us, as we enter into it, new worlds of possibility, new ways of knowing and being.” Theatre’s different from film or TV because it invites us into an intimate setting; it’s live. It has a sense of immediacy and suspense. It calls upon audiences to use their imaginations, to participate in bringing a story to life. It’s similar to fiction in that way, except that it flows inexorably from moment to moment, carrying the audience with it. A reader, on the other hand, can stop, go back, reread, skip ahead, skim, and so forth.

From what I see, there are too many playwrights chasing too few theatres. It’s hard for newcomers to land a production. The slumping economy has taken its toll on small companies. Many have closed. The pressure to put butts in seats has led many artistic directors exclusively to mount established works with proven track records. New work by emerging playwrights ca find a home, but it takes some luck and a relentless commitment to self-promotion. I find that most plays get produced because the playwright knows an artistic director or she knows somebody who knows an artistic director or literary manager and is willing to put in a good word for her. It’s largely about personal or professional connections. Submitting plays over the transom that land on a slush pile is a very low percentage path to production. The major challenge for a playwright is making a living from it. That has probably always been true