Because I'm an American woman, and I write straight plays, it's always been sort of assumed I would never be done on Broadway. But that was never the goal.
We have this powerful ideological basis to the country that I don't think any other country in the world quite can brag about. It's a very complicated nation, and it's very fertile.
Our distorted media culture sees men as subjects and women as objects; in films, Woody Allen gets older and older and still dates 20-year-old babes; movies about women are called 'chick flicks,' and men make fun of them.
I think it's straight men who are oblivious to goodness or badness to dates. That's probably unfair. Maybe they just don't complain as much.
There are so many people from many different classes and ways of life who converge in one space to make a musical.
I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.
The stage gives you more control over your own work; in television, there's a distressing amount of communal writing. Unless it's your show, you have no control over that. You're at the mercy of whoever's running the show.
I remember when I was at Brandeis, Geoffrey Wolff, he was a great fiction-writing teacher. He was the writer-in-residence, and for those of us who wanted to be writers, you were so excited to be in the same hallway as him.
Heath Ledger's recent death, like that of River Phoenix, was handled with great care by the press. Anna Nicole Smith's not so much.
I often find it maddening to live in America, in a way that is both amusing and horrifying to me. America clings to versions of itself that are absolutely hypocritical. I can't shake my outrage at it, so I write about it.
Sometimes I feel that my job on earth is to put Julie White through horrible things, watch her writhe and then recover.
I think it goes without saying that young would-be playwrights in developmental workshops should be so lucky as to write plays as good as 'Waiting for Godot,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'King Lear,' none of which would have existed without a decent plot.
Everyone pays lip service to this whole idea of doing more new plays, and nobody ever does it.
I think, with most writers, their neurosis is finishing things. I have a different neurosis. I'm terribly anxious when it's not finished. Then I become really difficult to live with.
When I was a staff writer on 'NYPD Blue,' it was truly my job to hear David Milch's voice for that show and to deliver episodes that embodied that voice.
Some people think big audiences are crass and that, say, a comedy that appeals to a wide audience is pandering. Other people would argue that you could say that about Moliere.
My son is a musician who next year will be attending the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts in New York City, which his mother helped him get into by making him practice all the time.
I am curious about a lot of things. I'm perplexed and engaged.
Does art have to have high foot traffic to get funded in a recession? A lot of people, I am sure, would say absolutely not. And those postmodern art-loving loners surely would argue that even if one person likes a piece of art, that would make a museum worthwhile.
That stupid postmodern emphasis on image over content has slammed us right into a dramaturgy that willfully leaves the audience behind and then resents the fact that they don't 'get it.'
