'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams brings a tamale vendor on stage to simply say, 'Red hot!'
I go through phases of watching a ton of dance/performance, and I am bizarrely well-informed on the subject.
'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.
The stuff I write about doesn't, like, necessarily leave people feeling warm and fuzzy. I'm writing in a territory that's, like, contested and full of prickliness. And I find that people project their problems onto me or something.
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?
