The dramatist

I like the play Laughter on the 23rd Floor. I think it was not only a really funny play, but it had a lot of things to say about the McCarthy era and working in that era – of what it’s like, not just...

Actually the first time I read Chekhov was at graduate school. I didn’t read…I didn’t study that much theatre in college. I was a history major. I wasn’t that good a student, either (laughs). I...

Talking about The Biloxi Blues and writing that scene that takes place in the brothel, that is in a sense autobiographical, but I deal with that in my book Rewrites. It didn’t happen in Biloxi,...

That was written for Maggie, yes, completely written for Maggie. She said to me one night, “Oh, what are you writing now? Another play for two men, is it? Why don’t you write for a woman?” I said,...

Once in a while you’ll get all good reviews from somebody, but that’s generally when they want to discover somebody. So your earliest plays, strangely enough, generally do better. Then as you get...

The Prisoner of Second Avenue was really an Uncle of Joan’s who, at the age of 48, decided to give up his pretty profitable printing business, because all of his life he wanted to own a newspaper....

The question about rewriting and when to know when to stop has two answers in a way. One is the obvious one: it stops when you have to open the play. You have an opening night. But I think something...

I remember that Danny and I would write…we were writing for comics in the early days, and we would write a monologue, and Danny was more the performer than I was, and so Danny would read the...

There was a problem in my life--if it was a problem at all--is that I felt like two different people, always. One was a very normal, fairly even tempered, average person, who goes about doing his life...

It was a very fearful moment for me, because I was really putting my mother and father and brother on the stage, and myself as well. And because I was a beginning playwright, they were more...