A Play Is Fiction And

Unless You Are Terribly, Terribly Careful, You Run The Danger-- Without Even Knowing It Is Happening To You-- Of Slipping Into The Fatal Error Of Reflecting The Public Taste Instead Of Creating It. Your Responsibility Is To The Public Consciousness, Not To The Public View Of Itself.

What Happens In A Play Is Determined To A Certain Extent By What I Thought Might Be Interesting To Have Happen Before I Invented The Characters, Before They Started Taking Over What Happened, Because They Are Three-dimensional Individuals, And I Cannot Tell Them What To Do. Once I Give Them Their Identity And Their Nature, They Start Writing The Play.

In A Democracy You Cannot Stop Public Access To That Art That Will Most Misinform The People. You Cannot Stop People From Being Misinformed. But What You Can Do Is To Educate The People To The Point That They Will Throw The Rascals Out.

When I'm Writing A Play I Hear It Like Music. I Use The Same Indications That A Composer Does For Duration. There's A Difference, I Tell My Students, Between A Semi-colon And A Period. A Difference In Duration. And We Have All These Wonderful Things, We Use Commas And Underlining And All The Wonderful Punctuation Things We Can Use In The Same Way A Composer Uses Them In Music. And We Can Indicate, As Specifically As A Composer, The Way We Want Our Piece To Sound.

A Lot Interests Me - But Nothing Surprises Me Particularly.