When A Play Enters My

I Usually Think About A Play Anywhere From Six Months To A Year And A Half Before I Sit Down To Write It Out.

The Health Of A Nation, A Society, Can Be Determined By The Art It Demands. We Have Insisted Of Television And Our Movies That They Not Have Anything To Do With Anything, That They Be Our Never-never Land; And If We Demand This Same Function Of Our Live Theatre, What Will Be Left Of The Visual-auditory Arts - Save The Dance (in Which Nobody Talks) And Music (to Which Nobody Listens)?

I Know Playwrights Who Like To Kid Themselves Into Saying That Their Characters Are So Well Formed That They Just Take Over. They Determine The Structure Of The Play. By Which Is Meant, I Suspect, Only That The Unconscious Mind Has Done Its Work So Thoroughly That The Play Just Has To Be Filtered Through The Conscious Mind. But There's Work To Be Done - And Discovery To Be Made.

I Stopped Acting When I Was About Nineteen, Twenty, When I Got Thrown Out Of College. I Did Act For About Ten Years. I Don't Know. I Suspect I'm Still A Reasonably Good Actor, But I Don't Really Know That I Want To Get On The Stage Again ... And Having To Say All Those Boring Words By Me Over And Over Again ... I Don't Know If I Want To Do That. Also, I Like A Certain Amount Of Freedom Of Movement, And If You're Acting, You're Stuck In One Place For A Long Time. Having Said That, I Will Probably Be Onstage Next Fall.

It Always Seems To Me Better To Slough Off The Answer To A Question That I Consider To Be A Terrible Invasion Of Privacy - The Kind Of Privacy That A Writer Must Keep For Himself.