The liveness of theater, and the excitement of experiencing it alongside an audience, is something you can't get at home. That makes the theater more vital than ever. It's definitely expensive, but I have faith that the market will keep recognizing the live experience as a valuable and important one.
I'm a sucker for double meanings in titles.
The real skill of being a writer is being able to take your inspired moments, and make them work as a whole, through the unromantic, daily hard work.
There's so much great stuff out there. The artists who've been most formative to me are the ones I've had the privilege to work with over the years.
I love writing stories about regular people dealing with life's biggest questions.
I take a lot of inspiration from the people I work with, and having many collaborators keeps me challenged and inspired.
Theater and music are both collaborative media, and I think they're best when they combine different people's visions and aesthetics.
Every day I wake up, there's a little part of my brain that's thinking I might die in a terrorist attack today.
My parents took me to shows starting when I was a very little kid. I remember seeing Henry IV at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC and our neighbor, who was playing Banquo, winked at me during the curtain call. I remember thinking "he can SEE ME?!" I was hooked from then. I wanted to be part of the place where you can escape the world, and also wink at it.
In terms of theater itself, no story is too strange or method of telling it too impossible these days. In many ways, musical theater has caught up with straight theater in that it's allowed more surreality and breaking of form, and that's really exciting to me - the challenge is getting people to produce those shows.
We live in an era where each of us has a massive catalog of film and television available through the internet at the swipe of a finger. To get folks out of their homes for a piece of art or entertainment, I think you need to offer something they can't get on Netflix or Amazon.
It's an incredible privilege to be able to sit in front of a computer and spend a few hours just thinking and writing.
