What excites you most about your most recent work?
I consider teaching at USC my “most recent work,” and I am excited by the insights, enthusiasm, experiences, and perspectives of my students. They have been patient with their occasionally absent-minded professor and courageous in declaring their opinions, hazarding literary analysis, and generally engaging with literature. They inspire me.
What do you find most appealing about the arts community at Carolina?
There’s a real liveliness to the theatre community at Carolina. When I first visited campus and Columbia at large, I couldn’t believe the sheer number of theatre companies. Currently I smile every time I walk up the stairs in Gambrell because a play by one of my college classmates, Noah Haidle, was produced recently at the Lab theatre. I am delighted that student actors and directors on campus are committed to producing new work.
What artist in your field, living or dead, do you admire most, and why?
Stephen Sondheim is a lyricist and composer rather than a playwright, but I admire him greatly as an artist and as a contributor to the theatre community. His verbal crispness and wordplay, mastery of rhythm, irony, and character astound me every time I listen to Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George, or Into the Woods. Sondheim also helped found Young Playwrights Inc., which sponsors the annual National Young Playwrights Festival and offers amazing opportunities to students who want to try their hand at writing a play (and even students who don’t realize yet that they want to try). That kind of generosity seems admirable and crucial to me in encouraging the arts in the next generation(s). Also, he wrote me a handwritten note when I sent him a “thank-you” for my experience participating in the National Young Playwrights Festival. How classy is that?
If you had a million dollars to give away, what would you do with it?
Put it in a trust for my cats. Just kidding. (Or so you think . . .)
What kind of place do you think art has—or should have—in the larger global community? And how does what you do in the classroom connect to the larger world?
Unsurprisingly, I think art has a crucial place in the larger global community. While the backgrounds and cultures we come from certainly affect our responses to the arts, art remains an arena where people can express ideas, question values, plumb emotion, glory in humor, test ethics, show our worst and best sides, etc. . . . Theatre is a communal, evolving, interactive art form. No play is really “finished.” The element of performance changes the play. Similarly, in the classroom, few lessons are really taught and finished. The classroom experience should ideally change student, teacher, and subject matter.
What’s the last book you read, and what did you think of it?
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. It was fun. I like the idea of entering a novel and interacting with the characters. Though I’m not sure Bertha Rochester would be my number one choice for a head-to-head battle. (I fear she would win. I’m well-intentioned but feeble.)
Tell us about your work in progress—what can we expect from you next?
I have been toying with writing a play loosely based on the experiences of Carol Ann Gotbaum who died at the Phoenix airport late in 2007. Though it tends to happen that if I express the idea that I have for a play, I don’t write that play, so perhaps the next work will be something completely different…(Monty Python would approve.)
Anything else you’d like to say?
“My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things . . . I used to bite my nails, but now I don’t even do that anymore.” -- Dorothy Parker |
