Thoughts come to my mind at any point, anywhere—I could be on the subway—and if I am alert enough and I have a pencil and paper, I write these messages that come. It might be just a thought, like a statement about something, an insight, or it could be a line of dialog. It could be something that someone says in my head.

I have a box filled with these scribbles. Some of them are on paper napkins or the backs of envelopes. These things are often the beginning of a play. Most of the lyrics of the songs that I write are based on these notes—as opposed to a play, which, once it starts, I make. I usually gather a number of those things that have some relation—again, I do not even know why I consider that they are related—and I put them together.

Autobiographical work is the only thing that interests me, apparently because that is what I do best. I write about my family. In many ways I would like to break out of that, but I don't know how to break out of it. In fact I would really like to write more about the people who were before my own immediate family, like my grandparents and their family. I have two children, but I've never been able to write about them.

I feel overwhelmed by family problems and family realities. I see my writing as being an outlet for inner, psychological confusion and questions stemming from childhood. I don't know any other way. It's really figuring out the “why” of things—that is, if that is even possible. I'm not sure you can figure out the “why” of anything anymore.

I feel a lot of reluctance in attempting to describe any part of a process which, by its truest nature, holds an unending mystery. At the same time I'm hoping that by trying to formulate some of this territory I can make certain things clearer to myself.

I've always felt that the term “experimental” in regard to theatre forms has been twisted by the intellectual community surrounding the artist to the extent that now even the artist has lost track of its original essence. In other words, a search for “new forms” doesn't seem to be exactly where it's at.

There comes a point where the exterior gyrations are no longer the most interesting aspect of what you're practicing, and brand-new exploration starts to take root. For example: In the writing of a particular character where does the character take shape?

I was bused to the theatre at the age of seven. There was a program, sponsored by the Junior League, to bring children to live theatre. I lived in a small fishing village outside of Seattle; it was a long bus ride, but it changed my life. Professional actors, who had worked together for twenty years under the direction of Mrs. Florence Bean James (who had studied with Stanislavsky) were playing Rumplestiltskin. That was it. I fell in love.

As soon as I was allowed to go about on my own (fourteen), I went back to that theatre and hung around and begged to clean Johns and sort nuts and bolts until they took me into the company.

Mrs. James and her actor husband, Burton, inspired me to write for the theatre. They always hoped a playwright would emerge from their theatre.

When I write a play there's no single sure track to run on. It's different each time I start. Each time is starting from scratch, a reinvention of form. There may be easier ways to do it, but for me, that's how it is. There are no rules that always apply. If I teach a playwriting class, I set up exercises, so people can learn some possible different approaches. I would be loathe to prescribe one single approach.

As you catch me just about to start something—which is always a peculiar time fora writer—I find it even more difficult to tell you how I go about things.

I began writing I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating a few days after the final performance of Einstein on the Beach in November of 1976.

I wrote a few pages of dialog at a time in a large notebook with blank pages that I often write and draw in when working on a piece. The language I wrote was more a reflection of the way we think than of the way we normally speak. My head became like a TV, switching from thought to thought (and in writing from phrase to phrase) like flipping a dial from channel to channel.

I write when I am alone and work best when there are no interruptions. I sometimes keep a television on at low volume and incorporate phrases I hear into my text, which I write quickly, usually leaving it untouched and in its original order once the words are on the page. Every few days I had a few pages of writing typed up.

Fydor Sologub (pronounced Sulagoup, with the stress on the last syllable) is best known as a poet and novelist, famous for his elegant; musical verse and for his grotesque fictional masterpiece, The Petty Demon. Born in 1863 and a member of the first generation of Russian symbolists, Sologub—a man of proletarian origins whose real name was Teternikov—was almost forty-five when he wrote his first play and had already been active in the literary world for over twenty years. Yet at this point the shy and withdrawn poet embarked upon a new career in the theatre and became a major symbolist dramatist and theoretician of a new stagecraft.

The premiere of Hamlet at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow on May 19, 1932, marked Nikolai Akimov's debut as a director. A talented Leningrad artist, the young Akimov had already attracted considerable attention in theatrical circles with his unconventional setting for Tartuffe in 1929, featuring the unscrewed joints of an enormous exhaust pipe, and his striking design in 1931 for Schiller's Intrigue and Love, which made use of a huge, shiny silver disk set on stage at a sharp angle to suggest the top of large sphere.

With his production of Hamlet, Akimov was determined to sweep away once and for all the pall of gloomy symbolism cast by earlier interpretations. His most immediate targets were the 1911 Gordon Craig production and the one at the Second Moscow Art Theatre in 1924, with Mikhail Chekhov both directing and playing the title role. “A sickly degenerate,” is the way Aklmov dismissed Chekhov's Hamlet.