Why I write plays.

A truism: my art is rooted in my biography. What I write draws from who I am and what I have experienced. A former rocket scientist (playwriting is much harder, by the way), a gay man of a certain generation, a descendant of medieval rabbis fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. The world I live in is a broken place, and we are commanded to heal that world with all the tools at our disposal. I believe in the theatre as a means of reaching into people’s hearts and heads alike, to make them think and feel. And so, armed with the tools of Talmudic logic, queer irony, and the steely bedrock of the science that took us to the moon, I became a playwright in the hopes of using those tools to help heal the world, a concept consecrated in Judaism as Tikkun Olam.

Here’s how I measure my success. I observe how an audience reacts to the world I’ve helped to create. I take a strange delight when someone comes up to me afterwards in tears, for I see they’ve been genuinely moved by their experience and I am humbled by my contribution to it. I am honored when they thank me for telling their story, even if I don’t know what their story is. I am delighted when I overhear an audience member arguing about what they’ve witnessed, and am thrilled with their disagreements about what it all means. Because who can say what it all means? That’s for them to discover. And then, I hope. I hope. I hope that when they leave the theatre they will go and do something. Change the world. Heal it. Make it a better place. I won’t ever know if they do, but I can hope.