At the PWC this week: Gregory S. Moss

Core Writer Gregory S. Moss is at the Playwrights’ Center this week, workshopping his new play Blindness with director Hayley Finn and actors Dan Hopman, Ashley Montondo, Kevin McLaughlin, Sara Marsh, Stacia Rice, and Pete Hansen. We asked Greg a few questions:

What have you been working on?

I’m currently revising and rewriting a new play about love and Rhode Island, called Indian Summer [developed at the Playwrights’ Center in 2014, world premiere May 2016 at Playwrights Horizons]; continuing work on a musical about Hunter S Thompson, with composer Joe Iconis, for La Jolla Playhouse; devising a decadent intergalactic gay love story about Charles Ludlum with Pig Iron Theatre Company; and beginning to write a new play about this guy I knew growing in Massachusetts, called Fran(k).

Why do you write plays?

I write plays to discover new common ground between myself and other human beings, and, hopefully, to entertain them.

Who or what inspires you?

I'm inspired by small stories - not sweeping heroic gestures, but the detailed, miniature kindnesses and cruelties human beings bestow upon each other. I'm inspired by the rhythms and music and poetry of every day speech, and also by ecstatic language, imagistic language, the limits of what can be expressed in language. I'm inspired by the malleability and mutability of the theater as a space - how actors and language, in collaboration with the audience's imagination, can transform the world the play takes place in.

What is your writing process like?

Very inefficient. I write three to four times the number of pages I actually use, then cut cut cut.

What kind of theater or art excites you?

Events that place us, as an audience, in the present moment, that compel us to pay attention.