I was lucky to take one of the easy paths to writing plays: choosing a thirty-three-character German Romance as my first directing job; founding a professional small-Equity-house theatre and starting out there with Sophocles, followed by Ibsen; and then choosing verse tragedy (in the full five acts) as my first play to write.
But it's Dance Bright Gods that's been the eye-opening master-class—starting out as a riff on As You Like It, with a Rosalind turning the tables to impose disguises on others, the play grew much larger with the addition of Harold Bloom's fanciful guess that the original writer of the Genesis stories was Bathsheba. It became clear I'm imprinted on this particular, peculiar form of drama (call it Romance? Fable? Tragicomic Tale?): deep, personal revelation juxtaposed with the ultra-expansive open stage. And while Romance is disliked for being thought un-modern and untruthful, I love it for its magnificence and wonder, and would bring it up to our day, wow an audience, and tell the truth.
Plays
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