A Play Is Fiction And

You Find Very Few Critics Who Approach Their Job With A Combination Of Information And Enthusiasm And Humility That Makes For A Good Critic. But There Is Nothing Wrong With Critics As Long As People Don't Pay Any Attention To Them. I Mean, Nobody Wants To Put Them Out Of A Job And A Good Critic Is Not Necessarily A Dead Critic. It's Just That People Take What A Critic Says As A Fact Rather Than An Opinion, And You Have To Know Whether The Opinion Of The Critic Is Informed Or Uninformed, Intelligent Of Stupid -- But Most People Don't Take The Trouble.

Few Sensible Authors Are Happy Discussing The Creative Process--it Is, After All, Black Magic.

I Don't Pay Much Attention To How The Plays Relate Thematically To Each Other. I Think That's Very Dangerous To Do, Because In The Theater One Is Self-conscious Enough Without Planning Ahead Or Wondering About The Thematic Relation From One Play To The Next. One Hopes That One Is Developing, And Writing Interestingly, And That's Where It Should End, I Think.

About Four Years Ago I Made A List, For My Own Amusement, Of The Playwrights, The Contemporary Playwrights, By Whom Critics Said I'd Been Influenced. I Listed Twenty-five. It Included Five Playwrights Whose Work I Didn't Know, So I Read These Five Playwrights And Indeed Now I Suppose I Can Say I Have Been Influenced By Them. The Problem Is That The People Who Write These Articles Find The Inevitable Similarities Of People Writing In The Same Generation, In The Same Century, And On The Same Planet, And They Put Them Together In A Group.

As A Playwright, I Imagine That In One Fashion Or Another I've Been Influenced By Every Single Play I've Ever Experienced.