one reason this was a struggle for me is because unlike film/tv/novels, plays and musicals are intended to be produced and performed again and again, in infinitely varied contexts, so a character must be written to withstand the individual performances of multiple actors. 1/6 https://twitter.com/jamesholod/status/1338499280034783235

for a long time i thought writing nebulously/nonspecifically was a way of being generous to those unknown future interpreters. i had to learn that by approaching it in that way, i was doing a disservice to actors and audiences by not creating real humans to engage with, 2/6

AND i was giving myself subliminal permission to avoid implicating my own life and beliefs and complicities and failures in the stories i was telling. there was an entire piece of the work — the piece Viola Davis is talking about — i simply pretended didn’t exist. 3/6

i do believe that what we choose to specify on the pages of our scripts and what we don’t put down in words is one of the most important actions we take as theater writers. to really be certain that we’re creating characters that speak to the dignity of the actors portraying 4/6

them (especially of other races, genders, sexualities, and abilities from my own) does, for me at least, take longer, require more work and intentional thought, and force me to the limits of my writing capability, but the past few years were to teach me 5/6

that THAT level of rigorous writing is actually what our artists and our audiences are looking for...that THAT level is the level i *actually* want to be writing at. 6/6