“It’s really interesting that whenever you do something that is so out of character, like having an emotional outburst, that you don’t get in trouble.”

The impetus behind going to graduate school was a year after graduating from college spent in Dallas working at the dog food factory and Bank America and not having met success in my chosen field, which at that point was being an actress.

It’s called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn’t realize what a rage I was in.

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.

In movement class, you had to lie on the floor and get your alignment in to pass the class.

I was just restless with being in school; so I went out to Los Angeles.

My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana.

And all writing is creating or spinning dreams for other people so they won’t have to bother doing it themselves.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn’t you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

I’m very into the first production of the show.

I tried to start a theatre in LA and failed miserably, but I was probably not meant to raise money.

There are probably brilliant people, geniuses, alive today who don’t even know how to say, “Hello, how do you do?” because their minds are absorbed with electronic images.

But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn’t a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don’t have to be very smart.

Part of that is that New York has proved to be too much fun for me to live and work; I love New York so much.

That was always my inclination, to start on a new play before the other one gets done, because at least you’ll have something to go back to if that play gets trashed.

The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan Kingsley or Kathy Bates who are better than your play.