“I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.”

I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the phone.

Plays are so much more special if they’ve never ever had a production, but I think you can really work on a play and make it better with each production.

I love writing for the screen.

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.

When you believe in something and believe in your community, no one can stop you from creating change.

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.

A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality have to adjust itself.

Now more than ever, we need heroes in our communities!

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

The pain and emotional trauma caused by the racism and violence we are witnessing toward the black community has a long reach.