I was repeatedly told that there isn't an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, 'Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don't do it?' I said, 'I think you're wrong.'

The great thing about 'Vera Stark' is that my research was watching movies, screwball comedies, so I could literally sit back and relax.

American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.

It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way.

I teach at Columbia, and I'm always looking for books I can lose myself in during the 45 minutes I'm on the train.

I am a Tony voter; it is an honor that I take seriously. Each season, I enter the process with a degree of enthusiasm and optimism, which dissipates as I slowly plow through show after show.

I wonder: Would there be a black president if people hadn't already begun imagining, through film and television, that a black man is president? It's self-actualization.

Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.

I feel like 'Sweat' arrived on Broadway at the moment that it needed to. I feel like a commercial audience was not prepared for 'Ruined' or 'Intimate Apparel' for many different reasons.

We live in a global society, and I don't think we can talk about, quote unquote, 'American themes' anymore.

All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized... erased from the public record.

I'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.

By and large, the theatre establishment is run by a white majority.

Silence is complicity. I believe that.

Once working people discover that, collectively, we have more power than we do as individual silos, then we become an incredibly powerful force. But I think that there are powers that be that are invested in us remaining divided along racial lines, along economic lines.

I remain committed to telling the stories of women of the African diaspora, particularly those stories that don't often find their way into the mainstream media.

The theatre should reflect America as it's lived in today. And that is a multicultural America.

It's very important for me to have dialogues across racial lines.

My fears about where theater is going - it's the Hollywood model, where people are chasing the almighty dollar and making commercial decisions based on nothing more than generating income for themselves and their theaters.

I think sometimes you need distance to reflect.

People probably have different philosophies about this, but I think that when you're first shaping the play and trying to find a character, the initial actors that develop it end up imprinting on it - you hear their voices; you hear their rhythms. You can't help but to begin to write toward them during the rehearsal process.

When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.

In senior year at college, Paula Vogel was my playwriting teacher; she is the first person to introduce me to the notion that a woman could actually forge a career in the theatre. Up until then, the possibility seemed remote and inaccessible, as I had very few role models who directly touched my life.

The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.