Writing

I was reading a lot about science and how we come to learn things about the world, and kept hitting on the notion of causality. People were interested in establishing causality—finding a way to show that one thing led to another. In this play I wanted to take apart the idea of causality, play around with it a little, see what happens when it’s not so easy to figure out what led one thing to happen and not the other.

Around the time I started writing this play, online dating was just beginning to take off and there was a lot of marketing and discussion around the notion that people were happier and healthier in relationships than they were single. There were also a number of new pieces of legislation coming out in Europe that gave couples and families major tax breaks (above the breaks that most straight couples already get in countries around the world) for simply being in a relationship and/or raising children. There was something creepy to me at the time about this confluence of pressure, and the fact that governments seemed to be getting involved in the match-making.

There’s a photo that the British artist Richard Billingham took of his mother, Ray’s A Laugh. She sitting on a dingy couch, smoking a cigarette, drinking a drink, and patiently, quietly, fitting together an enormous jigsaw puzzle. Inspired by this photo and my own love of puzzles, I developed this play to explore the way we use the metaphor of a jigsaw to piece together parts of our lives that are sometimes difficult to understand.

How many kinds of class are there—social class, school classes, the kind of class people relate to taste, dress, and behavior…

What is a Great American Novel anyway? And who gets to write them?

Sometimes the concern over the meaning or use of a word reveals more about those arguing than the thought that contained the word ever could.

When it’s too hard to find the right words, there’s always other people’s words.

I’ve always been a fan of people watching. Who isn’t? To sit quietly in a park or at a cafe table and watch the world go by, guessing at the lives of those that pass you by. But what about those assumptions we make? What about when someone else’s passing judgments of you have a direct impact on your life?