I Interview Playwrights Part 471: Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman

Hometown: New York City



Current Town: New York City



Q:  What are you working on now?



A:  A new play about sexual harassment and race.



Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who
you are as a writer or as a person.



A:  Like many of my generation I was handed The Diary of Anne Frank at an early age and it taught me that girls could be writers.



Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?



A:  Right now the standard is to reflect back to producers and their identified audiences, their perceptions of themselves. I would change this so that the standard for theater would be to expand what we understand about being alive.




Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?


A:  I must admit that Cherry Jones has inspired and frustrated me for many years.




Q:  What kind of theater excites you?


A:  Work that grapples with something that matters while expanding the kinds of experiences, points of view and characters seen on the American stage.




Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?


A:  Don't do it.



Q:  Plugs, please:


A:  Most recent book: The Gentrification of the Mind:Witness to a Lost Imagination (U of California Press)

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