The subject of so much life drama, as with theater drama, is the desire to leave the past behind, and the inability to do so: to become new without being weighed down by the old. What the past was is always up for negotiation. To be constantly negotiating the past with your community is always source of strife and unhappiness. There's too much subjectivity, too much intersubjectivity, overlapping interpretations—there's no clean way to decide what happened. Not really. Family, friends, lovers, enemies. You’ll never agree with them. They’ll never agree with you. We'll never agree with each other. Not completely. There's no scarier feeling, therefore, than simultaneously becoming new and realizing that you're still the old you in the eyes of others: your identity, your history, your reputation, your ecstasies and triumphs, your failures are all pinned to your breast like a name-tag. Sometimes I meet people—or I look at my own behavior— and think, well, your bad behavior is just the result of feeling like no one will see you a new way… so what's the point of being good? No one will trust that you've changed, so what's the point in changing? You might as well just sink back to the lowest common denominator of the self. That's actually tragic and that's why I think so much classical tragedy is predicated on that fall. You can never escape the past. You can only outrun it for a while. It's the subject of every Ibsen play—just that. The tragedy of the return of the past is as fundamental to 19th century bourgeoisie as it is Greek tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy or Arthur Miller. It's Macbeth or It's All My Sons or it's Rosmerholm or Oedipus. It's my own plays By Morning or Minotaur, among others. It might be the person next to you on the train while you're reading this. It might be you. It might be me. It might be all of us. Most of the action in life isn't really so simple. It's rarely simple matter of good or evil, but a complex one of tragic downfall and (the possibility of) merciful redemption.
One of the things, maybe the thing I despise most about our present culture is this aversion, this discomfort with the human capacity both for assessing tragic error and for mercy, for giving mercy. Instead we live by these vague norms generated by the meritocracy: rigid, uncompromising and brittle rules. It's really not about the law in terms of common law or even Platonic or metaphysical justice, or Christian justice—no, it’s all rule following or rule breaking (handbook justice). Criminals in the state of New York can have their records sealed, but meritocratic rule breakers are scapegoated on through Google search engine optimization. The algorithm does not weigh or deliberate. It cannot really judge. It can only amplify or deamplify. I think, as a playwright, or as a dramatist I should say, that my contribution to my culture, to my community, is trying to reorient the audience back towards its more primal task, which is to on one hand accept the tragic nature of human beings and of ourselves and others really, and also our responsibility to give or deny mercy as individuals for individuals, (rather than just accepting the judgment of the algorithmic media-saturated, norm-generating elite minority posing as majority).