Acknowledgments

This book began when Edward Stern, Artistic Director of Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, selected my play Scotland Road to premiere there as the winner of the 1993 Lois and Richard Rosenthal New Play Prize. While we were rehearsing in Cincinnati I met Lois and Dick, and after the play opened, we kept in touch over the phone. A few months later Lois asked me if I would be interested in writing a playwriting text for Story Press. I'm grateful to Lois for this opportunity. Working on this book has proved to be a kind of refresher course in Playwriting 101. While I was reading plays, researching other texts, talking to writers and thinking about drama, I got a second education in the profession.

Many people deserve a lot of thanks. Lois and Dick Rosenthal, of course. Jack Heffron and Bob Beckstead at Story Press. John B. Santoianni, Charmaine Ferenczi and Jack Tantleff at the Tantleff Office in New York. And Ed Stern for bringing me to Cincinnati.

I'd like to thank a few organizations that support and sustain playwrights: The Dramatists Guild; New Dramatists in New York; the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut; and most especially The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, which has served as my artistic home for eight years and has provided support, collegiality, security and inspiration to me, my work and the work of dozens of talented playwrights I've had the chance to know, teach, learn from and work with. I'd also like to thank the colleges and department chairs I've worked with over the years. Ruth Weiner and Ed Sostek at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and Sears Eldredge at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. There's nothing more invigorating for a playwright than working with eager, energetic, intelligent, talented and imaginative young writers.

Thanks to Lee Blessing, Marsha Norman and José Rivera for their wonderful interviews, as well as to the other writers and artists I consulted: Anthony Clarvoe, Bill Corbett, Barbara Field, Kent Stephens, Douglas Hughes, Ben Kreilkamp, Randy Latimer, Kira Obolensky, Tom Szentgyorgyi and Craig Wright.

But a special thanks is due two playwrights who have been great influences on my writing: Gram Slaton, who nagged and provoked me to write plays when I was living in New York and who critically and patiently took me through the endless drafts of my first scripts; and Phil Bosakowski, whose friendship and sly, wise, good humor delighted and sustained me from the day we met in 1990 until his death in 1994. His wife Gay will remember the night at the O'Neill when Phil gave me this bit of advice about a character in a play of mine: “It would be nice if he did something.”

To all of them—and to my wife Lisa, who lives with every draft for the run of the show—my great and good thanks.