As Sarah writes in The Forward...

It's easy to feel powerless as the great political wheels turn, financed by enormous wealth.

But then I thought about what starts every grassroots movement, people organizing in one room.

And as ill-suited as some theater artists are to some meanings of the word organizations, There's one thing we tend to do well, and that is to organize people to come to one room.

A

play is never finished.

I mean, Passion Play was almost 12 years from beginning to end.

I wrote the foreword of Passion Play during Bush-Georgia W.'s tenure when we were at war in Iraq.

Arriving at age 15 from Cuba with her widowed mother and speaking only Spanish, Maria was a founder and former leader of Intars Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratories.

She credits

We'll be right back.

Hi, my name is Sarah Rule.

I'm a playwright and I've taught at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale for, I think it's been 14 years now.

And I have had six plays at Yale Repertory Theater.

Who is the Wendy Wasserstein Room at 149 York Street named for? Playwright Wendy Wasserstein was known for, in her own words, serious plays that are funny.

In 1976, she got her MFA from Yale School of Drama.

And have there been ideas that have come out of that class that have sort of influenced your writing in return or...?

I think, I think maybe unconsciously.

Um, I had once given a, a prompt to my students to write-- I was teaching a class on Ovid and plays of transformation, and I was trying to explain this idea that there's Aristotle and there's Ovid, and there's-- So there's causality in Aristotle in a Greek sense, and then there's Ovid, who's writing stories where the, the transformation and the pleasure in the tale told is, is the dramaturgy.

And so we would read Ovid, and we would read plays that I felt like had that kind of moment-to-moment sense of transformation.

And then I would-- I, I said, "Write a play where there is one sudden transformation, one non-human, um, one song, and one sort of talisman object." And they wrote wonderful plays.

Um, some great plays came out of that.

MJ Kaufman's play, Sagittarius Ponderosa, which I really love.

And so I wonder, too, in terms of the element of song, I know a lot of your plays feature music in one way or another, and how do you decide sort of when that is appropriate to incorporate and who should write it and all of that?

Directing feedback and figuring out what to do with it is a crucial skill for playwrights.

What I really hope students come out of the program with, the first thing I would say is an ability to titrate feedback, and I'll say to them, "I want you to be like a blue whale." They have these enormous sieves in their digestive tracts, these huge systems where they can just open their mouth, swallow, and fish comes in, and krill comes in, and then, you know, stuff that they don't need comes in.

So three years at Yale School of Drama, I think, is like being a whale swimming in the ocean, and tons of things come at you, and you have to remain open enough that you're allowing things to rush in.

But you also have to learn to filter and become your own compass point, your own measure, and be able to say, "Ah, that's a really good note.

That's what I'm trying to do," or, "Hmm, if I did it that way, it would be your play." Because playwriting is this bizarrely democratic genre.

You hear feedback from all kinds of people.

It's not just dramaturgs and teachers.

Things on your list should be like, what can you do? What's in your control, right? Change the language around it," right? Instead of I wanna get an agent, "I wanna interview agents." So it's about changing the language so that you're putting it in the control in your hands because it's really about what are you doing to help yourself and to boost your career.

It's letting them off the hook a little bit.

It d- it did.

It let them off the hook a little bit, and I think it was partly that Joyce had an ensemble theater company, and so she was interested in giving good parts out to many people, so partly, I think she wanted to give both these actors a chance.

I think the culture was probably more conservative at that time around sexuality and gender, 'cause it would've been, God, you know, 25 years ago.

Um, and I think, funnily enough, she and I just didn't talk about it.

We didn't...

We, we both assumed in our minds that the other would've made the same choice, so it wasn't sort of until we got to rehearsal, we realized we had different notions of it.

Did any of your plays come from a prompt like that, a specific prompt where someone was trying to give you a prompt?