The theatre should reflect America as it's lived in today. And that is a multicultural America.

I remain committed to telling the stories of women of the African diaspora, particularly those stories that don't often find their way into the mainstream media.

Once working people discover that, collectively, we have more power than we do as individual silos, then we become an incredibly powerful force. But I think that there are powers that be that are invested in us remaining divided along racial lines, along economic lines.

Silence is complicity. I believe that.

By and large, the theatre establishment is run by a white majority.

I'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.

All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized... erased from the public record.

We live in a global society, and I don't think we can talk about, quote unquote, 'American themes' anymore.

I feel like 'Sweat' arrived on Broadway at the moment that it needed to. I feel like a commercial audience was not prepared for 'Ruined' or 'Intimate Apparel' for many different reasons.

Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.

I wonder: Would there be a black president if people hadn't already begun imagining, through film and television, that a black man is president? It's self-actualization.

I am a Tony voter; it is an honor that I take seriously. Each season, I enter the process with a degree of enthusiasm and optimism, which dissipates as I slowly plow through show after show.

I teach at Columbia, and I'm always looking for books I can lose myself in during the 45 minutes I'm on the train.

It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way.

American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.

The great thing about 'Vera Stark' is that my research was watching movies, screwball comedies, so I could literally sit back and relax.

I was repeatedly told that there isn't an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, 'Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don't do it?' I said, 'I think you're wrong.'

Ultimately, we're incredibly resilient creatures. People really do get on with the business of living.

We need to diversify the people who are backstage and producing and marketing these shows. It's the limitations of these people that are holding Broadway back.

In my family history, there are generations of women who were abandoned by men. It's one of the themes of my family.

If you lead with the anger, it will turn off the audience. And what I want is the audience to engage with the material and to listen and then to ask questions. I think that 'Ruined' was very successful at doing that.

My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.

Before I start, I create a set list that I listen to while I'm writing. For 'Intimate Apparel,' I loaded Erik Satie, Scott Joplin, klezmer music, and the American jazz performer and composer Reginald Robinson.

I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.

I've been asked a lot why didn't 'Ruined' go to Broadway. It was the most successful play that Manhattan Theatre Club has ever had in that particular space, and yet we couldn't find a home on Broadway.

By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.

I wrote 'Ruined' and 'Vera Stark' at the same time. That's just how my brain functions - when I'm dwelling someplace very heavy, I need a release.

As a woman of color, slowly and with some coercing, the not-for-profit theaters around the country are beginning to recognize and embrace the power of our stories, but with regards to Broadway and other commercial venues, we remain very much marginalized and excluded from that larger creative conversation.

The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.

If the Tony Awards want to remain relevant in the American theater conversation, then they need to embrace the true diversity of voices that populate the American theater.

I always describe race as the final taboo in American theatre. There's a real reluctance to have that conversation in an open, honest way on the stage.

Broadway is a closed ecosystem.

I am interested in people living in the margins of society, and I do have a mission to tell the stories of women of colour in particular. I feel we've been present throughout history, but our voices have been neglected.

What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.

I always thought of my mother as a warrior woman, and I became interested in pursuing stories of women who invent lives in order to survive.

Even in Congo, where conflicts are happening, people have births, weddings, deaths, and celebrations.

Here's the dilemma of the modern age: There used to be actions that workers could take, in the form of a strike. But now, that's being pre-empted by lockouts. They don't even have that leverage to protect their jobs.

African American women in particular have incredible buying power. Statistically, we go to the movies more than anyone. We have made Tyler Perry's career. His films open with $25 million almost consistently.

I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire.

We use metaphors to express our own truths.

My hobby is raising my children.

My parents are avid consumers of art, collectors of African American paintings, and have always gone to the theater. My mother has always been an activist, too. As long as I can remember, we were marching in lines.

I need a release from whatever I'm writing.

Each play I write has its own unique origin story.

In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.

Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.

I love Twitter.

I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother's gaze.

In many ways, I consider those to be my formative years, because when you're in school, you have a distant relationship to the world in that most of what you're learning is from books and lectures. But at Amnesty, I came face to face with realities in a very direct and harsh way.

There's never any ebb in human misery.