[Music] there is something inherently political about the theater well I think all plays are political politics is in everything we all do when you're in the theater you create an experience collectively the audience participates when you're all in it together as an audience you you ask bigger questions and you're talking about it and you're debating it that all theater is always going to be political if you're writing a play you want to say something about the world it's going to be about economics the government how we react to the state how that influences our lives it's going to be about gender it's going to be about class so I don't really know how any theater can't be political and it's actually a form of collective action in which you don't all have to have the same agenda we all have an agenda what is it well I know what the play's about but what's it really about what are the deeper themes that are going on within the play and those might be political i think I'm a political person so I think obviously that carries into my writing you don't choose to be a political play right you simply happen to see the world that way you know I continue to examine issues of race whether they be past or present or in the future because I just know that the seeds of it are still growing um in our in our world and you're going to express what it is you feel about the world which happens often to be expressed through politics i've I've been called before i've been called many many different name black or or whatever and so I needed to as a young person be able to understand it and put that in a context so I wouldn't take it personally human nature is inherently political you can't be a writer and not be fascinated by people and so one thing that we can do as playrs is we can dig into the multiple reasons why people do things that's very eye opening the first ever time I tried to write a full-length play it was about the minor strike in 1984 yeah I came from a village in Somerset and I had seen the the whole thing of sort of villages and farming being decimated i I remember seeing my town changed as pits closed and people became unemployed you kind of got to challenge your audience you need to weave it into a story it was also a human story it's about human characters and how they interact with each other all writing is is political because politics is about wants and needs that the politics comes through the storytelling and that's what drama is you know you write about what people are reaching for what they can't get what they can get i started uh writing plays about things that make me angry um I end up asking my teacher um for a specific scene that had two young Africanamean women in it she stood there for 10 seconds 20 seconds went by 30 seconds went by a whole minute went by and she couldn't think of a play that had a scene for two young black women so in that moment I decided I'm just going to have to write them myself [Music]