The Playwright's Muse

August Wilson penned his first play after seeing a man shot to death. Horton Foote began writing plays to create parts for himself as an actor. Edward Albee faced commercial pressures to modify his scripts-and resisted. After Wit, Margaret Edson swore off playwriting altogether and decided to keep her day job as a kindergarten teacher, instead. The Playwright's Muse presents never-before-published interviews with some of the greatest names of American drama-all recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize. In these scintillating exchanges with eleven leading dramatists, we learn about their inspirations and begin to grasp how the creative process works in the mind of a writer. We learn how their first plays took shape, how it felt to read their first reviews, and what keeps them writing for theater today. Introductory essays on each playwright's life and work, written by theater artists and scholars with strong professional relationships to their subjects, provide additional insight into the writers' contributions to contemporary theater.

Library Journal

This is a wonderful collection of interviews with 11 Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatists, among them Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, Jonathan Larson, Neil Simon, August Wilson, Horton Foote, and Wendy Wasserstein. As the title suggests, the linking theme is the question of what inspires the dramatist to write, and the interviewers ask pertinent questions about both the playwright and the plays. A separate essay by a scholar or theater artist precedes most of the interviews and serves as a good source of introductory material about the dramatist. One exception is the chapter on Margaret Edson, the author of Wit. Here, comments by the interviewer are interspersed with the interview itself, a technique that works quite well as the playwright's and the interviewer's comments often highlight each other. Edson stands out in this collection for two reasons: she is a one-play wonder, and she has no intention of leaving her job teaching kindergarten in the Atlanta school system. Perhaps because she does not consider herself a professional playwright, as do the other ten writers, hers is one of the most interesting chapters. Recommended for all academic libraries and libraries with significant theater collections. Susan L. Peters, Univ. of Texas, Galveston Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Joan Herrington is Director of Women's Theatre and Associate Professor of Theatre at Western Michigan University. She is author of I Ain't Sorry For Nothin' I Done: August Wilson's Process of Playwriting.