“Hurt is the human condition. Fortunately, hurt is not the only human condition. Humans also feel hope and love and fear and confusion and power and glory.  They experience frustration and defeat and triumph.  They long for the wrong person, they make bargains with the devil, they take things that don’t belong to them, they have fatal flaws and outrageous fortune, they make the same mistake again and again, and sometimes they learn things.  What we need to do, as playwrights, librettists and composers, is not try for a seat at the table, we just need to say what it has felt like to be a lone, living human in our time. The playwrights who convey the human condition, who chart the desperate path of one human toward one goal, those are the playwrights we treasure.  The plays that tell the stories we need to hear, because we are traveling the same road, those are the plays that survive.”

Marsha Norman, Pulitzer Prize winning Playwright, Screenwriter, Author, Teacher