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David Henry Hwang and Suzan-Lori Parks

Hwang, ’79, is best known for his Tony Award-winning play M. Butterfly and the book for the musicals Aida and Tarzan.

Ken Collins

Parks’s recent work includes 365 Days/365 Plays, an exercise in which she wrote a play every day for a year.

Ken Collins

‘I like being able to be part of a collaboration; I like being able to set a foundation which inspires another artist, which inspires a director. Different playwrights have different degrees of tolerance about messing with the text. I tend to be encouraging of messing with the text.’

‘I love Eugen Herregel’s Zen in the Art of Archery. He talks about learning archery, not in order to learn how to hit the target, but rather in order to learn how to understand the mind. . . . [U]nderneath all the waves and all the layers, I practice writing in order to understand the mind.’