Maybe It Will Help me Get Grants

My conscious influences; Shakespeare, Chekhov, J.M. Synge, Bertolt Brecht, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Luigi Pirandello. Also, probably, Naomi Wallace and Carol Churchill.

People I doubt are influences: Ibsen, Strindberg, Eugene O'Neil (maybe), Tennessee Williams (even though "Streetcar" is one of the best plays ever).

People I really like who may be subconscious influences: Arthur Miller (compassion, character, craftsmanship, issues), David Mamet (spare musical muscular language full of raw emotion and subtext), Lanford Wilson (lyrical music, wide-ranging eye for real subjects), George Walker ("nothing sacred" I saw when I was 14. I was so stunned I forgot to give a standing ovation. So was the rest of the audience).

Who I'd like to be influenced by: Dario Fo. I should read more.

Other important influences: Classical music. Jazz music. Live clubs full of young people and rock n'roll. Visual art -- especially the cubists. Also dutch masters and early 20th century American artist like Edward Hopper. And WPA art. Antonin Artuad who I probably read at a too young, too easily influenced age, what can you do?

More detail about who I emulate:
Shakespeare -- everything, of course, the language, the plots, the beauty, the power but consciously, I want to capture the wide-ranging, varied nature of all his plays. They bring in a world. They change up in style and tone constantly. They are not minimal. They are raucous and ambitious and free.
Chekhov -- life on stage precisely without somehow being as tedious and undramatic as life actually is. How does he do that? One thing is that he fits in to no category. He plays by no rules. His work is the most original of all playwrights because it is neither conventional nor avant-garde. It is entirely its own thing. . . I wish I could.
J.M. Synge: Story and language and delight and melancholy. An obsession with death counterbalanced by an obsession with the funny moment. And the language. And the sense of straight ahead, here we go, story telling. The ear. He writes like people talk but obviously don't talk. Careful listening.
Brecht; i think our entire culture has internalized the "alienation effect' without even realizing it. I was doing brecht stuff in my plays before I ever read brecht. But what I learned when I read him is that his plays are incredibly emotionally engaging. (I saw the last performance of the Berliner Ensemble which was the first America. It was so entirely carried away by this incredibly dynamic performer.) We are alienated enough, sure, to use our intellectual to analyze what we're seeing but we're not distanced. The effect comes from the way in which we are emotionally engaged moment to moment at the same time that we are thinking. I love that! Who else does that?
Edward Albee: first playwright I read. Thought I'd written the "Zoo Story" in my head when I read it at the age of 15. Said in an interview that he didn't write stage directions but wrote language like a musical score on the page. Have been doing that ever since and its totally fucked me up. Readers don't give me the benefit of the doubt that they give Albee when they're reading a confusing stage directionless script.
Sam Shepard: Freedom. Anything happens. Raw. Emotional. unintellectual. Feels the closest to music, jazz or classical or rock n' roll, in the theater that I've ever experience. The American mythology shoved in there.
Luigi Pirandello: So much fun. So smart. So intelligent and so compassionate about people and character. i have never ever seen a bad production of 6 characters in search of an author. How is that possible? because with all the tricks its the most true of anything. He's able to be theatrical and philosophical while also being real and alive and compassionate to people and their struggles. He brings the theater off the stage. It needs to come off the stage.

Naomi Wallace and Carol Churchill: They are living examples of exciting, emotional, complex work that combines fascinating stories, beautiful language, unique structure. They write music for the stage. I've actually modeled plays of mine off of specific plays of theirs. (Cloud 9 and In the Heart of America).