I hit a brick wall in my theatre work because I was only looking for ways to take plays from other cultures—South African, Scandanavian, Renaissance English—and make them relevant to ours. Those kinds of cultural translation efforts are very valuable, especially in theatre, where you can make cultural anthropology palpable and observable on stage—you can 'transport' people to another world at the drop, literally, of a hat.

But the root, we need produce our own, indigenous art works. We should be speaking of our own experience, not retrofitting others'.

In theatre, this is difficult for Americans because, unlike European, African, and Asian cultures, we have so little performative history to tap into: no ancient rituals for banishing the rain, not many folk dances, no widely-held liturgical tradition. . . . Where should our performances come from? ([chomping cigar] "Why, in my day, kid, there was a thing called a Vaude-ville!") In colonial, puritan America, theatre was banned or shunned as unvirtuous; when it finally got moving, it was simply bad, having no fine artisans to pass on the craft and no audiences prepared to do their part of the work. American theatre didn't become original and probing until well into the twentieth century—after movies had already made their move on the American psyche. Film is a distinctly different art form than theatre, even though they share certain techniques in common; film is where our national dreams will be played out. And, at a price of a million dollars for the cheapest film, it is necessarily a materialistic medium. Unsurprisingly, perhaps.