Biography

Finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play "Dying City".

[re Four (2013)] Choosing to be hands off, as I did, has its positive and negative sides. I chose not to write the screenplay because I knew it would end up being the director's vision anyway. The benefit of this is that it really lets the director make the movie his or her own. There's nothing worse than a movie that just feels through and through like a play. Even if this results in a movie that doesn't always feel true to one's play, the play still exists the way you wrote it, so anyone can see how it differed from the movie. I was deeply moved by the performances in ["Four"]. I felt like I was watching real people, and I don't think that's a feeling you can really achieve in the theater. The only thing I didn't like were some additional scenes and dialogue added by the director. They tipped the movie towards melodrama, where the play is more restrained.