Because I didn't go to graduate school or have mentorship out of college, meeting other playwrights and developing those friendships as a result of being a 'grown up' playwright - that's become an essential community for me. My contemporaries are all my mentors whether they know it or not.

Stephen Karam

Categorized in : Me School College Community

As playwrights, as poets, we have to look to ourselves, listen to our guts for the final answers about what changes to make. Everyone has advice about how to end your play differently. And it's not about right or wrong. At the end of the day, it's your baby and you know what's best.

Stephen Karam

play advice baby

So much of great American drama has been about a certain kind of dysfunctional family, and maybe my interests are in the kind of strange dysfunction that exists even among deeply functional families.

Stephen Karam

dysfunction strange drama

In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one's heart sank.

Stephen Karam

understanding heart reality

The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.

Stephen Karam

writing night wrestling

Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.

Stephen Karam

levels play writing

There's this unspoken history that exists between any mother and daughter, no matter how deep and loving the bond is, twenty-five years of being raised by someone, there's a kind of deep history which means that there are shortcuts to getting on each other's nerves.

Stephen Karam

daughter mother mean

I'm always very self-conscious and assume the way faith or religion might come up in my plays will seem very harsh to people of faith, or who are currently practicing.

Stephen Karam

self play people

I know how much respect I have for people of all different faiths, but especially for my family, who are the most important people in my life, and who are still practicing, and deeply religious.

Stephen Karam

important religious people

Priests are very interested in theater in New York! It's this lovely reminder that priests are just people, too, who need to be entertained.

Stephen Karam

lovely new-york people

I do think it's fascinating to see a play where everybody's sort of, in various ways, uprooted, and you see the older generation, the parents, whose faith has been something concrete that has guided them through a specific set of hurdles and circumstances.

Stephen Karam

parent play thinking

I'm still learning so much with every play I write. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts. I think you have to be ruthless.

Stephen Karam

play writing thinking

Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts.

Stephen Karam

regret night thinking

Suddenly you're at church and you hear someone pray, "For gays and lesbians, that they might realize their [sins]...." That's happening less and less now, but all it takes is one of those when you're nine, ten, eleven, twelve - and it's hard to describe to people who aren't, because of course if you're not gay, an eleven- or twelve-year-old wouldn't even remember that that happened.

Stephen Karam

gay people years

I guess we all feel like underdogs. I remember being a freshman at Brown University and not knowing what a WASP was. We were reading an Edward Albee play, and - it was just a moment of accepting, certainly that I wasn't very worldly, but also that a lot of the plays that I'd been reading, let's say other kinds of family plays, were speaking a foreign language.

Stephen Karam

knowing reading play

I definitely prefer to write under my own volition and see what happens.

Stephen Karam

own see my-own happens

The human condition is endlessly fascinating to me, and the existential horrors of life are what drive our imaginations and theater in general.

Stephen Karam

human drive me life

I think it's scary to be alive, but also exhilarating and joyful.

Stephen Karam

i-think think joyful alive

'The Cherry Orchard' is a masterpiece, and there can never be too many adaptations.

Stephen Karam

cherry too never masterpiece

I was not exposed to a lot of culture. The shows we saw in high school, like 'Phantom of the Opera' and 'Miss Saigon,' were thrilling. But my love affair with theater started with seeing a production of 'Little Shop of Horrors' that my sister was in.

Stephen Karam

sister love culture school

My own journey as a writer has been the discovery of different theatrical voices. Chekhov was a revelation. Tennessee Williams was another one. We read 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and I still remember the cover.

Stephen Karam

my-own journey remember school