MY: What is your play about?
MB: My play is a contemporary, freewheeling adaptation of Euripides' play, Iphigenia Among the Taureans --more commonly translated as Iphigenia in Tauris, although I was also influenced by Goethe's version, and by the Gluck opera. Like the Greek original, the play is really a romance, about how individuals go on after the wreckage of war, domestic or global, and how they begin to return home. Also like the original, the play is dance theatre --but I have used the notion of dances and songs and as springboard, and am in no way faithful to Euripides' designations.

MY: How long have you been writing plays? What was the first piece you ever wrote?
MB: This is my very first play. I started it about 2 years ago. I started translating the Euripides' from the French --we were in France-- in order to understand the play.

MY: How do you write? What process do you go through to tell your story?
MB: I write erratically. In this case, I started from the Euripides' -- and the essential framework of his play remains intact. Whereas most playwright probably work towards telling a story in a coherent way, I've mostly been looking for ways to take apart the original structure, to build in digressive plots and movements, in order to re-frame the story in a contemporary way.

language in very contemporary, jagged ways. I'm also married to an extraordinary writer, Chuck Mee, and we talk about plays and art all the time, and he, more than anyone is an inspiration.

In fact, I asked him to write this play for me, and he said no, saying that he had a different notion about the play and that if I wanted what I wanted, I should write it myself. I make it sound harsh,which it wasn't, it was an extraordinary act of support -- from then on, he coaxed and cajoled me, and without him, I probably would never have even considered writing a play.

MY: What is your favorite play/theater piece? What was it about the piece that makes it your favorite?
MB: I hate naming favorites, so i won't!

MY: Anything else you think audiences should know?
MB: I think that's it --although I'd like the audience to know that it took me a year to get Julian Barnett on board for this reading -- and if nothing else-- they should come see him dance because he's truly extraordinary and pretty soon they won't be able to see him for FREE! Ditto for my actors.
A lso, my ancient greek tutor will be reading Athena's speech in ancient greek -- so for anyone who wonders what it sounds like, they can get a free tutorial!

MY: If you were stranded on an island with your fellow Labbies, and had to choose a fellow writer to sacrifices in order to live, who would that be and why?
MB: My play is actually all about sacrifices and the cost of human sacrifice in war and in family, so i just can't choose --sorry!

MY: What is your play about?
ML: On a lonely platform, two gods make paper gifts for each other, creating a violent and unpredictable play world for their paper dolls. On a lonely pair of islands, a man and a woman enact the machinations of the paper gods. Inspired by Greek, Roman, and Biblical creation stories, Paper Gods tests the connection between the human and the divine.

MY: What do you hope audiences who see your play will take with them?
ML: I hope that audiences will join me in questioning the interdependence of the gods and the mortals. I hope that audiences will feel the thrill of myth-making, the intoxication inherent in taking elements from our world and piecing them together into a greater narrative. But it's also a fun, cheeky play; I hope that after doing that we'll all just laugh and forget.

MY: How long have you been writing plays?
ML: I wrote my first plays in high school. They were goofy class projects co-written with my best friend. We were in a two-year humanities program that held an annual student-written Spring play. My sister is in the same humanities program now and is, in fact, writing their class play. My first real effort at writing came in college. That's when I got serious about becoming a director and a playwright.

MY: What was the first piece you ever wrote? What was it about?
ML: I wrote my first full-length play when I was a junior in college. It's called Three Men of Golgotha, and is composed of vignettes and monologues taken from the perspective of the minor characters of the New Testament. I tried to capture some of the lesser-known Biblical episodes, such as the story of how Jesus frees a man from demons and then places the demons into a herd of pigs. The scene takes place between the freed man and the pigherd.

Three Men of Golgotha calls for an ensemble of five in which one person plays Jesus and the others play several roles - the Gospels, Lazarus, the thieves on the cross, Judas, John the Baptist, etc. I wanted the play to hold evidence supporting a spectrum of beliefs so that a devout Christian could sit next to an atheist and both would say "this play reflects what I believe." I researched the play over the course of a summer. I bought a season pass to the San Diego Zoo and would sit by the orangutan exhibit every afternoon with my Bible, watching the old ladies who came to talk to the orangutans and bring them treats. They called themselves the "Orang Gang." Weird.

MY: How do you write? What process do you go through to tell your story?
ML: Most plays start out as an idea that I'll sit on for about a year. I have a long list of plays I need to write, but I don't actually get to writing them until much later than the idea first surfaces. During that time, I'm actively thinking about the play - plotting it out, coming up with characters, going over pieces of dialogue in my head. I find that whatever I'm reading or experiencing at the time also seems to worm its way into the world of the play.

When I finally do sit down to write, the first draft comes out pretty quickly because it's been gestating for so long; maybe over the course of a month. Then I'll slave over it editing for months and months. I think the editing is where the play really solidifies. Paper Gods is an exception to the one year rule. I thought up the idea and just attacked it immediately.

MY: What writers do you admire? Who/what influences your writing?
ML: My favorite writer is Steve Belber. I love the diversity of voices he uses for his characters, his subtle humor, and the bountiful human heart that bursts out of his plays. My favorite of his is Carol Mulroney, which I'd love to direct someday. I love Craig Lucas' recent plays for their bold political scope, and I'm awed by Beckett for his sparseness and his ability to craft real humans living in inhuman worlds. I admire Sarah Kane's plays for their wrenching despair.

I'm especially fond of Julia Cho's writing because it's so beautiful yet heartbreaking, and because she has Korean characters whose interests go beyond their Korean-ness. I think she's trailblazing the next wave of Asian-American theater by trailblazing the next wave of theater itself. I adore Anne Washburn's writing. She creates these lavish and unfamiliar landscapes that expand my conception of what's possible in the theater. She crafts these images and one-liners that are seared into my brain, taunting me to go farther with my writing.

MY: What is your favorite play/theater piece? What was it about the piece that makes it your favorite?
ML: My favorite play is The Cosmonaut's Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union, by the Scottish playwright David Greig. It's about two cosmonauts lost in space and a bevy of Europeans who are lost souls. I saw a production directed by Neel Keller at La Jolla Playhouse, and then I directed it my senior year of college. I love the play's pointed use of double casting and its disparate threads that all weave together through repeated imagery and events. The play is hugely challenging on every level - technically, intellectually, emotionally, structurally. Though I suppose it doesn't have to be challenging technically. The production I saw at La Jolla had the cosmonauts living inside a jaw-dropping space module in a gorgeously elegant set designed by Mark Wendland. But I hear that in the first-ever UK production, the cosmonauts simply held strings tethered to a pole.

MY: Anything else you think audiences should know?
ML: I'm in Youngblood, a young writers' group at Ensemble Studio Theatre. I have a reading of my new play A Better Babylon on July 10th at 8pm, at EST. I've been working on A Better Babylon and Paper Gods simultaneously. A Better Babylon is about my parents going to UC Berkeley during the 1960s and doing nothing revolutionary. I love how while Berkeley was on fire with protests and riots my parents were locked in their rooms studying organic chemistry. I also wanted to mention that my one-woman play Yit, Ngay (One, Two) is published in the anthology "Plays and Playwrights 2006." Yit, Ngay is about my mom and her three sisters growing up separated in China and America. One actress plays all four roles in monologues and self-dialogues.

MY: If you were stranded on an island with your fellow Labbies, and had to choose a fellow writer to sacrifices in order to live, who would that be and why?
ML: I would definitely take out Qui Nguyen. I wouldn't even want to eat him; he's in shape but he's a smoker so he'd probably taste stringy yet char-broiled. However, Qui is a martial arts genius and were I able to successfully kill him off, nobody would mess with me and try to eat me. It's like how if you chiv a guy on your first day in prison nobody messes with you after that.

MY: What is your play about?
SKL:Change, loss, the unravelling of secrets and the transformation that occurs when love breathes freely. It follows the rise and fall of an aristocratic Korean family one generation after the end of the Korean War.

MY: What do you hope audiences who see your play will take with them?
SKL: I hope that my audience will realize how intertwined public history is enmeshed with their personal ones; that there is no such thing as separation of public and private lives and that the most enduring thing that remains in all of history is love. Love of nations, love between parents and children, love of God/spirituality, love between lovers. It is the one thing that remains indestructible.

MY: How long have you been writing plays?
SKL: I've been writing professionally since 1997 when I came to New York after a year abroad in Paris and said "I am a writer."

MY: What was the first piece you ever wrote? What was it about?
SKL: My first play was called Mappings - it was a play about a triangle of women caught up in love affairs that were really a reflection of estrangement within intimacy, the hypocrisy of social conventions, and the impossibility of capturing transient things. When I take a closer look at it, however, it was really just about narcissism.

Narcissism within relationships under the guise of love. It was a direct reflection of my previous year being spent abroad in Paris, where I was ostensibly a student but really all I did was travel and eat different foods, and mess around in foreign relationships. I encountered my own identity there - being away from home forces you to confront who you really are, and I became much more of an honest patriate than ever before or ever since.

It was in Paris that I discovered James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room which was the most elegant, astute and heartbreaking account of the expatriate experience - so much of being abroad is being outside - of fluency, comfort, easy recognition and every other construct we have to assure ourselves of our worth. Being outsides forces you to take in beauty where it comes - from within.

MY: How do you write? What process do you go through to tell your
story?
SKL:One of my favorite authors, Jeannette Winterson, says that you know you've become a writer when you discover what your obsessions are. I would agree wholeheartedly with that. I have to have a strong, visceral relationship with my subject or else I get bored - and there are many other things I'd rather do besides work on my writing, namely, have a fine meal, buy pretty things, look at beautiful people, etc. It's easy to get lost in beauty in a city like New York where beauty is a dime a dozen.

Usually, I'll have a central topic - it could be an idea, like shamanism, which is what prompted Ancestors - or prosaic cowardice which leads to tragic destruction, which is what provoked my play Witness. Enron, and the strange, disempowered powerlessness that this scandal engendered in American society as a whole, prompted my play Worth. I usually want to figure out how a person's belief drives their actions into what eventually becomes unconscionable acts. Great deeds of mis-deed. How does evil happen?

Well, very simply. Evil is just good misunderstood, over emphasized. The

little personal acts of destruction we enact very easily lead to larger circumstances which we then find we can no longer control. So I guess it is fair to say that all my writing begins with a question. There has to be a burning question to the play otherwise it's just a display of writerly vanity and colossally boring for the audience.

MY: What writers do you admire? Who/what influences your writing?
SKL: ? I've already mentioned James Baldwin and Jeannette Winterson, two very different but gorgeous, gorgeous writers. They have so much craft and rigor and sensuality in their words and structure, I am startled almost every time I read it.

Lolita by Nabakov has to be one of the seven great wonders of the world - each page of that book is a monument. It destroys me every time I think of it - literally sends shivers up and down my spine and makes me break out into a sweat, just because he understood desire and shame and confusion and adolescence and women and men and desperation and humor and violence so well. In short, the man catalogued how to be human.

I also adore Fitzgerald because he was the voice of his generation - dissolute, sharp, crackling, acerbic to the point of explosion, tragic beauty and a larger than life sense of pathos which was informed, I suspect, largely by his own alcoholism and his close proximity to mental illness. He was a lost soul yet a luminous giant. He articulated then what we are experiencing as a culture now. The decadence and energy and sexiness and decay of American greed and hope and desire is all in Fitzgerald. I fucking love it. Woolf did the same for her culture but it was tighter. Her rigor and simultaneous lyricism is astonishing.

MY: What is your favorite play/theater piece? What was it about the
piece that makes it your favorite?
SKL: I will be an old fart and say King Lear. It is the original and still best, treatise on the glories and limits of power, of father and daughters, of loyalty and blind adherence, of family and tragic isolation. I love the character of Lear - he is such a fool, yet he is a fool that I relate to and feel sorry for and don't want to witness in this way.

He is a great man yet a pawn in the power game that ultimately devours everyone playing. It's also a wonderful literary journey into the phenomenon of emperor hath no clothes. There's a lot of subversion in Lear. Shakespeare doesn't give easy answers and none of these characters are so far from the truth that you can't see some beauty in them. Let's face it, the world is a brutal place and reversals are common. But I like Lear's journey. It's an epic journey.

MY: Anything else you think audiences should know?
SKL: People need to read more. We flip back and forth so quickly between our iPODs and blackberries and internet dating and global business and frequent flyer miles and everything else that goes along with hi fi everything. It's a wondrous world but I wonder how much of it we actually experience. I personally prefer pen and paper and afternoon naps.

MY: If you were stranded on an island with your fellow Labbies, and had to choose a fellow writer to sacrifices in order to live, who would that be and why?
SKL: I wouldn't sacrific anyone because I wouldn't get on the damn island in the first place. I'd stay home and watch it on television. Or better yet, I'd go out to dinner and read about it the next day at work when I have hours to surf the major papers of the world.

MY: What is your play about?
JPC:Fraternal twins having simultaneous mid-life crises (at age 35).

MY: What do you hope audiences who see your play will take with them?
JPC: It would be great if the play made the audience question the implications of the common idea (in our culture, anyway) that our lives have to have "direction." But I'll be happy enough if they just mutter "funny play" to themselves as they leave the theater.

MY: How long have you been writing plays?
JPC: Since 2003.

MY: What was the first piece you ever wrote? What was it about?
JPC: Out of embarrassment, my first piece shall remain nameless. It was a comedy about alter egos, and while it had some funny parts to it, I still feel bad that paying audiences had to sit through it.

MY: How do you write? What process do you go through to tell your
story?
JPC: Very slowly, unfortunately. Ideas simmer in my head for a really, really long time before they ever get to paper. I like editing my stuff much more than writing it, which I think is kind of backwards for most writers.

MY: What writers do you admire? Who/what influences your writing?
JPC: I love reading what great playwrights have to say about drama as much as I enjoy the works they produce. Writing can be so lonely and difficult that it helps to hear comforting words from other writers. The essays and interviews of David Mamet, Chuck Mee, David Henry Hwang, and John Patrick Shanley have all been inspirational to me in that regard.

MY: What is your favorite play/theater piece? What was it about the
piece that makes it your favorite?
JPC: My favorite always changes, but lately I've found myself re-reading Death of a Salesman. The more hopeful the characters get, the worse you feel because you know what's in store for them. It's just devastating.

MY: Anything else you think audiences should know?
JPC: I am not a fraternal twin.

MY: If you were stranded on an island with your fellow Labbies, and had to choose a fellow writer to sacrifices in order to live, who would that be and why?
JPC: I believe this question will be answered on the festival's closing night.

MY: What is your play about?
CC: A shut-in since his girlfriend left him, Silas decides to write his first short story to chronicle their relationship and woo her back. When the story becomes acclaimed, a young agent coerces Silas into beginning a volume of autobiographical short stories. When these stories are published and Silas begins to blow up, his estranged brother Finn knocks on his door, claiming that Silas has stolen his life.

In light of all the hubbub around the James Frey debacle and the prevalence of reality television, I wanted to explore the obligations of the writer in telling stories and asking what is true and what is fiction and what the difference is between storytelling embellishment and a flat-out lie.

MY: What do you hope audiences who see your play will take with them?
CC: I hope to examine all things I feel like people of my generation are stumbling through in, reflecting the urban landscape in which I live and work.

MY: How long have you been writing plays?
CC: I’ve been writing plays for about ten years.

MY: What was the first piece you ever wrote? What was it about?
CC: One of the first pieces I can recall writing as a playwright (I was a poet before that) was called “Wings.” It was an autobiographical coming-of age piece which I wrote and performed with what was then Peeling the Banana.

MY: How do you write? What process do you go through to tell your story?
CC: I’ll think about the story I hope to tell and then look for the characters who populate that world. Then, this will sound hokey, I ask them to speak to me. I listen, and I start to record them as they do what they want, run up against each other and run amok. Then, I might have to muscle in and give the story structure, make sure there are events for all the scenes, etc. But, it really starts with characters’ voices for me.

MY: What writers do you admire? Who/what influences your writing?
CC: Adam Rapp, Stephen Adly Guirgis, David Hare, Harold Pinter, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel.

MY: What is your favorite play/theater piece? What was it about the
piece that makes it your favorite?
CC: Favorite play? I don’t think you can separate the play from the play in performance, so I really like a production of Blackbird by Adam Rapp which I saw at Blue Heron Arts Center. It’s both a delicate character study and a love story, done in one room, simply but eventfully. I think I also like the play because the production I saw was a careful collaboration between Rapp and his two actors. Paul Sparks created an astonishingly flawed and beautiful Bayliss, equal parts bile and love. I think Bayliss’s incarnation was equal parts playwright, actor and directorial contributions.

My favorite plays are probably those which have this at work, true collaboration. I also loved The Last Days of Judas Iscariot for its’ ambition in tackling issues of faith and religion and loyalty. I love that Guirgis is fearless and tireless in pursuit of the truth of the play. This is also the product of Labyrinth, and a longtime collaboration between Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Guirgis, and the actors of the Lab. I hope to get a chance to work this way in the future, with people I know and trust who can push me to be my best, and to take chances, and vice versa.

MY: Anything else you think audiences should know?
CC: I hope the work speaks for itself.

MY: If you were stranded on an island with your fellow Labbies, and had to choose a fellow writer to sacrifices in order to live, who would that be and why?
CC: I would probably sacrifice myself because I’m Chinese and Catholic and that collected guilt wouldn’t allow me to go on living if I let someone die in order to survive instead of me. So, I would probably offer myself up. Besides, I’m Vegetarian.

MY: What is your play about?
ARP: Four friends who come together in their small, middle American hometown for a wedding.

MY: What do you hope audiences who see your play will take with them?
ARP: The awareness that middle America is not a Tom Sawyer whitewashed picket fence. And the realization that the marriage equality debate isn't just an issue to be manipulated by politicians to get people to vote. There are real lives and livelihoods being played with and exploited, and discussions that have to happen between everyday people, not between reporters, Democrats, or Republicans.

MY: How long have you been writing plays?
ARP: Twelve-ish years.

MY: What was the first piece you ever wrote? What was it about?
ARP: Getting dumped! It was the first and only time I have ever been dumped, and it SUCKED -- doesn't that merit a play? A Simple Footnote in the History of Jeremy was really more of a performance piece with ensemble, so topically it covered a lot of things I was thinking about while I dated this guy: gender politics and identity politics, specifically what it meant for me (a Filipino-American) to date a white guy.

MY: How do you write? What process do you go through to tell your story?
ARP: It's different for every play. In the case of Beautiful Day, I was sickened by all the representations of middle America as an all white landscape and wanted to write about my own experience growing up there. Michigan has the largest Middle Eastern population outside of the Middle East. There was also an influx of Asian immigrants during the '70's and '80's brain drain; Filipino, Japanese, and Indian people who work as doctors, nurses, engineers, and for Detroit auto-makers. But America's diversity is never shown on TV or even in plays. So I started out with the small idea to write about four friends of varied ethnicities, sexualities, and experiences reuniting in my hometown and dealing with the whole, "You can never go home again" thing.

As I was writing, though, the marriage equality debate pushed it's way into my consciousness and forced it's way into the play. For me, that discussion is similar to the idea of returning to one's hometown, though,

since it was basically about the Midwestern values of my childhood clashing with my current identity as a Filipino-American man in a long-term, mixed race relationship with a Cuban American man. And so the four main characters of Beautiful Day ended up coming together for a wedding while themselves dealing with divorces, deaths, and commitment issues in their own relationships.

MY: What writers do you admire? Who/what influences your writing?
ARP: Tony Kushner and Maria Irene Fornes are my biggest inspirations. I enjoy how Kushner examines political issues from multiple personal perspectives and I love how Fornes develops structure play by play instead of adhering to widely accepted ideas of how plays should be shaped. I also have great admiration for Diana Son who really inspired me as a teacher when I was still indecisive myself about committing to playwriting.

MY: What is your favorite play/theater piece? What was it about the piece that makes it your favorite?
ARP: Angels In America. It made me realize that inclusive writing doesn't mean that there's one play on Broadway for gay people, one for black people, one for straight people, and one way downtown for gay, multi lingual, Asian immigrants. Plays should reflect the audience and have all kinds of ideas, ethnicities/cultures, genders/gender-identities, faiths, and perspectives.

MY: Anything else you think audiences should know?
ARP: It takes three licks to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie pop. Oh, and "Pegging" is the practice of a woman sexually penetrating a man using a dildo or strap-on. Dan Savage coined the term. Just thought you should know.

MY: If you were stranded on an island with your fellow Labbies, and had to choose a fellow writer to sacrifices in order to live, who would that be and why?
ARP: I've been a vegetarian for nearly 11 years, so it would just be easier to give myself up and let everyone else eat me. Besides, since I don't eat meat, I'm probably the healthiest meal - very low in cholesterol.

MY: What is your play about?
RM: It is a 2 character play dealing with the unlikely friendship that burgeons in a diverse ethnic enclave between Farzana, a 19 year old sheltered Muslim girl, and Nora, a club-hopping 25 year old atheist.

MY: What do you hope audiences who see your play will take with them?
RM: I hope audiences will see a new take on cultural domination and how it plays into modern society. That and a few hearty chuckles.

MY: How long have you been writing plays?
RM: For decades. Yes, I can officially say that. Ever since Madonna's "Who's That Girl" broke out in cinema houses like the plague.

MY: What was the first piece you ever wrote? What was it about?
RM: The first one act I ever wrote was about an undiscovered model who got signed on by an agency headed by a high powered, ill-mannered, ballsy female exec (which I one day was going to grow up and become). The model falls in love and steals away the head photographer from the ballsy female exec. Oh come on, I was eight. What do you expect?

MY: How do you write? What process do you go through to tell your story?
RM: I go into a deep mediation when I write, and if you try to interrupt me I bite. Really. I do. I also like to write quick and dirty and then go back and

flesh it out more with themes and symbols. Layering is the hard but rewarding part and I tend to spend a lot of time percolating after the first draft.

MY: What writers do you admire? Who/what influences your writing?
RM: Writers I admire run the gamut – Tennessee Williams, Sarah Kane, Tom Stoppard, Lorraine Hansbury, Martin McDonaugh. My writing is shaped by the world I see around me. So unfortunately of late, Bush has been influencing my writing.

MY: What is your favorite play/theater piece? What was it about the piece that makes it your favorite?
RM: My favorite shifts with time but as of this very moment it's Pillowman. To me, its way of examining storytelling and its effects on society are absolutely riveting and disturbing. I like leaving the theatre actually feeling something, anything.

MY: Anything else you think audiences should know?
RM: I will be lurking behind you when you come see my show.!

MY: If you were stranded on an island with your fellow Labbies, and had to choose a fellow writer to sacrifices in order to live, who would that be and why?
RM: I would sacrifice myself because I feel like I already do a little bit of that every day in order to navigate through this treacherous and slippery world. How depressing is that?! Ha! That's what you get for trying to ask a funny question.

MY: What is your play about?
MK: Change, on the global and personal level.

MY: What do you hope audiences who see your play will take with them?
MK: Hmm...that's a tough one - hopefully, that change is not necessarily a bad thing.

MY: How long have you been writing plays?
MK: About ten years. Egads, has it been that long?

MY: What was the first piece you ever wrote? What was it about?
MK: I think the first play I wrote was in high school - it was called The Fortune Teller, about a con-artist fortune teller.

MY: How do you write? What process do you go through to tell your story?
MK: I generally have to let things stew for a while. With BOOM, things stewed for a LONG while - I wrote the one act version in 2001 - several people mentioned that there were enough issues in it that it could be easily expanded, but the time was right for me, so I let it sit in a drawer for about 4 years.

MY: What writers do you admire? Who/what influences your writing?
MK: The first question is easier to answer than the second. I admire: Alan Bennett, Christopher Durang, Theresa Rebeck, Theatre de Complicite...probably a lot more that just aren't coming to mind, right now.

MY: What is your favorite play/theater piece? What was it about the piece that makes it your favorite?
MK: Probably Mnemonic, by Theatre de Complicite, just because it was so gripping, and so much was accomplished with so little, in terms of the number of actors, set pieces, etc. I also really enjoyed a version of Midsummer Nights Dream that I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one year. It was performed by a college in Florida, and each scene moved to a different place in the park.

MY: Anything else you think audiences should know?
MK: Thanks for coming and supporting the work!

MY: If you were stranded on an island with your fellow Labbies, and had to choose a fellow writer to sacrifices in order to live, who would that be and why?
MK: I don't really want to go there, as I am by far the fattest lab member and would probably feed the largest number of people, but I'm not quite THAT self-sacrificing.

MY: What is your play about?
NC: Four emotionally disturbed people kidnap their therapist and go on a road trip. Subject to change.

MY: What do you hope audiences who see your play will take with them?
NC: I hope audiences that see my play take any candy wrappers, drinks and garbage they might have brought into the theater with them. I don't believe in littering.

MY: How long have you been writing plays?
NC: Since the fifth grade.

MY: What was the first piece you ever wrote? What was it about?
NC: The first play I ever wrote was about a worm named Herman who was always getting into unfortunate accidents. Casting Herman was hard. There aren't that many talented worms out there. A shame really.

MY: How do you write? What process do you go through to tell your
story?
NC: I just sort of jump in and start typing usually inspired by a song, sentence or situation. The characters take over and I essentially become a
stenographer.

MY: What writers do you admire? Who/what influences your writing?
NC: Besides the writers in the Ma-Yi Lab? Haruki Murakami, JD Salinger, Hesse, Wong Kar Wai, Wes Anderson are a few writers I really admire. I am heavily influenced by music and cereal boxes.

MY: What is your favorite play/theater piece? What was it about the piece that makes it your favorite?
NC: One of my favorites plays is "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf". It's biting, dark, and witty.

MY: Anything else you think audiences should know?
NC: Drugs are bad!

MY: If you were stranded on an island with your fellow Labbies, and had to choose a fellow writer to sacrifices in order to live, who would that be and why?
NC: Can I have another question? This is very similar to the one I was asked for FAQ battle royale. If I can't have another question... I'd sacrificed them all because that's the only fair thing to do. Equal treatment. I am all about being fair.

MY: Another question? Let's see, "Who in the Writers' Lab would be the first to eat you?"
NC: Michael Lew because he is evil. EVIL. 666. Michael Damien Lew. Red rum. Red rum!

MY: "What is the best way to serve a filet of Qui?"
NC: Rare and with a side of Lloyd.