In an interesting way, poetry and drama are not that far apart. They seem much closer to me than poetry and novels, for instance, or even short stories. It’s because of all the things you cannot say both in poetry and in drama—the fact that you know language is not enough, that it will never be enough. You go in there realizing that; you’re armed with language, and it’s all you have. When I was writing this play, I almost never felt that I was in a strange country where I didn’t know the landmarks. It wasn’t quite a familiar landscape, but it wasn’t really frightening; I could find my way. In poetry, there’s so much you can’t say because part of the task is to let the silence reverberate, to let each word mean everything that it can mean. In drama, you can’t know what’s running around in someone’s head unless you write a soliloquy or an aside. So language-wise, the concerns and limitations are often very similar. While writing drama, I learned how to develop a monologue, how much of the pacing of words and silence can be controlled at the script level. How many stage directions are enough, how much of the time and pacing I can orchestrate in a particular scene on the page, so that when I leave the play to a cast and director, it doesn’t turn into something totally different.

The most challenging aspect of writing this drama for me, oddly enough, was the soliloquy. Poetry is all about interior thought; the theater tends to be about action. And yet the most critical dramatic passages are often those in which one character shares her thoughts with the audience. In my earliest versions of the play, no one had any monologues. It seemed unnatural to have a character simply talk to the audience. Even though poetry can be one long soliloquy, the tone of voice is often a whisper, a voice overheard rather than heard. That leap was a difficult one for me.

When writing plays, you have to keep asking yourself, how do I get this into the most streamlined form without being histrionic? How do I pull the theatergoers into this world I am creating? As a poet, I tend toward understatement and subtlety. As a playwright, I must find other modes of expression. When working on the play, I found it liberating to use utterance and movement in order to introduce subtlety into the play. There were things I could do that would not work in a poem because it would seem too—I don’t want to say bombastic—but flamboyant. Like shouting.