The play came out of love of the theatrical space, where some human beings are illuminated on the stage, and others are in darkness, watching. You have an interplay of breaths; you have tension between moving bodies and those stilled bodies attending. I have always found the theater to be a magical space, and I have often longed to enter it in some way.

In the end, I discovered that poetry and drama have more in common than Aristotle, with his so-called “classic dramatic unities,” may have cared to admit. Alfred Hitchcock once said that drama was “life with the dull bits cut out,” and Gwendolyn Brooks defined poetry as “life distilled”—where’s the big difference? For if a poet planes away unnecessary matter so that we can see clearly to the very core of the soul, a playwright commits the same sacred enterprise by training her spotlight on some select souls and then summoning the audience to listen, to bear witness in the dark.

Robert McDowell:

How did your musical training influence you?

Rita Dove:

I grew up with all kinds of music—blues and jazz and popular R&B. I have been actively involved in music since the age of ten, when I began playing the cello. Playing chamber music taught me the cadences of fugues and the power of harmony. I believe my poetry reflects an intense relationship to the music of the spoken word. Writing plays involves not only language but the interplay of various languages—different characters’ varying speech patterns and inflections, personalities—as well as the visible rhythms of bodies relating to each other. A domestic scene in a play is like a string quartet.

Robert McDowell:

What literary and theatrical influences do you acknowledge?

Rita Dove:

When I was in grade school I began to imitate the satiric comic strips I was reading in Mad magazine, which meant writing little plays involving my classmates and penning sardonic lyrics to popular tunes. During summer vacations, my brother—who is two years older than me—and I would enact radio plays which we found in the public library; our father rigged up a microphone to the stereo system, and we tormented our parents with endless murder mysteries involving oriental temples (so we could bang a lid as a gong) and waterfalls (holding the microphone next to the running faucet). And then there was Shakespeare. Shakespeare was one of my earliest literary influences. I began reading the tragedies when I was about eleven years old. No one told me they were difficult, so I stumbled through them on my own, deliriously happy to have found such rich language, such musical utterances. I started with Macbeth because my mother was always quoting it while making dinner: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” From there I went on to Julius Caesar, Othello, and Hamlet.