Your play "'night Mother" won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the same year that Alice Walker's book, "The Color Purple," won for Fiction. Had you read the novel that year? If not, when was your first read?  

I first read The Color Purple soon after it was published. Then I three or four more times getting ready to go talk to Spielberg about writing the movie, which I ultimately did not get to do. Then I read it again twice more getting ready to talk to Scott Sanders and Gary Griffin about doing the musical, and then I read it maybe another 15 times doing the musical. And if we do some other versions of the musical, I'll probably read it again. I see something new every time.    

You arrived in the process with "The Color Purple" the musical when, asyou've stated, "they didn't really know what was needed to make it work.They had all the songs, they had the story but they didn't have the rightstring to put the pearls on; they didn't have the underlying structure." Who determined that you were the one to string the pearls?  

Scott Sanders, the producer, and Gary Griffin, the director were the ones who decided I was the one to string the pearls. I read the material they had at that point, listened to the songs, and then talked to them about what I thought they needed to do.  

Did you have to be convinced? 

No, it wasn't me who needed convincing. I was ready to talk to anybody as long as was necessary to get the chance to work on this great novel. 

You've said that "musicals make use of different writing muscles." How so? 

The big difference is that a play exists for its big speeches and powerful scenes, but a musical asks you to get through the scenes as quickly as possible, so you can get to the songs. The songs are the emotional heart of a musical. The big dramatic moments, the big realizations, which would be spoken in a play, must be sung in a musical. The challenge for the bookwriter is providing a structure for the entire piece, writing the transitions in and out of the songs, and making sure the whole thing has a big arc, with characters that sound like the same person whether they're singing or speaking. The bookwriter is in charge of the flow of the musical, how the whole piece goes together.   

You had a tremendous challenge to highlight the parts of the story that were the most theatrical yet somehow maintain the full range of the novel. You've stated: "It becomes more daunting when you get down to the nuts and bolts of the actual writing. Turning a successful novel into musical-theater piece is more than cutting up a sofa to make a chair."  What did you do first?   

The first thing I did was to get clear about what Celie's story actually was. The danger in adapting The Color Purple would be to get distracted by the big showy characters like Felicia and Shug. Even Mister is more entertaining than Celie. But Celie is the center of the story, the one we want to root for, so each scene has to be a step in her journey. Celie can't be passive, someone who is just reacting to what happened to her. I began by seeing the story in terms of who Celie talked to - first God, then her sister, then Sofia after Nettie is thrown out, then Shug, and finally, herself. I looked at the way her questions changed over the piece, but made it clear she was always asking them, and expecting answers. I looked at the lessons Celie had to learn, and found ways to show her progress toward that self-love that is waiting for her in the second act.  

What did you bring to this process that another playwright couldn't have? 

I think it helped that I am from the south and am a woman. It also helped that I had done Broadway musicals before, and had a lot of musical experience from having grown up playing the piano. I could help put together the big musical scenes because I knew how the machinery worked. I love that part, actually. 

The story spans four decades with a musical score that seamlessly reflects the changing times through the black musical genres prevalent then in the South - including gospel, ragtime, jazz and the blues. How did the score influence your writing? 

The score has wonderful characters written into it. Basically, I took those voices, and used them for the scenes. 

You've said that your next challenge is to prove that you can be funny and write comedy. Is it harder to write a comedy?  

I guess comedy is the hardest thing of all. That's what the comedians say, anyway. Somebody, I forget who, Donald Wolfit, maybe, a British actor, said on his deathbed, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."  But I don't really want to write a comedy. I just want to keep writing the kinds of things that make people laugh in The Color Purple, like the line about Jermaine missing the picnic because he had to go to college.   

What are you working on now?

I'm working on another musical, but I'm not free to talk about it yet.   

What was the most important piece of advice you received as a young,up-and- coming writer?  

Lanford Wilson told me, regarding critics, that if you just stayed around long enough, sooner or later they would realize that you weren't going away and they'd stop trying to drive you out. 

What advice do you give your students today? 

I tell them to find something in their past, some time when they were really scared and write about that. Jon Jory gave me that advice, and I pass it along to everyone who asks. I tell students to only write the work that they have to write, the stories that are theirs alone to tell, the stories that we won't know unless they write them. I tell them that if they can tell the story in any other form than the theatre, they should do it, that we should only write things for the theatre that belong there, that have to be seen to be believed. I tell them to find good people to work with, people they can count on. And I tell them to look for theatres who are producing work like theirs, and send their work to those theatres, ones close to home preferably. And I tell them not to give up.

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