When writing Friendly Fire: A Forty-niner’s Life with the Me-Wuk, in 1995, I was acting, and thinking, locally. The impetus had been my indignation when I discovered how completely the story of the genocide of native peoples had been excluded from my education in California’s public schools. Of course I was aware that European people had been laying waste to indigenous cultures for at least 500 years of colonization, but I was only thinking about what had happened in my state, and indeed in my own back yard. This was surely a good thing for the play. I had chosen… [Continue reading]

Writing a play may or may not be a crime, but to create a produced play one needs the same ingredients. You must write a play that can be performed within the means of a theater. You must be motivated to write the play. And there must be an opportunity for it to be shown before an audience. In 1994, when I was working at Sierra Repertory Theatre there was an engaging young Chinese American actress named Tricia Dong. The management at Sierra Rep had an interest in producing a play on the Japanese Internment and suggested that I write… [Continue reading]

As of this writing in the summer of 2016, Money Man is our most recent play. It imagines what Alexander Hamilton might have said to a group of friends who have come to be with him in the hour before he is rowed across the Hudson River to engage in his fateful duel with Aaron Burr. People, quite logically, question why on earth I would write a Hamilton play in light of the overwhelming impact of Lyn-Manuel Miranda’s fabulously successful musical that opened on Broadway just before Money Man opened in a small town in the California foothills. It’s true… [Continue reading]