Write a play a day while you’re on hiatus from your TV show. What it became? What it has become? Mind-blowing. That told me what it was going to be: Write a play a day. They tell me what they’re going to be, up to a certain point.

Now I can look at the play and say, Wake up to the love. Twenty years ago, I wasn’t saying wake up to the love. It bursts through the way that theater says it needs to be. What was it then? People have told me it showed a lot of people who come to theater how art can be. I discover what it is as we’re creating it-not so much the text, but the event of it. I receive, I work very hard on the text and the production, and I see what it is. How did it get the audience to dig in 20 years ago? They’d never seen it before, they’d never heard of it, and it was saying, like, This is some real shit. How does the play get the audience to dig in in a different way now? We’re 20 years on from when Topdog/Underdog first hit Broadway. Or everything is available and used to knock you off the path. Everything is available to help you stay on the path. Someone might say something that rubs you the wrong way, and they might not be intentionally trying to fuck with you, and you’ve got to just remember, Right, I’m gonna stay in peace, I’m gonna stay on course. Just knowing that you’re not alone in this journey. If someone says something that knocks you off course, what do you do?

It is 2022, and it is time for me to speak to that. Billie Holliday or Native Son or Girl Six, I am dedicated to transmitting the beautiful song, capital S, of the soul, the song of the spirit.

The Negro Book of the Dead, all the way through, even when I do a work for hire, like Genius: Aretha or The United States vs. All the way back from The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, a.k.a. And the people who participate with me in the creation of that work become sacred agents. I’m realizing, when I’m doing my work, when I’m in the groove of my purpose, capital P, when I’m in the lane with my higher self, big S, that my work is an agent of the sacred. It changed some internal chemistry in me. I had never been in a theater where a play was so alive with its audience. I saw the 2003 production of this play at the Royal Court in London.

Topdog play