For a while I've meant to write in a simpler vein. Bart Sher and I worked together on Chekhov's Three Sisters two seasons ago; the encounter with Chekhov started me thinking about the mundane, the moment to moment interaction between people living out of the limelight in domestic contexts: how lives change in the handing of a can of soda from one person to another.

I didn't want to write about the Iraq adventure out of my political creed. All hope of swaying an audience to a political position through playwriting is, in my view, in vain, stemming from a basic misunderstanding as to what art can do. Even the most persuasive conservative argument is not going to sway progressive minds - least of all in a play - and the opposite is true. I have never once, in a long life of theatergoing, heard one single audience member say, you know, I think I'm going to vote for the other party because of what this play has showed me.

A play may spark the beginning of compassion or thought, but the inspirations run deep, and change is very difficult and painful. The very best we can hope for, again, in my view, is to show the mess of life in such as way as to perhaps awaken our shared capacity for embracing life, reawakening to it in all its beauty and terror.

Political weariness inspires cynicism, and I am not particularly interested in plays where the audience is invited to laugh at the smallness of the characters and to take pleasure in their suffering. This kind of frame is very familiar to us from movies and TV. People are awful, just look. They are small and greedy and desperate, not just the housewives, but children, the well-educated: they will eat worms, they will stand up to hideous public scorn. Aren't they ridiculous? Aren't we just venal and corrupt and hypocritical?

Chekhov's great achievement is a kind of irony that never can be reduced to sarcasm. Irony - Socratic or Chekhovian - is never sarcastic. Let us leave the sarcasm to public figures. When we sit in the dark and face in the same direction, quietly awaiting a story, we hope together for a vision of something better than what can be sold over the airwaves or forced down our gullet by mass media.

- Craig Lucas