I tend to write two plays at the same time: now one play, which I describe as a tragedy, and the other play which is a comedy. It’s like the yin and yang of Lynn Nottage. A play like Ruined, which took me into the forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo with women who were victims of rape, I found that I needed some place to escape periodically, and so I had to write another play, which at the time was By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, and that became my refuge.
When I was writing Intimate Apparel, which was a play that I had written for my mother, which really required me to go someplace very deep and emotional, periodically I needed to escape, and that escape was Fabulation. And Fabulation was imagining the character in Intimate Apparel a hundred years later, if she had had the benefit of the Civil Rights Movement and the feminist movement. Who would Esther, this lonely seamstress, be a hundred years later? So that’s Fabulation.