Blessed by sinking feelings

A short time ago, I got a job writing on a TV series about cops which was being shot here in New York. I've done a bit of this kind of work - NYPD Blue, The Sopranos ... The head writer/producer on this show was a guy who had won every television award that exists and was a millionaire hundreds of times over. He was also, unlike most people in TV, truly brilliant. He had been an esteemed professor of literature at Yale before he came to television, and most of our conversations involved him quoting Greek philosophers and early English poets, and me nodding my head eagerly, trying to act as if I had even the slightest notion of what he was talking about.

One day, we were riding in his stretch limousine to a location in Brooklyn where a scene was being shot. We found ourselves at a traffic light in front of a seedy, flophouse, welfare hotel - a bottom-of-the-barrel, last-stop hell-hole. He turned to me and said: "My secret fear is that I'll end up dying alone in a place like that."

I was too intimidated by him at the time to confess that I felt the same way, and it wasn't until later, when I learned that he was a recovering addict, that I could understand how such a brilliant, genius gazillionaire could actually believe that he'd ever sink to a level where he could credibly meet that kind of fate. It also helped me to understand how a guy who lived in a big mansion in Hollywood and who thought nothing of tipping a waiter $100 for a cup of coffee could write so realistically about the streets.

When I wrote my play, In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings in 1998, I lived in a renovated, government-subsidised hotel in Times Square that was a cleaned-up cousin to that Brooklyn flophouse. My neighbours were the mentally ill, the formerly homeless, HIV patients, and a few scattered artists whose utter lack of success in their field allowed them the opportunity to live there for cheap rent.

By day, I worked as a violence-prevention specialist and as an HIV educator in New York City prisons, shelters and mental hospitals, using theatre and improvisation as a tool to foster discussion with clients about things like conflict-resolution and how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted disease.

By night, I pursued my dream: the theatre - auditioning, working as an actor, director, tickettaker, whatever I could wangle. It was hard. I went to bed most nights feeling I had a lot more in common with the citizens of my day job than with the citizens of my dreams. Even now, bathed in the success of having productions of my plays running simultaneously on three continents, I feel as though the distance between me and my former clients is closer to a yard than a mile.

I am a guy who has been blessed. If I die alone in some sad Brooklyn flophouse, it will probably only be because I stubbornly willed it to happen out of fear and despair and a complete submission to the depression I struggle with and my periodic dalliances with various addictions that I continue to dance with. I was born smart and with some talent. But the true blessings in my life - the blessings that have sustained me and allowed to me to thrive - are the following: I was raised by patient, loving parents; I was born, I believe, with an irresistible calling to the theatre which has sustained me through the most troubled times; and, lastly, I became a part of a theatre company - the LAByrinth - which encouraged me to write and to keep writing, and whose members believed in me when I couldn't tolerate believing in myself.

Anybody who has ever earned a pay cheque doing social work will probably tell you the same thing: you go in there thinking you're going to "teach" them something, and you leave having been taught more than you ever could have imagined.

I remember an impromptu discussion about religion that took place at a workshop I led at a jail for teenagers called Spofford, in the Bronx, which prompted a tough little gang member to relate the following: "Religion is for people who want to get to heaven. Spirituality is for people who have already been to hell."

The anger, the tears, the simultaneous existence of fleeting hopes and crushing despair that enveloped the rooms and cells I've spent time in don't leave me. I hope they never do. I am in love with the language of the street. I mourn the wasted lives I continue to encounter. I am angry that we, me, allow ourselves to create distance from those less fortunate people, whom, I believe, we ultimately fear because we see ourselves in them. Some day I'll stop writing about the streets. My new play in New York, Our Lady of 121st Street, is, in fact, populated with characters who actually have jobs, but people on the edge of disaster will continue to inspire and fascinate me. I'm still learning how to write plays, but I know that high-stakes lives in high-stakes predicaments make for exciting theatre.