Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

I go through phases of watching a ton of dance/performance, and I am bizarrely well-informed on the subject.

I actually don't read the press. All the writers I admire were significantly reclusive, and I'm still trying to figure out how they got to a place where they didn't have to talk to press.

One of the most incredible and important things about the theater is that we're creating a safe space for all feelings, but especially, ugly feelings.

I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them.

I was 23 when I wrote 'Neighbors,' and I definitely look back at it now and cringe a little bit. I was trying to understand what drama was.

All my plays have these titles that are oddly tricky. I like that something can look like one thing but mean two different things. Language is really unstable in that way.

The stuff I write about doesn't, like, necessarily leave people feeling warm and fuzzy. I'm writing in a territory that's, like, contested and full of prickliness. And I find that people project their problems onto me or something.

I don't hate people who colour-blind cast, but I hate people who colour-blind cast and pretend that they're not, who pretend that these bodies on stage don't actually carry specific meaning.

I identify as queer. I just don't know what any of these labels mean.

I spent summers with my mother's parents in Arkansas, where religion felt very present. My grandmother was Baptist, and my grandfather was Methodist. Double Southern whammy.

An Octoroon' was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I'm writing about America's relationship to its own history. Race or not, it's a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically.

Somehow, whenever we think about race or blackness in relationship to art, we always come in kind of nervous. We always think someone's about to be punished or accused of something.