Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

“Things just kind of stick with me, and writing, for me, is always an investigation into my own feelings about them. I wonder why things stick to me, and I try to synthesize those into a dramatic experience in some ways.”

“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.”

“All of my work is sort of fed by a question, a need to understand the world and why the world is what it is.”

“'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams brings a tamale vendor on stage to simply say, 'Red hot!'”

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

“My mother had a wall of degrees in our house, and she would walk me up to the wall and say, 'When you have this many degrees, you can tell me what to do.'”

“My dream was always to have an experience where an audience member would turn to another audience member, a stranger, and be like, 'What did we just go through?' And, like, kind of begin to talk.”

“I have a borderline-embarrassing obsession with pop music.”

“I wrestle in a big way with August Wilson's work in that I at times admire it and at times feel infuriated by it, which is weirdly more influential than loving someone entirely.”

“Family dramas are tough, as a playwright. Most stories are about characters going on a trip or a new character coming to town, because that's how you learn information about them. But with family, they all know each other already. There's years of history in every interaction.”

“I seem to belong to a boom moment of playwrights, and I'm always curious about how we all got here and what comes next.”

“Something that happens to me is that I'll write a play specifically from my own experience, and then I'll inevitably be told that I'm being tunnel-visioned about it. People always ask, 'What about that other race? Or discrimination toward those people?'”

“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.”

“You get better at the thing you do by having to explain it to someone else. That, I think, totally makes my work stronger.”

“Theater is an old thing. It's thousands of years old. TV isn't. Film isn't. We're doing a really old thing.”

“I'm not a really firm believer in theatre that is 'about anything.' I don't think theatre can be about anything other than the people who show up and the value that they hold.”

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

“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 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.”