I wanted to write a play about racism, about poverty, about the negative forces that haunt us and make us murderous—and the positive forces that do daily battle for us—like love, friendship, family—which lead to some kind of hope...

I wanted to play it with an economy of words and create this whole feeling through attitude and movement. It was just the kind of character I had envisioned for a long time, keep to the mystery and allude to what happened in the past. It came about after the frustration of doing Rawhide for so long. I felt the less he said the stronger he became and the more he grew in the imagination of the audience.

I wanted to create a character who didn’t routinely resort to violence and wasn’t courageous by virtue of wielding a gun. I wanted to show someone who was powerful and incisive who could face down the bad guys without becoming a bad guy himself. I wanted a hero who was ethical, thoughtful, and just.

As a former soldier, what struck me is the absolutely heartless way that war was being pursued by the Americans, partly I think because of the race problem. The Vietnamese to us were not merely communists, they were nasty little yellow people without souls. It didn't matter how we blew them up or how we bombed them or how we burned their villages and so on. I was very struck by that. And one thing I was trying to do in The Great War and Modern Memory was to awaken a sort of civilian sympathy for the people who suffer on the ground in wartime, and that's really an act that I've been performing, oh, ever since 1945, I suppose.

I wanted to really be sure that the play never became a play about how to grieve…And in order to accomplish that I needed the play to remain in this time of confusion and chaos.

In terms of writing, I just wasn’t finding enough stories about contemporary African people—or historical, just anything, the whole gamut. I was raised in southern Africa and I came back to the West for college. I was starting to look for what I would like to perform, what I would like to see put to life onstage, and I was finding many stories about everybody else, but none about my own people. My playwriting became a “necessity being the mother of invention” type thing. I wasn’t finding what I wanted to perform, so I started to create it myself.

"My inspiration for writing music is like Don McLean did when he did "American Pie" or "Vincent". Lorraine Hansberry with "A Raisin in the Sun". Like Shakespeare when he does his thing, like deep stories, raw human needs.

I'm trying to think of a good analogy. It's like, you've got the Vietnam War, and because you had reporters showing us pictures of the war at home, that's what made the war end, or that shit would have lasted longer. If no one knew what was going on we would have thought they were just dying valiantly in some beautiful way. But because we saw the horror, that's what made us stop the war.

So I thought, that's what I'm going to do as an artist, as a rapper. I'm gonna show the most graphic details of what I see in my community and hopefully they'll stop it quick.

I've seen all of that — the crack babies, what we had to go through, losing everything, being poor, and getting beat down. All of that. Being the person I am, I said no no no no. I'm changing this."

Once I saw the role I was playing, I found myself conflicted. The role wasn’t necessarily stereotypical. A young man in his formative years with a violent streak pulled into the allure of gang involvement. That’s somebody’s real story. Never judge the characters you play. That’s what we were always taught. That’s the first rule of acting. Any role play honestly, can be empowering, but I was conflicted because this role seemed to be wrapped up in assumptions about us as black folk. The writing failed to search for specificity. Plus, there was barely a glimpse of positivity or talent in the character, barely a glimpse of hope. I would have to make something out of nothing. I was conflicted. Howard had instilled in me a certain amount of pride and for my taste this role didn’t live up to those standards.

I wanted to be appreciated for what I was as a person and what I had to offer. I didn’t feel my work meant anything there. I knew I was a good artist and I wanted to express my feelings. Not the writer’s or the director’s; I wanted to express me. I wanted to play the role of somebody who was mentally ill. I think I could have done a really good job, because I knew those feelings.

While my return to Vietnam was intensely emotional, connecting to the landscape allowed me to disengage somewhat and gain perspective. I wanted to show Vietnam in a way I had not seen it shown before—not devastated, not victimized, not romanticized. I felt I could do that best through my exploration of the landscape.

"...I turned down a few projects to pursue this one. I knew there was a sense of what was expected of me, but this play felt so important to me that I had to do it, expectations be damned.”

…The reason I write the plays is to open up some sort of dialogue or just to have this in the conversation. I mean what I would love is to have the guy—the Republican who thinks that the only issue is keeping brown people away—he is my ideal audience. That's who I would love to have in the audience. So I get a little bit tripped up because, on one hand, I want plays that my family can go to. You don't have to be an artistic person. You can go in and actually get something from it.

…I wanted more from the genre. I felt that film was a tool we could use to address some of the issues we are facing in our country

Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves — all plot and no characters, or made-up characters — Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session.