Saheem Ali: Early in my early conversations with a playwright like James Ijames I really want to know what’s important to them. Why they wrote the play, when they wrote it, what they hope the play will say, and hopefully that’s aligned with my own thoughts and we find a space that we have a shared vocabulary about what excites us about this world and why we think the story is important. So it really does begin with the playwright because it’s their piece that they have crafted and so it’s my job as a translator, as a midwife of sorts, to kind of like take it to the-- bring-- birth it-- help birthing it and translating it, and so when James is in the room with me with the actors I do ask a playwright as well to share with the actors why they wrote the piece and why it’s important to them, and then as the process evolves playwrights like James are really responsive to what the actors bring because, you know, in every version of the creative’s process there’s what it’s our head, and then there’s what it’s like in three dimension, when there’s people, when there’s humans who come to collaborate. So that’s why I love the theater so much, because at every level you are relying on other people to collaborate with you to make something. There’s no version of this where you can do it completely on your own, and so the actors bring their experience, their identity, their proclivities, and James responds to that.