Meet Our Playwright – Bill Cain
Where are you from? Where do you live?
I’m a New Yorker. Born in the now defunct French hospital five weeks premature weighing a little over five pounds. I live in Crown Height, Brooklyn weighting a little more than I should after covid.
How did you become a playwright?
Really? While I’m working on a play, you want to know how and why I got myself into this? Really?
Is there a recurring theme in your plays that you write about?
My goal in writing is to expose people to their hidden greatness. I didn’t start out to do this but I discovered it play after play. I think that’s what most plays are about – including King Lear. Look at these mad people in the storm. See their strength and beauty when they are at their most helpless. Attention, attention must be paid.
What led you to write this play?
Awareness of the great valor of the underpaid underappreciated nearly invisible essential workers who some people didn’t know were essential until the pandemic. And so we don’t forget.
What are you most looking forward to in your week of development?
The company of wonderful co-creators.
What advice do you have for the participants in our college program who are interested in pursuing a life in the theater?
Find your own voice and stand by it.
Anything else you would like our audience to know about the play before they see it?
Gratitude to everybody who stood by theater when we couldn’t theater together. I hope this play will help us to gather again around a simple story of what we – and centuries of others like us – have been through. May we emerge from our old world of Hamlet thoughts into the world of Lear’s broken-hearted compassion.
