I have a theory that we all write in the way we lived our lives as children. Take someone like Suzan-Lori Parks, who was an army brat and lived all over––her plays are free-form, unencumbered. You don't feel the dome of conformity around them. Then there are people who grew up in small, tidy apartments, and as such their writing is spare and unadorned. And there is someone like me, who grew up in a brownstone with rooms of varying sizes that were cluttered with eclectic stuff, a lifetime of belongings––as a result, I wrote plays that are architecturally sound but packed with unexpected things.
∆ Lynn Nottage interview, The Art of Theater No. 19, The Paris Review 245