my name is david alex and i grew up in chicago well i've always been writing when i was eight or nine years old i wrote puppet shows for kids in the neighborhood and as i grew older i still kept writing i wrote short stories for myself i always loved when i was in high school writing research papers i love research even as a child and i still do and then i decided one year to write a novel and a couple years international access nation conspiracies murder intrigue all that business it was not published and i decided i think i to work on my dialogue a little bit and what better way to working out a play many discovered this is great no adjectives you have to worry about the powerful rays of the sun and all that business so since that time and that was about one thousand nine hundred eighty nine and written thirteen or fourteen full length plays and about eighteen one acts and most have been staged at one time or another in a small u s town during the vietnam war and that was a tumultuous time and i remember that and one of the themes of the play is life is full of choices and i wanted to write about that era and choices that people faced i really wasn't sure what direction the play was going to go and a common question is often asked of me is do you write a plot first and then develop the characters or develop the characters first and then the plot sort of unfolds in this particular case i had towards a background and i established the characters first and then i  let it go and see where it led and it went through as you can imagine many writings many revisions and what have you the play has four characters two men two women one of the characters is a high school basketball coach who was a high school basketball hero and then he became a coach at the school and in this town as a basketball coach is about one step above god let's say his wife very patriotic sp letter writing campaign supporting the troops her brother's m i a missing in action the coach by the way has faked a medical injury in order to avoid the draft of course his wife does not know that the coach character was the sister of a nun i've never been a sister i've never been a nun and it's interesting that she has become one of the most popular characters in the play by audience members what i want someone to take away from the play basically is this i want the person who's leading the theater not to be exactly the same person who entered the theater i want to learn something about themselves and about other people and to realize that yes life is full of choices for them but also for other people to is a timeless play a timely play with a timeless message it deals with as we say the war at that time the war in vietnam was a tumultuous time war is always tamal to us no matter where you are what country and what time period and as it turned out one of the themes of the play turned out to be honor and one of the things that grace who's the nun in the play explains is that everyone can have honor whether one is for the war or against the war if you stand up for what you believe you can have honor and that's one thing that would like people to take away with them when they so my advice to playwrights is advice i give myself right which you know but write what you don't know another bit of advice is something that i learned from jonathan wilson who's the department chair at loy university for theater and he said always think of tension you want there be tension and you want the tension to increase and if you think about it all plays comedy what does comedy come from there's tension there's something somebody wants something as i want them to have it and look at i love lucy that's a classic example people use for tension just writing funny lines you know a comic stand up that's not a comedy play so one of the things that i always ask myself when i go to see a play as an audience member is when does the tension begin for me so that some of the chicago has a program called trellis where on tuesday nights they have readings for playwrights to come in with their own actors and it's a great opportunity for actors to hear their plays read so i encourage more theaters to do this that's how we serv playwrights actors and theatre i also like to give a shout out if you don't mind to a lot of these foundations they give their hundreds of thousand dollars to theatre it seems sometimes that money goes to money let's take one hundred thousand dollars which is a pretty small grant for some of these foundations and give it to some of the larger companies it's almost lunch for them you take one hundred thousand dollars and divide it by ten that is a production for ten companies we're seeing ten new works in the theater so that's my shout out t foundations please think about that and the audience members go to theater we need you i'm with the show here we go thank you very much and good night miss calabash wherever you are change my life forever ok you have no idea what is going on in your brother's life i know i know what dante does ok but i don't also know my brother and i know he's not involved in any of that muck he came over here to talk to