Kobek’s Invocation for My Demon Brother shuttles deftly between the two evocative landscapes of 1960s California culture that collide in this conversation: the acid-saturated warped funhouse of Summer of Love San Francisco and hep industry town Los Angeles in the summer of 1969.

A “no” that sticks must be cultivated. Built upon a foundation of habit.

One of the best accounts of the fall of France and how Vichy flowed into the vacuum left by its Third Republic can be found in Victor Serge’s novel, Last Times.

Politics is saying. A saying that is cast not merely in words, but in gestures.

One of the delights of writing the book and lyrics was finding that you didn’t really need to falsify history or concoct a new timeline to make Congressman Davy work.

Very little of Davy Crockett's era in the history of “Washington City” has survived to the present day.

Knowing that Poe actually reviewed a Crockett book when it appeared opened up another fascinating window into the topsy-turvy landscape of Washington City in the 1830s.

As a playwright, I know that I have a sister in Anne Royall.

Three larger things continue to stick out for me now when I recall why I wrote Hotel Mayflower: questions about revolution, the vanishing/erasure of Holocaust narratives, and the relationship between theatre and history.

In August 2020, two envelopes arrived at my door in the midst of the pandemic from the National Records Center. Inside them were images that I thought I might never see: two photographs of a playwright’s very elusive quarry.

Ernst Toller’s tale that is worth hearing as we grapple in our own time with resurgent fascism and political exile.

Little if any written material from Burroughs exists in the public record from the years I was interested in tackling in Hotel Mayflower: 1937-1939. There also were no photos of Burroughs in those years.

What really happened in Munich in 1848? The story is long and tangled.

Trevor Griffiths took root in our theatre and in our films — and in our moral and political moment. As a model for how to write well (and especially about history), he also took root in me.

A Youth in Germany is Toller’s firsthand account of his experiences in war, in prison, a well as his deep involvement in Bavaria’s failed Soviet Republic.

“In the ‘Green Room” depicts Lola in costume, puffing a cigarette backstage.

Was Lola a republican or a royalist? Both. Definitely.

Where did the association between Lola Montez and whips begin? Her stage performances certainly did not feature a riding crop.

Ilse Burroughs – the first wife of author William S. Burroughs – cuts a mysterious figure in literary history.

In the annals of U.S.-Soviet rivalry in the decades after World War II, the so-called "space race" between the two superpowers was by far...