Inspiration for drama: playwrights ponder the literary influences that inform their work.

Langston Hughes often mentioned how he would prowl the neighborhood bars of Harlem looking for inspiration--and never left a Harlem bar less than satisfied. Zorn Neale Hurston walked country roads and listened closely to dialects and stories. Some were literally told from the front porches of men who cradled shotguns in their laps as their wives snapped green beans.

Playwrights--even when they don't mean to--tend to overanalyze just about everything: a gesture, a look, a walk. Even the way the guy who's wiping down your car at the end of the car wash becomes fodder for thought because a playwright's perception of the smallest thing is almost always exaggerated and becomes the basis of major inspection.

So, ask a playwright a question like, "What books have influenced your plays and/or style of writing?" and you can sense their brains pause, then shift to another gear that reveals itself in a questioning look that says, "I don't know how to answer that question in a way that won't incriminate me ... for something."

The Dramatists' Bookshelf

According to several playwrights, in addition to environment, books do inspire them. At least that's the gist of the response to the question of whether or not a particular book ever inspired them to write a play. When pressed, however, the prose that inspired dramatic prose tended to come from pretty much the same places--The Bible, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Richard Wright's Black Boy, and Lerone Bennett Jr.'s Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America were among those mentioned most. All, of course, are classics.

Ed Smith, a noted director and playwright who has worked with everyone from Woodie King Jr. to Ossie Davis, says that Lorraine Hansberry was influenced by the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey, while Ron Milner was influenced by such novelists as Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes.

"What books have influenced me" says Smith, "were Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man (Vintage [reprint], March 1995) and John A. Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am (Overlook Press [reprint], July 2004). What influences me when it comes to writing is anything by Bill Gunn and the music of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker."

Playwright Darlette McAlpin of Chicago says, "Books that have influenced me on a technical level have been The Art and Craft of Playwriting by Jeffrey Hatcher (Story Press Books, March 2000) and The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives by Lajos Egri (Touchstone, February 1972)."

"I read them each time I start a play to remind me of what I'm trying to accomplish and what mistakes I don't want to make," McAlpin adds. "I also read older anthologies like Totem Voice: Plays From the Black World Repertory edited by Paul Carter Harrison (Grove Press, January 1989) and The National Black Drama Anthology: Eleven Plays From America's Leading African American Theaters edited by Woodie King Jr. (Applause Cinema and Theater Book Publishers, January 1996), and one just recently released, Seven Black Plays, edited by Chuck Smith (Northwestern University Press, September 2004)."

Stories of Survival

Whatever the influence, drama apparently has to include something involving a struggle of some sort--whether it is humans with one another, humans with nature, or the denigrating, degrading and vile aspects of racism (including slavery) and its role in the forceful creation African American culture. So, the inspiration that stirs playwrights seems to come from a compilation of experiences and exposure rather than a singular event, saying or even a book.

"I never know what it is that will trigger the impulse to delve deeper into a story or an idea that will lend itself to a play; but in retrospect, they are always very interesting journeys," says Dr. Kimmika L.H. Williams-Witherspoon, a playwright, performance poet and professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. "I was inspired to research and write a play about the activist I'd heard about O.V. Catto. Ten years later, that play, Dog Days: The Legend of O. V. Catto, became my thesis project when I was finishing up my MFA.

"Inspiration comes from everywhere and anything," she says. "For every thought, there's a story."

"I like to tell the story of everyday people and their everyday struggles just to survive," says Richard Lamonte Pierce, whose work includes the powerful one-woman play Sojourner, and Twilight Time, My Name Is Sapphire DAMNIT! and a new work-in-progress, That Honeysuckle Summer. "That's where the real drama and inspiration lay," Pierce continued. "In the lives of everyday heroes who will never be famous, yet their stories demand to be told."

Joseph P. Blake is a playwright and a managing editor at Pathfinders travel magazine.