SOURCE: Tucker, Martin. “A Running Log on Lanford Wilson.” Confrontation: A Literary Journal of Long Island University, nos. 48-49 (spring-summer 1992): 245-56.

In the following essay, Tucker details the circumstances leading up to and including an interview with Wilson around the time he staged the premiere of Redwood Curtain.

“You in school here? … Let me see your I.D.” The actor playing the Vietnam War veteran in Redwood Curtain tries out these lines, standing alone on the huge, empty stage of the Nederlander Theater in New York. Lanford Wilson, Marshall Mason the director, and Tanya Berezin of the Circle Repertory Company listen from the auditorium.

While Wilson does not think of himself as a teacher, a school or a college is often offstage in his plays; artist and educator, he asks his audiences to think about what he has seen and understood. Wilson grew up in Missouri, where the...