I was going through some past notes in my Gtasks list and came across one that simply said: Charles [sic] mee

Googling his name again, I was quickly reminded about this amazing playwright and artist.

Taken from Charles’ web site:

Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don’t just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece—and then, please, put your own name to the work that results.

Artists, especially writers, forget that they are not creating in a vacuum; creating worlds, characters, and textures from the impressions their reality has set upon them.

A curry of humanity is expressed in every work of art.  The enjoyment is in how the particular chef prepares the ingredients.

His views on casting the works are also inspiring, encouraging us to challenge our view of the world.

I am an old crippled white guy in love with a young Japanese-Canadian-American woman, and we talk about race and age and polio and disability, but race and disability do not consume our lives. Most of our lives are taken up with love and children and mortality and politics and literature—just like anyone else.

My plays don’t take race and disability as their subject matter. Other plays do, and I think that is a good and necessary thing, and I hope many plays will be written and produced that deal directly with these issues.

Charles is an accomplished individual who has given his art to the world.

Taken from Wikipedia:

Among other awards, Charles Mee is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two OBIE Awards (Vienna: Lusthaus (1986) andBig Love (2002)), PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama for a playwright in mid-career, and the Fisher Award given by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Thank you, Chuck.  For creating art that is accessible.  On a multitude of levels.  Cheers!