As a playwright I seek to tell stories that illuminate the points where disparate threads in American life today intersect or entangle. I am inspired by and committed to a theater that centers those who exist on society’s margins and to feats of storytelling that can motivate social change. My own experience has two conflicting thrusts. As the progeny of European Jewish immigrants, I feel the weight of historic oppression while knowing that in today’s America, my whiteness places me firmly in the camp of the unoppressed. As a queer person growing up in a Midwestern red state, I have experienced life as "the other”; yet today, as someone who is white and presents as male in a large liberal city, I am also undeniably in the majority. My work interrogates these contradictions and seeks to mine them deeply. While the characters in my plays come from all swaths of society—some are like me, and some are very different—in exploring them I look for the common human threads that unite us. In doing so I aim to write as honestly as I can, telling stories about characters we can relate to, even when they seem entirely opposite from who we are and what we know.
—Charles Gershman