Although the playwrights assembled here talk about the physical circumstances of playwriting, about the history of their plays and their influences, about their lives, none of them can quite answer the question every interviewer wants to know: how does the play happen? There is no truthful way to answer such a question. “A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition it gets clearer and clearer and clearer,” Tennessee Williams says. About his masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire, he continues: “I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she’d been stood up by the man she planned to marry.” A play is a piece of happy synchronicity where the writer’s ideas, his collaborators, and his luck cohere into a narrative which is a kind of gossamer mystery. “Good plays are a mystery,” Neil Simon says here. “You don’t know what it is that the playwright did right.” He adds: “If the miracle happens, you come out at the very place you wanted to” . . .