Twenty-two pages into the play, the pinball machine in my mind lurched to the side and lit up, "Tilt." I didn't like where it was going. It was a smaller and less complex idea than I wanted and certainly less universal.

I have sort of a mental litmus test I give myself when an idea first beckons to be reckoned with. "If I were to write this play," I ask myself, "and fulfill all of its promise, on each and every page, and carry the play and its characters to their richest potential, just how good a play can this be?" And sometimes the answer comes back, "Not bad. A good play but not worth a year or two of your life."

Conversely, I have come up with an idea that seems muddied in my mind, with no clear direction and no guarantee that I would even know how to finish it. And again comes the question, "If you write this one only half as well as the one you just put aside, how good can it eventually be?" And the answer comes back clear and loud: "This could be something special." (Special in my terms, not Shakespeare's or Chekhov's, or even the plethora of critics who pass judgment on it. Special for me is all I ask for.)

I did not always conduct this test earlier in my career. "The Star-Spangled Girl" would never have got out of the starting gate and "God's Favorite" would have been filed away in a folder marked "A Young Writer's Conceit."

And there are the plays that don't even apply to the test. They come under the heading of they-just-won't-go-away plays. The ones that demand on their own to be written. "Brighton Beach Memoirs" was one of those. I wrote 35 pages of it, got logjammed somewhere in my mind, and it was relegated to the bottom drawer of my desk. Aged but not forgotten, it did not appear again until nine years later, when I took it out one day, dusted it off, read it and suddenly thought, "I know how to write this play," and proceeded to finish it nonstop in six weeks, if you don't count the endless number of rewrites that go on in rehearsals and out of town.