A few years ago, while directing a play of mine in Paris, an actor told me a story about Pierre Bonnard revising a painting of his, several years after he'd completed the piece. What made the story unusual was the fact that the painting was on a museum wall when Bonnard revised it. A guard spotted an old man adding fresh paint to Bonnard's painting [and] grabbed the old man, who explained himself by saying, "I am Pierre Bonnard and I've had a fresh idea about my painting."

I was thrilled by this story! Who owns the painting? The artist or the collector? I began to outline a play about Bonnard investigating the subject of "intellectual property." Simply said, who actually owns an artist's work: the artist or the collector who buys the work?

What's next for you?

Producing a season of four plays that were created in the New York Playwrights Lab. The Secret of Mme. B's Bath is the pilot production of the producing wing of the New York Playwrights Lab, which is a group I founded some 30-plus years ago. We were a kind of secret society for years and years. ... You may wonder: is it a cult? A cabal? Is there a secret handshake? Do you have to be hazed to belong to it? I wish I could say that we were all Nabis wearing mystic costumes, but we're not that, not at all. It's been a sort of secret society because it's so completely work-based.

We're an ever-changing group of approximately 15 established playwrights. Every writer in the Lab has been produced professionally and is fairly well known. It's important that everybody around the table feels comfortable in the company of peers. We start a new play on approximately the same day in late fall and bring in approximately five pages per session to be read aloud and discussed. By spring, we are all quite expert in each other's plays.

Playwright members, over the years, have included the likes of me, Wendy Wasserstein, Peter Parnell, Kenneth Lonergan, Warren Leight, Michael Brady, Elizabeth Diggs, Max Mayer, Daniel Reitz, David Rimmer, Frank Pugliese, etc.

The new company is really just an expansion of the existing Lab into showcase productions. We'll continue the main activity of the Lab, which is the development of new plays. But, additionally, we'll be doing a four-play showcase season, showing a combination of famous and/or good plays from past years of the Lab, and new developing plays from the current Lab.

What theater do you see?

This year, practically nothing but my own work. If were counting titles, I've opened 11 of my plays between mid-September and mid-February … more than half of them new! I managed to see my old pal Jill Clayburgh in The Clean House at Lincoln Center … loved it. I also saw a new Theresa Rebeck play in Boston starring my new pal Marin Ireland—loved that as well.

Who or what are your influences?

Samuel Beckett was probably the greatest influence on my particular life, and an undeniably strong influence on my writing as well. He was a close personal friend for many years and was a man of profound integrity.

You're directing The Secret of Mme. Bonnard's Bath. How do you feel about directing your own work?