My parents also said, “Don’t follow money. Follow your heart and you’ll be successful.” That’s all they told me and my sisters.

I think he was expecting someone with a more strident tone and antagonistic demeanor. I think he was surprised to find out that I’m a pretty likable person, and that despite out different views I conducted myself with a civility and grace of manners my mother always demanded of me. For myself, I found him to be a more likable person than I had imagined. And I certainly value and respect the contributions that he has made to the theater; our differences of opinion on black theater do not dampen my respect and appreciation, nor in any way invalidate the considerable contributions that he has made.

And I think it had something to do with my grandmother and my mother being nurses, and my mother once said to me, “Once you see people bleed it’s hard to believe there’s much difference in race.

Mine has been a long journey, a lifetime journey to Oslo. It was shaped by the values of my parents and by my two grandmothers – indigenous Liberians, farmers and market traders – neither of whom could read or write. They taught me that only through service is one's life truly blessed.

I’m still astonished that somebody would offer me a job and pay me to do what I wanted to do. And to this day, that’s been the astonishment of my life, and delight of my life, and the wonder of my life, and the puzzlement that anybody would be so stupid as to be willing to do that. I hear all these success stories of people, these captains of industry, these forgers of the world, and empire builders and so on. And they talk about all the money they’ve made and become presidents and all that, and I thought, jeez, but look at me. When I was offered a chance to be head of studios I wouldn’t take it. I like to work with the tools of my trade. The tools of my trade is a lot of paper and a pencil, and that’s all it is.