I wrote this play for television. I met a television producer back then in 1959, a guy by the name of Robert Alan Arthur – who's now dead. And Bob was the producer of, I think it was Playhouse 90 it was called. And he commissioned me as it were, to write this play after I told him about it. So I did – and this is before the Hannah Arendt book – and the network turned it down. They were correct to turn it down. Not… let's assume the play was good, it probably wasn't, but let's assume it was good. The fury it would have aroused in Jewish viewers would have been enormous. So to present a Jew as the one who's doing the selection for the Nazis, but it was just that moral horror that excited my imagination.

Then I went out to teach at the University of Iowa in 1960 – in the writers' workshop – and I had a friend named Howard Stein out there. Howard was in the drama department and I told him about the play and he read it and he said, 'let my students read it, and do a reading', his drama students. So they did. I don't remember anything about it, but I remember that my engagement with the horror – the holocaust – was of course tremendous. In the writing... writing about this, in writing this play and thinking about it and reading the material for it. So that was my education, it was a kind of self-education.