Sophia Romma

Playwright, Screenwriter, Poet, Director, Professor (Screenwriting and Playwriting)
New York, New York USA

Inspiration is really a mystical demon, so to speak. I haven’t a clue where to find inspiration other than from moments in time tinged with poetry; the sublime art of conversation over a glass of wine that smells of roses and reminds one of fresh ink on an opaque page, later hopefully, filled with ardent words. Love, perhaps, and thoughts of the divine are my inspiration.

My favorite novel is Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. My favorite film is Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Sergei Parajanov. Uggs, puke colored—wearing them, is terribly pop culture, and I am afraid not very flattering on the feet. I don’t drink cocktails at all. My favorite line of a play is from Franz Xaver Kroetz,Through the Leaves, from Mensch Meier, when Otto says: “You could dive all the way down to the bottom in me like it was the ocean, go as deeps as you can, you won’t find any great white shark down there; you know that, don’t you?”

The Brothers Karamazov, a production of the play at the Mayakovsky Academic Art Theater, altered my entire view regarding prose and verse set to the stage.

I still dream of catching my sister by her auburn pig tail and whispering that I love her, very softly—but then that’s only a dream, I remember that she is no longer living and I will have to see her in the other world.

I am not sure what I feel like when I feel like myself. I don’t know what I am, ideas racing, and the veins of poetry buzzing in my ears. I am myself when I am with my children, then I can relax and not hide my face, and not erase my personality to please others.

I love Moscow and St. Petersburg, the cathedrals, the golden spears which touch the tip of the vast Russian sky. That is my escape, the place of my birth—that nostalgia.

Playwright Sophia Romma received her MFA at NYU; Ph.D. from Gorky Literary Institute. She is screenwriter of the film Poor Liza. She has had three plays produced at La MaMa E.T.C. Her recent play, “The Mire,” (Cherry Lane Theater) received rave reviews from the New York Times. She is Literary Manager of the Negro Ensemble Company.