Description by playwright Craig Lucas:
“I’ve never come across anything like the play Tornado Tastes like Aluminum Sting. We are inside the mind of the protagonist, an 11-year-old autistic child who is also nonbinary. They apprehend the world through a different set of tools than I possess. They are obsessed with movies, a walking library of cinema history. But the three-dimensional world they inhabit is an overwhelming swirl of sensations, sights crossed with sounds crossed with metaphoric echoes of ideas stimulated by everything they encounter in history books, in the community, in the lives of the parents. This over-stimulated mixmaster of the character’s aspirations colliding with the joys and terrors of the world outside their own mind creates a storm. And that is what we are placed inside—right in the eye of that funnel. The walls of this young mind literally swim with the projected movie footage of their omnivorous gaze, using comic bits to show horrific things. I would kill to direct such a work. For me it is akin to the most original and sui generis works one stumbles on in a lifetime—Samuel Beckett’s 'Not I', Sarah Kane’s '4:48 Psychosis', Maria Irene Fornes’ 'Drowning'.”

Currently nominated for the Venturous Playwrights Fellowship, PWC, 2023.