I want to make audiences feel seen, found, and provoked by creating radically resonant
plays about brave young women who become a little (or a lot) braver.
My work largely lives in a world of quick-paced and full-hearted naturalistic realism, but
also challenges realistic structure. I’m interested in the dissonance between the living
room/bedroom/back porch world of a play and a more grey and dangerous world —the kind of
world where the audience becomes Instagram followers, the dead, the institution of college, or
simply themselves.
I think it’s true that the “soap opera moments” of our lives often feel more true than the
making-eggs-moments. I am on a mission to ground the ridiculous, would-be melodramatic
moments of our lives, as well as to expose the gnarly and poetic underbelly of the mundane. I want
to create work that feels more like life than life. I want audiences to watch my work and think I
know that.
My protagonists are almost always young women who must come up against a scary
personal fear in order to free themselves into courageous love of self. My characters often wrestle
with shame over past trauma, deference, anxiety, loneliness, and lack of love. My plays often
include close female friendships, wild nights, the divulging of confidences, lost objects, and knocks
on doors.
Playwright/Actor Anna Deavere Smith said, “It’s theatre’s job to trigger you. It’s what you
do with that that matters.” I’m out to create that kind of triggering, bravery inducing art—the kind
that makes us more bolder and more tender with one another. Because then maybe life would feel
more like the second act of plays—and we would have more clarity, and there would be more love,
and we would feel found.