A secret about me that’s not so secret, is that I’m afraid all the time. I think most people are. And we lock our fears away in a tiny box at the back of our skull – one that’s almost too small to contain them all. So sometimes, they break out. And when mine break out, they become stories. I write plays about the things I can’t escape – those pervasive kinds of fears: loss, death, loneliness, how it feels when someone is walking too close behind you, and it’s after midnight, and where is everyone, this is Broad Street, shouldn’t it be packed?
Because I write about these fears I live with, I write characters who can overcome these fears. I write power into my characters, power that, perhaps, I have a hard time recognizing in myself. The women in my plays become unwieldily powerful – they often don’t know what to do with it. Sometimes that means I have to change them, or the circumstances of the world in which they live, in unlikely ways, so that my plays become equal parts feminist manifesto and magical-realist fantasia.
The things that scare us make us who we are – they make my work what it is: often poetic, frequently nonlinear, compassionate. Full of monsters. Full of women who are bigger than monsters, bigger than the things they fear. I write for women.