To me, theatrical writing is about the basic truth that, as Brecht puts it in “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” “The smallest social unit is not the single person but two people.” Theatre is an art form that recognizes that we are always created in community. Theatre is always about the social, which is to say the political. Even a one-person show is about the relationship between the performer and the audience.
Folks sometimes expect political theatre to be dogmatic, but what's exciting to me about political theatre is that it's theatre: it's multi-vocal, conflicted, messy, live, embodied. Political theatre has the unique ability to make an open-ended intervention in the political realm. I'm not trying to win adherents to any one political point of view. Instead, I'm clashing political points of view together in an attempt to make audiences think more critically about what they believe. I am motivated by some core commitments, but that's where the plays start, not where they end. The plays are always about an interaction, a meeting, a coming together, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in love, often in both, in the hopes of reconfiguring the social in a healthier form. I think it doesn't really make sense to speak of a single person "having politics." Politics is what we do together.
But as an autistic person, being with other people is often hard! Sometimes I call myself an antisocial socialist. It's a contradiction. I think playwriting is my way to try to massage that contradiction. It's a way of making the social manageable and contained. I am able to spend my months or years doing my slow, methodical thing, but in order for it to be its fullest self I need to join the world. I need other people. Thus, doing theatre forces (allows?) me to break out of my little world. I think that's the best thing about it. Our little worlds are not the world. The world is what we share, and sharing it, we can remake it. Any way we want.
When I was doing research for my play River Rouge, I came across a statement by a Detroit police spokesperson referring to Communist Party rallies as “rehearsals for revolution.” Thinking of a play as a rehearsal, even a rehearsal for revolution, is my way of refusing to close off possibility. We're still in rehearsal. We're trying stuff out. The performance will come. God willing, we'll be ready.