I am excited by theater that takes risks. I most enjoy plays that are genuinely surprising, that are willing to test, explore and challenge what it means to present a story. I love theater that tests limitations, inquiring as to how deeply it can embed a story in the viewer’s mind. Part of our process at NeuroKitchen in devising Tin Can was discovering how we could communicate complex ideas in innovative ways. Tin Can is about a girl falling into a black hole, and one of our goals was to figure out how to inform the viewers of some of the science behind the plot in a dramatically compelling way. We chose to have three actors representing each character--one for the character’s past, one for their present, and one for their future. In one scene, all of the characters flooded onstage together to demonstrate the Block Theory of the universe (that all of time happens at once). We had actors fly miniature spaceships around the stage as the characters floated in spaceships. Furthermore, we decided to have a band, in which we would perform when we were not playing characters, and have members of the band use visual demonstrations to explain concepts like special relativity. Our biggest risk was inviting all of the audience members to join us in song and dance at the end (as the girl crosses the black hole’s event horizon). We shattered the fourth wall, and the audience loved it.

I’ve explored theatrical innovations in my own writing as well. In Fortune’s Fools, I included two different endings. The one to be performed would be chosen by a coin flip onstage at each individual showing. In Decision Day (which ran as part of the 31st Pegasus Young Playwrights’ Festival), I anthropomorphized colleges as a way of reflecting on and reinterpreting my own college decision experience. I set another play entirely in a broken elevator, investigating how to maximize the limited space.