When I discuss my playwriting, the first thing I usually say is “Barthes was right. The author is dead.” That is to say, authorial intention ain’t shit. When I first wrote Goliath, a choreopoem-play set during the Iraq War, I meant to write a piece that would dismantle toxic masculinity, homophobia, and state violence. The last people I expected to appreciate the play would be war vets; the soldier in my play, after all, becomes a rapist and a murderer. And yet, time and time again, whether Goliath was being staged in the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City, veterans in the audience would volunteer their experiences, saying that this was a play that healed them. The first performance they had seen that captured what it meant to be at war, to define themselves through an existence of constant dehumanization. One elderly gentleman who had fought in Korea told me, “Now, for the first time, I feel free.”

Performance, and its powers of haunting and iterative presence, can remind us that liberation emerges from confrontation, from the recesses of despair, from the holding of shared space in which the boundaries between witness, actor, and writer become permeable. Liberation can also emerge uncannily from mismatched affects, from the absurdist laughter that comes from sorrow or the paradoxically bleak ennui from a dream fulfilled. Increasingly, I have come to view playwriting as a tool of experimentation in liberation, as a means to map areas of social, psychological, and political entrapment for which we often lack precise words. Together, the playwright and the performer can combine the vocabularies of spoken language and embodiment to grasp at something. Theater does not explain; it gestures. But that something is an inert quality until the audience, like an enzyme, brings it to life, when it is present and living and engaging with the population in the theater. The playwright’s control is necessarily partial, and thus always experimental. A praxis of liminality.

It’s something I learned ever since I started playwriting under the tutelage of Cherríe Moraga more than a decade ago. Moraga, who converted me from a spoken word/slam poet into a playwright, taught me to ruthlessly experiment, to figure out what works best when interfacing with audiences, to take whatever risks were necessary to create a world onstage where it was possible to imagine something like liberation. Drawing from predecessors like Ntozake Shange, Anna Deveare Smith, Velina Hasu Houston, David Henry Hwang, Philip Kan Gotanda, and of course Moraga herself, I began to cultivate my own voice—or, more accurately, voices. Sometimes I would develop plays that consisted entirely of poetry performed in a black box, finding meaning through the rhythm and musicality of language itself. Other times, I developed magical realist explorations of race and sexuality in esoteric chapters of American history. Recently, I’ve turned to satire and absurdist comedy, experimenting in wit and lunacy to capture the paradoxes of contemporary social relations. Many, if not most, of my works are failures, in one sense or the other—sometimes they fail to capture what was in my mind’s eye. Sometimes they fail in the sense of providing a form of liberation that I hadn’t intended. But they have all moved me forward to try to figure out what next frontiers of social and personal experience that need to be explored next.