I was seventeen years old, standing at the back of my high school auditorium, pacing behind the last row of the audience, when the lights came up on the first play I had ever written. The scene began, and as the characters were speaking my hands rose to the sides of my face where the tears had begun to form. One thought crystallized in my mind: it’s working. The characters were communicating before an audience – to the audience – and, in effect, so was I.

I return to this experience when reflecting on and trying to articulate why it is I write, why I began in the first place, and what has kept me going over the years. I believe in fostering a theatre of encounter, that of the self and of the other. The kind of encounter I experienced that night: with the audience, the actors, and myself.

In our world at present, we’ve lost the ability to communicate effectively with one another and have fewer and fewer opportunities to encounter one another in shared, communal spaces. The theatre has a vital role to play in addressing this and other crises. It has the power to "transcend solitude" as Jerzy Grotowski realized, and it is inherently equipped - at its best, and through its most essential aspects - to reinvigorate a sense of binding purpose that can unite our disparate selves into a cohesive oneness that will help restore health and stability to our ailing society.

The theatre can and must shine slights on each and every margin, and in so doing flex our imaginations to the fullest extent of empathy and awareness to shatter the stigmas that have paralyzed and undermined our ability to understand one another and to dream. The theatre is uniquely positioned to harbor and reenact the miracle of simple human solidarity and to facilitate breakthroughs of democratic love.

Theatre is where the human is. It will forever remain, first and foremost, the art of communication between our deepest selves, built on the encounter of human minds and human bodies and human hearts. What I felt in the back of that auditorium all those years ago has never left me; I am indebted to it. It keeps me going, trying and failing in a different way every day to sit down with the words and speak with the hope that we might again encounter one another, fully and freely, in shared spaces, with common endeavor, so as not merely to endure, but to prevail.