I was born with a hole in my heart, and having open-heart surgery when I was five meant I spent a great deal of my childhood imagining unlimited adventures in my small backyard. I have been writing and telling stories my entire life. From re-writing jokes for my second grade class from a bawdy 1960s comedy album, to exchanging a floppy disk with my fourth grade teacher of the novel I was writing, to having my first full-length play receive the coveted Hopwood Award for Drama at the University of Michigan, writing is the most intrinsic craft I have ever known. It is what gets me up in the morning, and it is what keeps me up at night. As I developed my ear for dialogue and theatricality, I found more and more that the characters and stories I sought to shine a light on were queer. Since the devastating Pulse Nightclub massacre rocked the LGBTQ community in 2016, I have further committed myself to creating stories about people whom I never saw on stage or screen growing up. People like me. Journalist John Paul Brammer once wrote, “remember what it felt like when you saw a queer person owning it, and it gave you permission to be yourself? You're that person to someone.” That is a driving force behind my work. Theater has always been about building communities and making people feel less alone, and if I can make one person feel more at home with themselves by seeing their story on stage, then I have done my job. My style is often at odds with itself, ranging from outlandish comedy to gut-wrenching drama. To me, that is the queer experience I bring to my work. It is not just that life is full of highs and lows for everyone, but that life for queer people (and queer Jews, like myself, still wrestling with the past) seems to necessitate trying to pull any sense of hope out of the rubble of dismay and despair.

My process, much like my style, conflicts with itself as well. I am in love with research, and I spend a good portion of my time learning as much about my characters and their circumstances as possible to build the most authentic worlds for the stage. Other times I find myself falling into the “Finishing the Hat” style of storytelling, wherein I go for hours outlining and writing and ignoring everything around me. Three things keep me going on a project: knowing the ending, understanding the characters, and holding onto the spark that tells me it is a story I deeply need to tell.

I write because I feel I must. I write to put new faces on stage that represent the landscape of gender and sexual identity. I write for a better version of myself, searching for a better version of our world.