As a playwright, I focus working on climate narrative stories, bringing science into my plays and mixing facts and chemical jargon with poetry and writing plays that center chemists, glaciologists, marine biologists and environmental scientists. I have found pairing beautiful words with scientific facts has created this style of writing that I am loving and allows me to focus on stories about our relationship with the planet and seeing the earth mirror our emotions. In my play, Time is a Color and the Color is Blue, the main character’s guilt about the earth and her mother is paired against the ice cave she is stuck in and the melting of the ice. With Whittaker’s emotional arc based on ice structure - from the soft dusting of snow on the crust, down to the planet’s core - no play has ever come more naturally to me.

My most recent play, Deserted, focuses on soil, desertified land, food deserts and trying to settle down and create roots - literal and metaphorical - on soil that can no longer grow anything. With this play, I’ve reframed my focus on writing plays that take place in the current day or 2 minutes in the future. While Today Tonight Soon is set at the end of humanity, I have learned that discussing the consequences of the climate crisis that are affecting people and places at this very moment is much more interesting for storytelling and brings awareness to an issue that is not theoretical.