In all of my writing, I use some sort of genre, convention through which to frame my experiences, and try to look at it from a new angle, injecting modern awareness and flavor into stories about vampires, or Westerns, or High School dramas. I see culture as a force not dissimilar to gravity, something that binds us together and keeps us tethered to one another, a shared language through which we communicate and understand one another, fostering empathy for better or worse along the Leigh- lines etched out in cultural/pop-cultural patterns. These stories we grow up with stay with us and grow too, growing into something we may want to hold close and value as part of our identity. But we must allow our stories to grow too, allow them to change and evolve and adapt to the new world around us. I want to rehabilitate old forms to be more open and accepting and, when this genre rehab is impossible, blow up the old forms and play in the rubble to build something new.
As I go forward and continue my growth as a playwright, I feel it’s my duty to tap into the thing theatre still does better than any other media form — its immediacy. We share the room with the spectacle, we breathe the same air as the world of the stage, and we cannot look away. We aren’t just consumers in theatre, we are witnesses.