UNDER CONSTRUCTION:
I was born in the year 2000 and grew up in Southern Orange County, California in a conservative family. Debate and discussion of politics was always present when with family—making debate and discussion important to how I navigated life.
I joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) in 8th grade after experiencing a crisis of faith and what I believed to be revelatory encounters. This shift led to many interesting discussions with my Catholic and Protestant family members. I sincerely pursued the gospel for a few years, attaining a testimony so strong that I desired to devote two years of my life to Christ and serve a mission. Eventually, during my sophomore year of high school, my fire for the church and god was extinguished thanks to the often heated and always exhausting debates I had with my atheist best friend. The inevitability of this falling out was compounded with my coming to terms with my attraction to men.
Soon after, in 2016, I became politically conscious (or at least as politically conscious as a 16 year old white boy from South OC can be) when the Bernie Sanders' campaign burst open my world-view and showed me that a better America was possible—one that aligned with a politics I seemed to always feel but never had the language for. At the same time, I became theatrically conscious after encountering and obsessively devouring Bertolt Brecht. The two seemed to synergize: Bernie inspired me to hope and Brecht inspired me to think. From then on, I’ve considered myself a socialist and interested myself in plays that are politically useful: plays which exercise an audience's empathy and thought; play’s that don’t shy away from depicting the brutality and strangeness of humanity; plays that are exorcisms which function to disrupt the grip of modern ideologies and neuroses. It has become my strong conviction that there are three markers for the success of a piece of theatre: if it entertains, if it makes an audience think, and if the audience brings their thoughts outside of the theater into the world. This is a very practical aspiration of theatre’s productive capacity. My idealistic aspiration for theatre is that it can serve as the post-theistic answer to Nietszche‘s death of God for it stands to edify the soul, stimulate the mind, and raise an audiences’ consciousness.
Whither shall we go now that we’ve untethered from the sun? To the theatre.
I now concern myself totally with the craft of playwriting.
Most, if not all of my work starts from two places: a political subject and self-parody. Essentially, a play starts with a political question and I pursue it by assuming the role of holy fool: I humble myself and, in good faith, pursue the truth—often making fun of myself, my thoughts, and actions in the process. This is not to say that I write myself directly into my work. That would be deeply embarrassing—I’m not that messed up! But there are certainly traces. Aside from myself, I draw my material from everything else: memes, gossip, music, plays, books, people, movies, theory, and so on… There’s so much that informs my plays, I can’t keep track of it all. To adapt a quote from Thoreau: I don’t remember where everything in the play came from, yet it’s made the play.
The two plays I’m proudest of are my No Girls Allowed and Ascension. No Girls Allowed was a one act written in the thick of the metoo movement in 2019. It follows a Mormon bishop and and his two counselors (dysfunctionally) debating over how to handle an accusation of sexual assault within the congregation. Ascension follows a young man, Matthew, in OC who can’t seem to find his way after graduating high school. As a sort of hail mary for direction, purpose, and meaning, Matthew returns to the fictional Ascensionist Church, the church he was raised in. Ascensionism, despite being the fix he wants, isn't the fix he needs; and, as a result, Matthew devolves into a manic and out of control steroid fueled soldier for Christ: religious fanaticism incarnate.