Storytelling is the oldest art form. Throughout the history of humankind, people have been compelled to explain the world—to themselves and to each other. I consider playwriting to be a heightened version of that most basic instinct. Whether tackling the meaning of life, the import of love, or how one copes with loss, plays develop empathy and understanding of worlds both foreign and known for the audience and writer. Moreover, a play can timestamp the era it depicts, as well as capture the spirit of the culture and generation in which it was written. If historical texts relay facts, fictive ones deliver truths.

It is in this spirit that I approach my own work. While a standard narrative trope places an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances, or vice versa, my inspiration is drawn from characters’ realizations that the choices they have made, the stories they’ve willingly told themselves, parts they’ve committed to and enacted, are perhaps not as significant as they’ve led themselves to believe. They are confined in relationships that largely exist in quiet, riddled with assumptions, and mired in subtext. Whether marriages or friendships, the complications between parent and child, or the primary relationship with the self, my work seeks to illuminate the stark realities of mortality and paths not taken, regret and longing, human obsessions, disappointment that life is not what it was meant to be, and how one comes to terms with such things.