I write from the land of lakes and landfills. Dead trees puncture verdant forests like rows of rotten teeth. Neither completely rural or urban, a very small city surrounded by farmland and poverty. Betwixt and between. I drive through this region, overcome by the splendor of the geography while also gripped with terror at what is ahead for this overheated world. Sometimes I can’t see the forest for the (dead) trees. But then the tentacles of Parthenocissus quinquefolia snake up the wooden skeletons, burning red. Out of the ashes of the Ash, Virginia Creeper rises. To me, that is the complexity of hope—loss and life; grief and growth; ruin and resoluteness. My playwriting exhumes the wreckage, giving air and light.
I write plays of archival topography, weaving together historical artifacts with the distinct contours of contemporary rural landscapes. History and directing are the ignition and fuel for my playwriting. For several decades, my primary identity in theatre was as a theatre historian and director. The “stuff” of history—texts, sites, fragments—sparks a new play. The theatricality of directing translates that “stuff” to the stage. Grappling with themes like guns, climate disasters, or suicide, my plays inhabit a shaky terrain between certainties. My writing presents muddled figures who try, fail, and ultimately find their way to the architectures of community.
Where are the opportunities to luxuriate in the betwixt and between, to find the moments when, as Marvin Carlson evocatively writes, theatre “oscillates between the fleeting present and the stillness of infinity”?