American mythologist Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the 20th century’s foremost expert on hero stories, was famously once asked by a student of his, “What about the women?” He responded that the woman was the mother of the hero, the goal of the hero’s achieving, or the protectress of the hero—but she could not, he implied, be the hero. Campbell studied old stories, stories that have been part of their respective cultures for millennia, but little has changed; while stories with female protagonists have gotten at least somewhat more common, it’s still remarkably rare to see stories that feature female heroes, in the fight-monsters-achieve-glory Joseph Campbell sense of the word. When we want to show women being powerful, we show them enduring suffering with grace and fortitude, usually in domestic or workplace settings; we rarely show them taking action, pursuing a destiny grander than the one that’s been laid out for them, or fighting for something larger than themselves.
I seek to change that. Over and over again, I find myself writing about women, particularly young women and girls, stepping into their power. In a sense, I see everything I write as a superhero origin story. Because while we may not believe that everything we see on screen or on stage is true or possible, we do believe the limits of what is possible that entertainment media lays out for us. If women can’t be powerful in mediums where the only limitations come from the imaginations of the writers, how on earth can we be expected to be powerful in real life? The idea is implied to literally be beyond imagining. I hope to use my plays to show the possibility of power—the kind you use for good—to those who might not be able to imagine it on their own and inspire women to take up the mantle of heroes in real life.
In addition to representing female heroism, I also want to use my work to destroy any notion of what a girl should or can be, to blow the limitations of girlhood wide open. In 2022 I was fortunate enough to see Mark Rylance in the London revival of Jerusalem, in which he does things like beat on a drum and call out to giants and launch into a handstand over a trough of water, dunking his head into it—actions that are the physical manifestations of a complex but larger-than-life character who has no limits to what he can or will do on stage. It clarified a goal of mine: writing roles in which female actors get to exhibit a similar level of virtuosity in their performance. So often, as women continue to play ingenues and long-suffering mothers, they spend most of the show standing still, unless they’re primarily a dancer without a built-out character. I want to write shows with female characters who might feasibly do something as outlandish as a handstand over a trough of water, in the hopes that women in the audience might be inspired to reconsider the types of behavior and ways of being that are available to them, despite all the limitations society has tried to enforce upon them.