Specializing in provocative, timely and often darkly comedic work, often exploring generational feminist issues and invisible disability. My play Dionne's House was a 2022 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference finalist, about two generations of feminist friends' terrible taste in men. See O'Neill's letter of recommendation on play profile. My play Jane: Abortion and the Underground, just finished a Jeff- nominated run here in Chicago by Idle Muse and will be featured in a national anthology of women's monologues later this year.
My brand-new play, very current for the 2024 election season, The Pardoned, is a comedy/drama following the evolution of a 1980s punk rocker to become a high-level MAGA operative. It's set in the underground music scene in Chicago of the 1980s and 1990s and...
Specializing in provocative, timely and often darkly comedic work, often exploring generational feminist issues and invisible disability. My play Dionne's House was a 2022 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference finalist, about two generations of feminist friends' terrible taste in men. See O'Neill's letter of recommendation on play profile. My play Jane: Abortion and the Underground, just finished a Jeff- nominated run here in Chicago by Idle Muse and will be featured in a national anthology of women's monologues later this year.
My brand-new play, very current for the 2024 election season, The Pardoned, is a comedy/drama following the evolution of a 1980s punk rocker to become a high-level MAGA operative. It's set in the underground music scene in Chicago of the 1980s and 1990s and explores the much-debated risks and rewards of that time of "selling out."
A highlight of my dramatist career was a celebrity-staged reading of my play Jane: Abortion and the Underground, starring Cynthia Nixon off-Broadway at Rattlestick Theater to benefit A is For in New York City in 2019. This play, my most well-known, had five productions of some kind in 2022. In 2023, it hit a sad milestone of having a reading for the first time in a state that had outlawed abortion, in South Carolina.
Jane is based on interviews with Second Wave feminist who ran this legendary underground Chicago service. I'm Gen X, the play has mainly been performed by Millennial actors, and now Gen Z is discovering it, with a whole new gender outlook. It has been performed by dozens of fringe theaters and colleges and raised many thousands of dollars for pro-choice causes.
Also a study of recent generations of women, Dionne's House explores the different life choices available to the trailblazing feminists of the Second Wave -- and how having a personal life and children can still dramatically limit those options today.
I got a "poor man's MFA" taking classes by masters over the years at Chicago Dramatists, including Scene Shop with Will Dunne, where I developed Dionne's House, The Pardoned, and parts of Jane.