Artistic Statement

Artistic Statement

I grew up between houses in different realities. Dad was a right-wing evangelical. Mom was a progressive, feminist pastor. They divorced pretty fast. So growing up, one week I’d be at a Billy Graham crusade, the next at a stranger's funeral. My parents didn’t speak to each other; I was the battleground in their private culture war. Compliance was key to survival. Rules were unspoken and constantly shifting. I found room to breathe physically in death-defying stunts with a cheer squad of girls and then intellectually at Harvard. As an adult, I’ve worked to give other women and girls the room I’d lacked to inhabit themselves and their lives fully. First as an educator, and now as a playwright.

Straddling fundamentalist dogma and performative progressiveness has made me a writer fascinated by boundary. In my plays, I twist genre and archetype to tease the audience away from the comfort of their assumptions while offering entertainment as a reward (no one listens to a sermon). I write a lot about the profound difficulty women have finding safe rooms to exist in fully and the tension created when that room is denied. On stage, I aim to make art that’s impossible, true, and transformative, using the interplay of humor and horror to invite a collective examination of uncomfortable questions we’re not supposed to let into the room.