On January 21st, 2017, the day of the first Women’s March, I stood in the middle of Constitution Avenue, freezing cold yet melting into the million who stood alongside me, and screamed in the direction of the White House until I could no longer hear my own voice. And though I was literally one of a million, it was as if none of us existed at all. As if we were screaming into a void. I began to think of all the voiceless women shouting to be heard, those around me and those before me, and I knew that a change was going to come. I knew that I needed to become a different writer than I had been. I knew that I was a different writer. One whose job it is to write about Her, to specifically and emphatically write about Not Him.

In pursuing my MFA these past three years, it has been my task to rediscover who I am as a writer and uncover new pieces I had yet to find. I have spent my twenties focusing – unintentionally, but quite naturally – on the inner lives of fiftysomething married couples and the challenges, negotiations, and sacrifices innate to their experiences. And though that direction served me quite well, I have been working, in this new course of discovery, toward new goals. My interests have shifted into writing historical plays with contemporary significance.

For time immemorial, we have looked at history and art through the perspective of men – white, straight cis men in particular – and as a writer, I see no need to perpetuate that pattern. Female voices, be they loud or suppressed, are at the center of my work, my focus, and who I am as an artist. I believe that as a female writer in 2021, I have a responsibility to lift these voices when they’re silenced and create them where they don’t exist. Often I tell these stories through the lens of their relationships, romantic and otherwise, and the sacrifices and negotiations made to keep those relationships intact.

My most recent play, Go Like Saints, is about the Hollywood Blacklist, set during the HUAC hearings in 1951, centering on the relationship between two female friends who must choose between their friendship and their careers as subpoenas begin tearing the town apart. My thesis play centers on the oft-ignored women who contributed mightily to the breaking of the Watergate scandal and the eventual resignation of Richard Nixon. What has become painfully clear to me is that, in this country and in the American theatre, anti-racism is not done and neither is feminism. In the year 2021, we are still grappling with a predominantly white cis male industry and, as a result, we are not hearing the voices we should be hearing. We are not allowing the most important stories to be told. But some of us will keep on writing them.