Artistic Statement

Artistic Statement

I’m a really good liar. If I were lying to you right now, you’d never know it. If you could see my face, you wouldn’t be able to see a twinge of sarcasm or lack of truth. I’ve been like this since I was a painfully shy child. I mean who would ever guess that that chubby, awkward kid would lie? And yet, I had my entire third-grade class convinced that my parents were hippies, and we lived in a school bus. We did not. We lived in a fairly decent house in the Hollywood Hills. Although it seemed as if I lived a perfectly charmed existence. I did not. My house was filled with secrets. And I perpetuated those secrets by telling lies, although in my mind they were stories. Eventually, these stories filled my mind so often that I was constantly lost in them. In conversations, I would nod my head and interject an, “uh-huh” periodically, when in fact I was not listening. At all. I was watching movies in my mind. Movies only I could see, where sometimes, actually often, I was not the main character. These characters were based in reality, but it was up to me to fill in the blanks of their lives, and eventually, I imagined them on stage. An undertaker and tinkerer became a curmudgeon in need of finding love. A female comedian was faced with a cheating husband who threatened her career. A queer high school kid became an advocate for gender-neutral clothing.

These characters, deep down, are ordinary, yet deeply flawed people whose deep-rooted dreams give them a sense of purpose. They hold on to this purpose, this hope as if their lives depend on it. And in the end, what they all realize is that they are so much more. Whether they fulfill their purpose or not, what’s more important is their integrity, which sometimes means letting go of what they thought they needed or wanted. And more often than not, they were wrong all along. As one human to another, you know what that's like. We all sometimes need to be backed into a corner in order to change. I know I do. Also, just so you know. I don’t lie anymore, I write plays instead.
​​
My plays often have a recurring theme, gender empowerment, and I’ve deduced that there are infinite ways stories that inspire gender empowerment can be told, and need to be told until all of us are equal. We can especially see it in the disparity of the number of produced plays about women and non-binary people and/or written by women and non-binary people. Several of my plays are about the struggles we have faced historically. From them, we can see how far we’ve come, and how far we still need to go. When more than half our population is deemed less worthy, it’s a significant issue.

My artistic goal is to trust that what I know and what I have to say through storytelling is within me, to listen to the world around me, and to add my own take on universal truths through the medium of a play, or two.