I invent characters that are ignored or misunderstood, who feel they must justify their lives to an uncaring universe. They are not always likable but they are worth getting to know. They are angry and traumatized, articulate and smart, solitary and hopeful. They resist the violence of being silenced; they insist on being heard; they make a space for themselves. Audiences relate to these people because we've all been misinterpreted, and we all want to be seen for who we are.

My themes are the search for home and connection, loneliness and redemption. My plays end with the protagonist (usually a woman) keeping on keeping on, having neither achieved what she thought she wanted, nor giving up completely. There is hope but not too much. There is relationship but it is tenuous. I embrace the irony of focusing on solitude in the most collective of genres. I have never felt happier than when in the middle of a play development process, listening and revising and learning that my words often mean something different, and often richer, than I knew.

When I was a graduate student, I saw a performance of Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends. I had read the play, thought I got it, but at the curtain I was wracked with sobs I could not explain. Fornes’ imagining of misogyny broke me, but the terrifying beauty of the play galvanized me. Those are the plays I am trying to write, the ones that upend your certainties, bother you for a long time.

My playwriting apprenticeship began at Cornerstone Theater Company’s fifth summer institute in Los Angeles, learning how to produce community-based theater. I had only written two incomplete plays at that time, but my Cornerstone experience inspired my most successful piece to date: Sheltered, created after years of volunteer work with homeless women. My purpose was to make these women visible, to allow them to voice a reality most of us would rather ignore. Sheltered uses a Greek chorus of homeless women who shape-shift into stock characters such as cops and outreach workers. The play also tells the story of a volunteer at a homeless shelter looking for her addicted mother, their reconnection and ultimate failure to reconcile. Many spectators have admitted to not “seeing” homeless women before watching the play, and to gaining a deeper understanding of their lives. The play has succeeded in making this population harder to ignore. It has succeeded in another way as well, a way that has taken me a full year since writing the script to acknowledge. I have never been literally homeless; I have no disabilities; I do not live in poverty. But I have been invisible, mostly to myself, and developing this play has shown me that visibility is my primary motive for writing plays. I am always going to write about misunderstood people, people who are not seen and heard for who they really are.