I am a bi+ cis female, but my goals as an artist come out of a love-hate relationship with my fundamentalist Christian background (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, the conservative wing of Lutheranism). I rejected their view of truth as a kind of language-based explanation behind the physically present world. But I also feel lucky to have had a spiritual practice as part of my early life—it can be a way to symbolically transcend our human limitations. I write plays because I’m interested in connecting language to the physically present world. I write experimental plays because I want to disrupt the familiar, in order to symbolically transcend our human limitations, and challenge power.

The “real” of my childhood fell apart once I left that environment, because as it turns out it was made entirely of conventions—what the people involved agreed on. This experience sensitized me to how limited and unjust life is if we don’t question our own historical, economic, and cultural assumptions, and also made me fearless in disrupting what our Capitalistic society as a whole takes for granted as “real.” In theater it means disrupting the technical and dramatic naturalism of mainstream TV, film, and plays. For example, my one woman play Maker of Worlds [produced at Theater for the New City, 2019] begins with the conventions of a YouTube cooking show about “making worlds,” but it’s soon clear what is being shown is a low-tech mess. It portrays a god misled by a Capitalist husband, imprisoned by bourgeois complacency and white guilt, and remote from those who need her. My idea was that if gods are reflections of our highest ideals, I would hold up a mirror to show what’s missing from ours.

All of my plays have an element of anti-Capitalism, because I feel before I can do anything, I need to disrupt Capitalism’s conception of art as a “product,” which is its way of neutralizing threats to the existing order. It doesn’t want to get rid of art completely, because it does represent a basic human need, and Capitalism needs those to power itself. To me, the basic need art serves is similar to religion: to symbolically transcend our human limitations.

We need to symbolically transcend our human limitations because to the extent shared conventions allow us to survive every day life, we also suffer from them. Perception itself, beginning when an infant separates the face of its caregiver from the background, is not a mechanical process (as the Lutherans would have it), but meaning-making. To survive, we divide up the world into blocks of meaning that serve us—but we long for the seamlessness that existed before, too. The dividing process creates the need for “ultimate meaning”, which it then can’t resolve. To me, the highest form of art creates a safe space in which we can again experience the world as seamless—sufficient in itself, and without need of a separate, language-based explanation.

In this safe space is the opportunity to picture an alternative from what the conventional world calls justice, and from the roles real life thrusts upon us. It makes it possible to talk about sexual orientation as a continuum, and race as an arbitrary weapon of violence. We can comprehend gender as a construct. We can even dream, fleetingly, of a post-Capitalist world. Indeed, if racism, sexism, gender oppression, economic inequity, and religious domination were simply bad content that can be switched out for good, we would have done it already. But they are woven into how we conceive of the world. To me, realistic plays with progressive messages currently favored by many theaters do less to foster change than reality TV. I believe in theater’s mandate to challenge the powerful, and to the extent that I do, I believe it needs to challenge existing forms.