When I was five years old, I sat on my father’s shoulders at the back of a sold-out auditorium, watching an eighth-grade production of “H.M.S. Pinafore.” And I can still picture a raven-haired beauty of thirteen, wearing a yellow bonnet and singing “Poor little Buttercup, I.” Probably I impose the yellow bonnet on the scene because of Buttercup’s name, but, really, that’s the point. That night in the theatre was so powerful that my imagination continues to fill in the details, populating the stage as I must have seen it.

The creation of such hard, bright moments is at the center of everything I do in the theatre. If I get it right, and the gods smile enough that the play finds an audience, these shimmering moments illuminate how we function in an imperfect world and resonate within long after the house-lights have come up. Imperfect? The world is a mess, a huge mess. The plays I want to write (and see) immerse themselves in the imperfection; what crawls up onto the shore in the end may make us laugh, or cry, or both. The important thing is that something has made it onto the sand. And it shimmers.