Artistic Statement

Artistic Statement

At 8 years of age while performing my first play in the backyard of a neighbor - during a poignant monologue,
I got an unscripted whipped creme pie in the face. A mad pie fight ensued . . . So I took up the clarinet. Not moved to risk theatre again for five years, I then read the words “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” Ah, I thought, the author of Macbeth is a kindred spirit. Since then, after many figurative whipped creme pies in the face, my love of theatre has never faltered, and I've grown some.

I write to entertain, to love and to honor the human race by holding up a mirror to society, to inspire thought, and to dig deep and truly get somewhere. As a fiction writer and playwright, I admire how Anton Chekhov was able to reconfigure himself as primarily a writer of short stories, someone who was accused of just wanting to tell stories from the stage, to the preeminent early modern dramatist. The rewriting strategy he used to transform his early bad play, The Wood Demon, into the seminal play, Uncle Vanya, has been a revelation into how his mind worked and how one perseveres to create drama.

I’m excited by the potential for the stage to go beyond the familiar experience of home and office, to test the limits of the imagination, to astonish the intellect, and to instruct the heart. Nitimur in vetitum (We strive for the forbidden) says Ovid. I endeavor to create work that could only come from me and yet has the potential to reach others in profound ways. Writing to invite collaboration is a prime motive of my theatre. To write a play and to find later something I didn’t know, something only other voices could have brought to the work, makes all the storm and stress of the process worth it.