Because I came of age in the turbulent 60’s, both personal and social impulses prompt my playwriting. I’m an activist, but friends and family hold keys to my heart. To live fully in both arenas, I write plays to better understand what urges us to imagine others’ viewpoints and entices us to build relationships with people, often to our own pain. What makes us linger in the darkness of bigotry and greed, isolated from intimacy and community, the essential sparks that light our lives?

I create stories from unfolding conflicts that I have witnessed among a diverse array of Southerners. Our ceremonies and manners are steeped in religion and family pedigree and are preserved with adequate hypocrisy to ignite both comic and tragic conflicts. I’ve created characters torn between seeking heaven and a lover’s pleasure, or between winning a legal case and failing to protect a daughter. Even in adapting classics, like Dickens’ A CHRISTMAS CAROL, I retain a story's backdrop of social conflicts pressing upon characters' personal desires and needs.

For me, writing plays builds strength and brings joy. More manageable than our lives, theatre's unfolding scenes remind us of what we have in common; creating such scenes heartens me. Life propels us into the unknown, necessarily in the midst of others, who may comfort, ignore or harm us on the way. Plays open new awareness, demand courage, and swell our spirits beyond loneliness.