Artistic Statement

Artistic Statement

My work focuses on relationships. I like stories about people who use nothing but words to change a person, connect with someone, or push someone irreparably away. I am uncompromising in my dialogue, using the profane, jagged, accidentally poetic way people speak to breathe life into the characters on stage, making the audience identify with them through vernacular, whether they want to or not.

There are always themes that I find interesting and want to riff on for a time. With Get-Together and Facsimile, I wanted to test the limits of seemingly indestructible relationships, like family or lifelong friends. With my Father-Son Trilogy, consisting of Rebound, The Lawyer's Father, and Sink, I wrote about toxic masculinity, the changing notion of parenthood, and generational nostalgia. The next idea I'd like to tackle is what I think of as the Great American Orphaning. That being the sense of alienation and abandonment Generation Z has felt at the hands of Generation X and Baby Boomers in the wake of the multiple cataclysms of the 21st century (9/11, the Great Recession, The 2016 Election, the rise in police brutality against Black Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic, to name a few). The entropic explosion of the post-war Boom and the hedonistic greed of Reagan's America created an elder ruling class who have witnessed the events of the 21st century and become cognizant of their own mortality, but apathetic to the world that remains after their death. Thus, the younger generations of this planet inherit a world broken-beyond repair (abandoning of the security of the future) and any concerns voiced about the matter derided as "being triggered" (abandoning the legitimacy of activism). When the youngest denizens of this planet are left out to dry in a world that is doomed, what can you call it but an orphaning?