When I was ten, the kids in my neighborhood formed our own nation and quietly seceded from the United States. We called the country Anabru, (the name of our hometown spelled backwards). We wrote up a constitution where children could vote, run businesses, and theoretically drive cars. We garbage-picked things for shanty cities, for a national detective agency, and an Olympics, and signed treaties with other child nations that emerged during Anabru’s sovereignty. Every day was an exercise in recasting our down-and-out neighborhood as something magic and mythic: recasting ourselves as founders, and rulers, and explorers.
I’m still heavily invested in that type of recasting.

In my work, I’m interested in showing the ways those without power flip the expectations of what power looks like. In FLOOD CITY, a trio of survivors of the 1889 Johnstown Flood become entrepreneurs of necessity, selling relics and miracles in their ruined city with a Brechtian practicality. Colored by own experiences living in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, FLOOD CITY looks at the politics of disaster recovery and the way survivors re-cast and re-categorize their own experience of catastrophe.

In nearly all my plays time and space is uniformly porous: a thin and passable membrane. In CATCH THE WALL, a classroom bursts apart to become a dance club, a janitor strips off his uniform and becomes a charter school founder, and a ghost inhabits the body of a young teacher. In THE PANAMA LIMITED, two failed lovers and a pair of wanna-be hobos turn a couch into a train car and a hotel bed all at once. I believe creating these permeable spaces in my plays creates an expanded space for audience members to see themselves inside the story,
but also to see the way their own stories bleed into their neighbors’. With that shared narrative comes an expanded capacity for empathy: a permeable reality. I want my plays to slip through the walls people build around themselves and to quietly cut in slits of empathy until those walls are passable.

Besides my own plays, I write and direct collaboratively with Underbelly, which builds immersive journey plays in forgotten spaces. Underbelly often makes work that travels the private or invisible parts of a theater— the light pit, the loading dock, and the very back of the scene shop. With Underbelly, and in my producing capacity with Brooklyn Yard, I’m interested the way an audience’s invitation into a new space propels a story forward. I believe theatre is the practice of continuous generosity; an art form of shared resources made powerful by its immediacy.