I believe that we are all built from the same matter, though every individual represents an utterly unique and distinct form. “Same matter, different form” is at the heart of all I write. Before I started playwriting at 16 years old, I was convinced that I was something worse than everyone around me, a defective lemon of a person: too fat to be female, too female to be confident, too awkward to be gay, too desperate to really belong. Writing plays showed me how the singularity of my form complemented the ubiquity of my matter. The characters in my plays directly confront the systems we’ve developed to qualify each other’s humanity—skin color, gender, sexuality, size, wealth, education, accent—and find the lie by recognizing, sometimes unwillingly, themselves in each other. If I can bring those essential human realities forth even briefly, without pretense or posture, I can make it more difficult to deny their existence and importance.