Artistic Statement

Artistic Statement

I write for my younger self:
My childhood.
My adolescence.
All the heightened teenaged anxiety and gross/beautiful puberty driven moments.

I write for my mom:
Her dreams.
Her past.
Who she was, who she is, who she will become.

I write for middle class women:
Working class women.
Minimum wage women.
Working paycheck-to-paycheck only to wake up and do it all over again.



I write for anyone who is considered “the other” by society. I might not have lived their specific experiences but I can write to:
Believe.
Include.
Listen.

I write for women because sometimes being a woman can be the loneliest experience of your life.

My plays seek to answer the question, “How do you build a woman?” Prompted by Simone de Beauvoir and her statement, “One is not born, but rather, becomes a woman,” I look inside of my body and see my heart, guts, and blood. These are my writing tools. I have difficulty separating my writing from my womanhood. With every social injustice against my identity that is smeared across headlines, I feel the anger inside of me explode releasing my heart, guts, and blood to drown the pages of what will become my next play.

My plays explore the many facets of my identity and raise awareness to social issues. I find myself exploring middle class America, matriarchies, privilege, gender roles, and how women contribute to the legacies of their families. The question, “What does it mean to be a woman,” propels my characters on their journeys. My womanhood, experiences, happiness, anger, desires, vulnerabilities, and dreams are tangled together in these knots of words I call my plays.

I strive to challenge myself with each new play I write. In order to excite myself, my collaborators, designers, and audience members, I challenge myself to include at least one “unproducible” element in each of my plays. I believe “the unproducible” is where theatricality is born.

I once read somewhere that anger is just sadness wearing a disguise. I agree with this statement and would like to also add loneliness and confusion. I think back to when I was a young girl experiencing a traumatic event. I would think to myself that I am the only person in the world experiencing this moment. No one understands me. No one will hear me.

As a theatre artist, I think about my younger self often in her moments of ultimate loneliness and I wish I could tell her that she was never alone. My plays are a way of screaming into a dark void wanting to hear more than just my echo. As I write, I take my sadness, confusion, and loneliness all wrapped up in this angry pain and shout my truth. I hope that when people hear my plays, even if it is just one person who feels lost, standing in their dark void, they will know they are not alone.