Artistic Statement

Artistic Statement

My plays are dark comedies and should be played as comedies with all that implies in terms of pace, tone, and rhythm, i.e., quickly, ironically, and deftly timed. This means that the actors need to maintain a certain ironic distance with respect to their characters in order the more to bare their souls. Also, because dark a comedy is only another name for tragic comedy, a mixed genre that goes all the way back to Euripides, i.e., grotesque, disordered, ugly, its content is a tragedy, meaning that within the spiral of comedy there is a through-line that leads to the tragic enlightenment, however modest, of the main character.
Also, my plays do not exemplify the standard contemporary linear formula of exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. They are ring structures, meaning that they end as they begin, the climax or meaning of the play is in the middle, and the second part is a mirror image of the first part. This is not something that I consciously set out to do but is the way my plays naturally emerge. Nor is there anything original about this structure. It was widespread in the ancient world and there are also modern examples, such as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. See Thinking in Circles: An Essay in Ring Composition by Mary Douglas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)