Artistic Statement

Artistic Statement

I write plays because I was a very shy child who liked to make his toys live out intricate and morally ambiguous fantasies. I write plays because I enjoy listening to people talk to each other and am fascinated by their rhythms, their admissions, and their omissions. I write plays because people started producing plays I wrote through young playwrights contests. I write plays because listening to actors audition using my dialogue is intoxicating. I write plays because I produced them myself in college and that helped me figure out what I wanted to accomplish as a playwright, which is to boil the vastness of the universe down to a conversation. I write plays because I went to grad school for it, which helped me get my first professional productions, which directly led to me meeting my wife. I write plays because I held temp jobs and real jobs that allowed me to write plays at work and this state of disconnection from my physical tasks has become a theme of my plays. I write plays because I got married and made a family and live in Brooklyn, so I might as well write plays. I write plays to keep from going totally insane. I write plays because I am not a total alcoholic yet. I write plays because I will not live forever and neither will you. I write plays because the Ancient Greeks and everyone else after them wrote plays. I write plays because the universe was created or boomed, or something. I write plays because not everyone writes plays, even though it feels like you might hit a playwright if you threw a rock on a crowded 6 train.

I do not just write about one thing in my plays, but in all my plays I seem to be drawn to epic intimacy. Within that, here are some recurring themes: Moral relativism; swordfighting; education, race, class, and other social divides; men and women; the effect of legendary real life figures on non-legendary people; the effect of legendary figures on each other; salvation through imagination, often connected with artists; fantasy as a means of control; feeling disconnected as a result of trauma and the inherent humor in that disconnection; surviving after escape, and the ensuing guilt.

My vision for the theatre is in constant formation and reformation. Always at its center is the relationship between the audience and the actors. To me, there is no other relationship once the play is doing what it is meant to be doing: playing.