I’m a playwright. I write comedies about very serious things and the occasional drama with a bit of humor. I seldom think of comedy as a genre but rather a language. I like using comedy to laugh both with and at the things that scare me. BLOOD: A COMEDY is about memory loss, the pain of aging, the problem with religion and the salvation of dysfunctional families. SLIPPERY AS SIN is about the dangers of blindly following a flawed belief-system. REAL TRUE CRIME concerns the existential pain of growing older and realizing that the world is too large to experience in a single lifetime. FESTIAL QUARTET and FIXED are about finding salvation in life-long friendships when the rest of the world lets you down. I’m also fascinated with the rituals we create throughout our lives in an effort to conjure up a little bit of magic. I’ve never been an overly religious person – not since childhood anyway – but some of my Midwestern, Christian upbringing must have taken hold because my plays are full of quasi-religious rituals that the characters sometimes create on the fly. In ROCKET SEX MAGIC, the real-life rocket scientist Jack Parsons creates his own rituals to find the secrets of space travel. In BLOOD: A COMEDY, the matriarch creates an impromptu communion with hot pepper cheese cubes and iced tea. I’m a bit of a confused person. In particular, I’m confused about religion, politics, family, psychology, where we go after we die and why people are so incredibly cruel to one another. I think most people are confused. The act of writing has not alleviated my confusion, but it has helped me share my confusion with other people. So I write about these things. I sleep better after.