artist statement
My work centers women and non-binary people in magical worlds at the intersection of family, identity, and water. Like me, my plays often have deeply queer Midwestern roots.
I think of my plays as love letters. To my mom, to shitty jobs, to microorganisms, to complicated loss, to blueberries, to secrets, to groundwater and fresh water and the bottom of the ocean. To the many wonderful and disgusting things our bodies can do. My playwriting practice intentionally gives agency to actors and designers. I envision a theatre that is nonhierarchical and generous. My writing is full of impossible offers. When I say "two hundred dead horses fall from the sky" I am offering my collaborators space to figure out how to honor what it feels like to be surrounded by death. I am excited by creating opportunities for inventive, playful stagings of evocative truths. My aim as a writer is to create space for the grief we don’t have words for in our everyday lives. Because of this, my plays are often quite funny. I want the audience to simultaneously feel like they’re part of a secret club, and running to catch up with what’s happening. Everything I write comes back to the water. I'm interested in letting the body of water that is inside me align with the bodies of water in the more-than-human world. Recently, I’ve been wondering “What does masculinity mean for me? What does femininity mean to me?” Both of these concepts are incredibly mysterious. Isn't that fun? I’m interested in staging the impossible and writing to discover what I don’t understand. |