I’m interested in surprising people. I write realistic plays with certain specific elements of magic, and genre plays that break the conventions of their genres in certain particular ways. I write well-crafted plays, plays that follow rules, but then break those rules at specific moments, in hopes that this will make the audience question the rules of the play and, more broadly, the rules that all of us live by. I’ve always been drawn to those moments when you see something unexpected, and it makes you see everything else a little differently, and I want to create those kinds of moments in my work.

I think surprise can be a useful tool for social change, because it defamiliarizes the world just enough to let us to think about how to improve it. Many of my plays examine the challenges and contradictions inherent to being a woman in the 21st century, and question traditional social expectations about how women are supposed to behave. Some of my plays feature women who are trapped within these traditional expectations, struggling to break free and be happy despite the social pressures they’ve internalized. Other plays subvert traditional social expectations or blow them apart entirely. I’ve written a romantic comedy where the romantic lead is a pedophile; a play about wanting a baby where the baby is actually a machine gun; a play about the mother-daughter relationship where the mother ends up getting eaten by a minotaur. The thematic through line of most of my plays is that they examine women’s roles in our society, and question whether the traditional happy ending – marriage and babies – is actually a happy ending after all.

I’m happily married, and I have a one-year-old baby, so when I say question, I don’t necessarily mean reject. But we’re living at a time when the world is changing – maybe faster than it ever has – and we genuinely have a chance to remake our society. I know that the kinds of stories we tell affect the ways we live, and if we can learn to look critically at the kinds of stories we’ve always told, then we can start to tell different stories – more progressive, more inclusive stories – and live in more progressive and inclusive ways.