Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
A Connecticut Women for Life meeting is interrupted by a young mother who needs help. Elsewhere in history, a group of wealthy Londoners write a dictionary of slang so they can speak the unspeakable in front of their wives and daughters, and a New England tea party devolves into an intervention when the lady of the house must fire the indiscreet help.
Alliance/Kendeda Finalist 2021-2022
O'Neill National Playwrights Conference Semi-Finalist 2021
After a tragic accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down, ZZ spends her days creating ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos for a YouTube channel, and hoping to become a millionaire. As ZZ’s world becomes more isolated through her total immersion in technology, a competition with a fellow YouTube star named Gabi Shush, and the desires of a mysterious Donor, drive ZZ to confront the loss she has locked herself away from the world to avoid.
Developed with ShoutOut Saugerties with a free, masked outdoor reading in April 2021.
Take Me For the Mountain
And her? Dig out a trench. Pile earth on top.
Lay heavy soil on her ungodly head.
-Seneca, Phaedra
Written in collaboration with director Katherine Wilkinson, Take Me For the Mountain tells the story of Phaedra, a woman who is married to a bad man. Through interlocking scenes that take place in "women's spaces,"; nail salons, gynecologist offices, Costco, Phaedra's fall from social grace lands her in a mountaintop commune of goddesses, where she must reckon with her lifetime of loving a man who caused ruin.
Take Me For the Mountain most recently received a residency and workshop performance opportunity with Catskill Mountain Shakespeare in July 2021, and is currently in a second round of development with support from The Syndicate.
I Love You Forever I Like You for Always as Long as I'm Living My Baby You'll Be
James and Myka Stauffer are real-life people with a real-life family of 4 children, plus one adopted child, Huxley, whom they adopted from China when he was two years old. They also had a popular YouTube channel of over 700,000 subscribers, on which they documented intimate details of their home life with their big brood, and Huxley's emotional and developmental issues. In May 2020, when Huxley was 4 years old, James and Myka posted an emotional video about their decision to re-home their son. Then they disappeared from the internet.
Using interviews, real-life resources, and Medea as guides, I Love You Forever examines the idea of the white savior in international adoption through the lens of what it means to be a “good” mother.
Finalist, The Civilians' R+D Group 2021-2022
JewGirl; or, The Prophet M
When there is a prophet among you,
I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions,
I speak to them in dreams...
When the cloud lifted from above the tent, Miriam’s skin was leprous[a]—it became as white as snow.
-Numbers 12: 1-3
One of the earliest and cruelest examples of quarantine, the banishing of a leper, is the leaping off point of JewGirl; or, The Prophet M. The play reimagines Miriam's fateful 7 days in the desert, exploring the concept of prophecy and what a world where the Bible we read is Miriam's and not Moses' might look like.
Written in workshop with David Adjmi.
Big Dead Bird
Big Dead Bird is an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Set in the 2010s, the play explores the ramifications of the opioid crisis on the good people of Kensington, a neighborhood in Philadelphia. With Wilder's innovative, meta-theatrical structure as its guide, Big Dead Bird is an updated "translation" of this classic play that uses the simple poetry of day-to-day life to examine the United States' slide into an epidemic that has ravaged the entire country, and its effect on families. This play is designed to be performed in hospitals, treatment centers, schools, and other community spaces. It will ideally find development and production opportunities in communities that have been deeply affected by the opioid crisis.
It’s 1999. On the competitive dance circuit, a dancer’s obsessive attempts to perfect her routine for a panel of judges threaten to take over her life. Meanwhile, the world around her grows increasingly obsessed with Y2K, boy bands, guns, celebrity...laying the groundwork for the world we find ourselves in today. By examining the seemingly inconsequential mistakes we made at the end of the 20th century, Tiny Errors at the End of the Millennium wants to know: “How did we get here?”
Performed as part of IRT Theater's 3B Residency, 2018.
Trixie the Giant is one-woman show created in collaboration with Creative Producer/Dramaturg Sophie Blumberg, with music written by Sean Vigneau-Britt. Inspired by the life of vaudevillian, movie star, and suffragist Trixie Friganza, the play examines women's impact on early comedy, and the reverberations and consequences of that impact, through the character of "Trixie,” the last standing monolith of vaudeville.
On May 26, 2017, Trixie the Giant was presented as a free workshop showing at the Lounge at Dixon Place after development via a First Draft Residency with The Drama League.
70-year-old performance artist Maria receives a cancer diagnosis that makes her question how she wants to die. Unfolding through a series of short scenes with Maria’s much younger lover, song-and-dance numbers with her nurse, stand up routines from Maria’s daughter, and visits from a mysterious marine biologist mourning the effects of climate change, Graceful Exit is a darkly comedic play with music about death, climate change, and aging in America.
Graceful Exit was written in residency with the Mabou Mines Resident Artist Program 2015/2016 and The Drama League Next Draft Residency 2017. With music by Sean Vigneau-Britt