ABOUT
As an interdisciplinary playwright, my work examines the collision of emotional intimacy with late Capitalism, feminisms, “America,” language, and the idea of hope. More simply, I am interested in unearthing the undramatized machinations of daily life that can swerve from the hilarious to the traumatic on a dime.
My darkly humorous yet heartfelt plays explore political polarization embodied in human behavior as it unfolds in the United States. While the results of uncompromising ideology are easy to identify in the news and pop culture, my overarching goal is to write plays that invite audiences to ask increasingly direct questions about their own varying levels of empathy, cultural (dis)empowerment, and contradiction. This serves as a guiding provocation for myself, as my latest work, Picture This, grapples with personal family history surrounding immigration, assimilation, and aspects of Judaism ranging from racial and ethnic identity to the long shadow of the Holocaust. Considering both my own white identity as well as the U.S.' history of white supremacy, another challenge that guides my process is figuring out how to chip away at hegemony's tight grip while—for starters—also knowing that I play a part in it by sheer virtue of being born middle class in the United States.
As I expand my dramatic practice into the realms of video and sound art, I have recently drawn influence from migratory aesthetics, a field which views the action of migration as a springboard for potential understandings of identity politics, psychology, and political terrains as they pertain to artmaking. The fluidity and possibility to be found in this field have opened up new pathways for me to consider widely-accepted beliefs about “universality,” especially in relation to the struggle between individual expression and the seductive tyranny of collectively-devised cliché.