My plays and prose have been winners, finalists, or semifinalists for a number of awards and/or contests, including those sponsored by the Road Theatre Summer Playwrights' Festival, the Live Arts WATERWORKS Festival, the Ashland New Plays Festival, the Garry Marshall Theatre New Works Festival, the New American Voices Playwriting Festival, the Full Circle Theater, the Arts Club of Washington D.C., the Chameleon Theatre Circle Festival, Friends of American Writers, and Council for Wisconsin Writers. My nonfiction work has also been shortlisted, twice, for Houghton Mifflin’s annual Best American Essays series. I consider myself primarily a playwright while also, in the intermissions between acts, an essayist.
My plays often explore or take as a given a kind of porous boundary between naturalism and something that simply won't fit under that label. They exist at the extreme edges of where the human imagination will go. I like a bit of spectacle, what I think of as the life blood of the theatre, an explicit reminder to the audience that when they enter that space they've truly entered a world unlike the one they live in daily, a space where almost anything can happen. Don't get me wrong: I love seeing a good, tight, intense naturalistic drama. But it's not the kind of play I want to write. That said, my characters are real. They are human and flawed and likable or unlikable. They wrestle with real-world dilemmas, with personal tragedy, with love and loss, with aspiration and failure. And they inhabit a recognizable world, where sexism, racism, hatred, fear, and suffering hold sway, but where joy and wonder or at least a kind of contentment can also get a foothold if the characters work hard enough. And if they can take away something new from their skirmishes at the boundaries. I believe all of my plays, though they are intellectually challenging, leave my audience with a sliver or more of hope. And some ameliorating laughter along the way.
As for my other work, my essays have appeared in numerous national and regional magazines and literary journals, and have ranged in subject matter from nature to science to memoir to baseball, among other things. I've also published several books for young readers.
Plays
(2022) Tom, a cynical, cranky artist in his 60s lives in a cottage that he owns with his wife on the Maine coast. On the day of this play, a day thick with fog, he has just buried his old dog out back. If only his old wrongs could be so easily put away. Instead, in a series of his paintings, almost against his will (though he holds the pencil), faces from his past have begun to appear faintly, as if rising from the deep, through the paint, through the fog, into his studio. And when these “ghosts” then begin to arrive in person, walking into his home, demanding a reckoning, he can no longer ignore the often terrible hurt he has inflicted on others, including his children, his best friends, and an illicit lover from many years ago. Worse, it appears that their arrival is largely prelude to his reckoning with (and learning from) what he calls “the worst thing I ever did” and what his wife Maggie calls “the best thing you ever did”: his uncharacteristically selfless but heartbreaking decision to aid in her suicide before dementia could rob her of her determination to die while life still had meaning.
(2021) Against an occasionally quite active backdrop of January 6 rubble, a focus group of people aligned by race, by fearful, angry attitudes, and by loyalty to a certain unnamed former President, have been invited to speak candidly, to name their perceived enemies in the context of a closed session led by a moderator. Into this cozy, self-congratulatory bubble, a young latecomer arrives, someone who neither looks nor thinks like them. She is a teenager and out of her depth at first with so many (white) adults, but as the discussion becomes increasingly volatile, the latecomer finds her voice and ultimately asks the group to consider a kind of desperate proposition, an impromptu story that may (or may not) help them imagine a way toward change.
(2018) This play explores the dangers of coveting what is not, and can never be, ours. This includes transgressions of boundaries, attempts to appropriate the “other,” and inabilities to separate the imagined from the real. In it, a top marine biologist and seal specialist, wishing for the kind of discovery that "changes everything," comes across a beautifully unsettling, naked woman on the rocky Maine coast one night, just after he has found a complete, empty seal skin. This event challenges everything he knows as a scientist. It also threatens his tenuous marriage and raises--for him, his wife, the exotic newcomer, and us--questions about what happens when the ghosts of our past impel us to leave what we know and enter places we don't belong and can't survive.
(2022) (2018 and 2014, earlier versions under the title The Infinity Monologues) Through interweaving monologues, Amelia Earhart, Lawrence Oates (of the ill-fated Scott expedition to the South Pole), and Stephen Hawking recount their unique but oddly similar stories of facing the Absolute. Each has crossed a line from the familiar to the surprising and terrible. In such a crossing, something happens, a new insight or alchemy that opens up the universe just a little and changes the traveler forever, making it very difficult to return to the solidity and predictability of the world most of us actually have to live in. While honoring the facts of history and biography, my play also fictionalizes in order to uncover a different kind of truth, an insight into three very distinct choices. Life and death. Beginnings and endings. What might it have been like for these people to confront the infinite, to long for the immense and profound while simultaneously fearing its obliterative power? What might it be like for us?
(Early version 2020, but currently in revision) MasterMind speaks in part to our present times, while setting up an unusual dramatic situation. It features two big-city police Detectives -- a late-60s white male and a 30-year-old African-American female -- interviewing the greatest serial killer, the greatest mass murderer, of all time: God. He's not the usual suspect, and the interrogation takes both detectives down surprising and personally harrowing paths as they try to pin everything that's wrong with the world (racism, sexism, violence, hatred, even aging) on a deity who won't confess to anything until they do.
(2023-2024) On a stage populated by the living and the dead, an aged mother reckons with her past and, advised by a long-dead Antarctic explorer, prepares for her own death, one she hopes to delay until she reaches the South Pole. At the same time, in the same space, her estranged son is packing up her house after her mysterious death, helped by a young woman who is both very real and perhaps just a little bit magical. The painful surprises he comes across result inevitably in the dead and the living confronting each other, demanding answers, and finding some sort of mutual forgiveness amid the calm of a continent that moves at the pace of an ancient glacier.
Successes
When We Ceased to Be? was named a finalist (out of 600+ submissions) in the 2024 Live Arts WATERWORKS Festival contest.
Reckonings was selected (out of 674 submissions) and performed in the Road Theatre Company's 14th annual Summer Playwrights' Festival in 2023 in Los Angeles. This is billed as the largest play festival of its kind in the country.
Focus Group was a semi-finalist (out of 650 submissions) in Full Circle Theater's call for scripts for its 2023-2024 season.
Seal Skin was named a Semi-Finalist in the 2021 Ashland New Plays Festival, 2021 Garry Marshall Theatre's New Works Festival, and 2021 Landing Theatre Company's New American Voices Playwriting Festival contests.
When We Ceased to Be? (in its earlier iteration, The Infinity Monologues) was one of ten winners chosen from over 300 submissions worldwide in Chameleon Theatre Circle's 20th annual new play contest, and was directed by Megan West, Chameleon’s Exec Producer, as part of their New Play Festival in 2019 in Minneapolis.