Stories belong to all humans and we have a need to tell and share them. I love writing plays that celebrate a breadth of human stories that feature bodies and stories systemically repressed from being a part of the stage. I have lofty goals of following fiercely intersectional paths that my heroes have walked in before; sharing space with dear ones who should be (and always have been) heroes in our plays. This pull is kindred to what I believe children's programming used to be. Then somehow that got sterilized or stripped of the humanity. My dream is to bring back that humanity and all the flaws that are inherent with it. And to make theatre that is accessible for all people. Because theatre does not have to just exist on a stage.
I am a playwright from the Pacific Northwest currently teaching the craft of play/screenwriting, dramaturgy, and film at Western Washington University where I have been for twelve years. My heart home is in Albuquerque and the surrounding mesas and high desert plains. I multi task being a professor and creator with parenthood; just how things are done in 2023. I try to write plays (short and long) the occasional musical with a friend, and lots of subpar poetry. I also co-chair of KCACTF Region VII for the New Play Program in the same region. I am also artistic director for a small story telling collective that encourages access to performance and community connection through sharing personal experience.
Plays
Dad died. It happened and it sucks. And now the kids left are grappling with identity, place, and the oppression of a legacy of abandonment and disfunction. The story centers around Ari, a single-mother of a sixteen year old and her struggle with mental health, death in the family, and love of Dolly Parton.
The play is designed as a collaboration with performers and producers to create a unique story that each group identifies with. Hopefully the message of loss and overcoming loss is universal.
Ded Reckoning” is a musical-theater production told in song and dialogue with five quirky characters, all set on a spaceship. Three sisters and their mentor-mechanic have been barreling aimlessly through space for almost seven years with a broken navigational system.
On the day the audience joins them, a mysterious surge of power collides with the ship and their navigational system comes back on line. The system, an android named N.O.R.T.T.H. (Navigational Operations Run Through Titanium Humanoid), presents them with an important question they must now face.
Three forgotten goddesses are exiled to the New Mexico desert for discovering the subtle art of masturbation. (And you thought you could just go blind!) Forced to deal with the trials of becoming human, these three goddesses (and two helpful, if bumbling, muses) banter, bitch, and break down, and (of course, of course) discover a little bit about themselves in the process.
Set against the backdrop of the Southwest, Peaking explores people’s natural ability to deal with a fall from on high, (literally, in this case), the power of choice making, and how a little bit of self-actualization can cause a lot of trouble along the way.