I'm a playwright in NYC. I've written for NPR, Wired.com, Theatre Communications Group, & Dramatists Guild. I also contributed to New York Times columnist David Pogue's book, The World According to Twitter.
My plays frequently explore dark subjects such as parasitic relationships, emotional violence, and organized aggression. I like to set up collisions between characters who have run out of words and characters who have too many of them. My characters live at the intersection of language and power, and struggle to break free from the constraints of class, race, gender, and systemic abuse. I'm proud to be one of four students in the first Playwriting MFA class run by Tina Howe and Mark Bly at Hunter College.
I started blogging in 2002 as Lucky Spinster; my first full-length play was based largely on that blog and was produced in Washington. While in DC, I produced my own work three times and had four commissions produced by small theatres. I was a teaching artist to over 1,000 students through various nonprofit arts organizations, and I taught Shakespeare in a juvenile detention facility.
My full-length plays have been produced, read, or developed at Washington Shakespeare Company, Project Y Theatre, the Kennedy Center, Electric Pear Productions, and the Capital Fringe Festival. I also wrote a verse adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Rape of Lucrece” in three days to replace a cancelled production of “King Lear.” It opened 10 days later at Washington Shakespeare Company.
In addition to writing plays from scratch, I enjoy writing plays that are adapted from or inspired by literary works. I find that they can be useful as a lens through which to examine topical and political issues. When I wrote Peace, an adaptation of Aristophanes’ play, I was asking questions about the War in Iraq, about why we go to war, and what the cost of peace is. When I wrote my adaptation of The Rape of Lucrece, the Bosnian rape camps and the trial of Milosevic were foremost in my mind, as rape then and now is often used as a weapon of war, for political gain.
I’ve been writing plays since 2005. My creative work up until then had been as a poet, dancer, and actor at various points in my life, and my playwriting is informed by all of these—I love to play with language and form, I’m interested in creating visceral work, and I have an ear for dialogue that comes from being an actor. My work is also informed by a very nomadic early life spent at first on welfare—I went to 12 schools by the time I graduated high school; I mention this because it’s at the core of who I am as a person and writer. I am deeply invested in telling the stories of marginalized people.
I have received a MacDowell Fellowship, a Ludwig Vogelstein grant, and have won the Rita & Burton Goldberg Playwriting Award at Hunter College two years in a row. I've been nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn and the Pushcart prizes, was an O’Neill semi-finalist, and was a finalist for the Clubbed Thumb Biennial Award. While at William & Mary, I won the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Tiberius Gracchus Jones Award for Most Outstanding Undergraduate Writing.
I'm a member of the writer’s group The Cram, and I founded the playwriting group Lizard Claw. I also founded DC Dollies & The Rocket Bitch Revue, which raised $4,000 for the DC Rape Crisis Center with a performance of The Vagina Monologues.
PLAYS
& other plays [PDF]
FILMS
a web series