Plays

Elizabeth is going into the ground

Four trees in the north Maine woods communicate through an underground network of roots and fungi.  Four women, each struggling to come into her own in a nearby rural logging town, pass each other gifts by way of the town’s one-car postal service.  By blurring the boundary between human and tree, Elizabeth is going into the ground contemplates the communities of our forests, weaving a tale of love, resilience, and old growth.    

2022 Honorable Mention Leah Ryan FEWW Prize
2022 Winner UT Austin Green Fund Award
Production (upcoming) – UT Austin Studio Performance (2023)
Reading – Scriptworks Austin (2022)

Petrificationology

An immersive performance in the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin

Nestled between the disciplines of Geology (the study of rocks) and Biology (the study of the living) is the small and perpetually underfunded sub-field of Petrificationology: the study of those who have been turned to stone by the Gods.  Sometimes petrification happens because the Gods are punishing that person for their sins.  Sometimes the Gods are trying to save them from a worse fate.  Sometimes – and this happens more often than we’d like to admit – petrification just happens.  And we never learn why.  Petrificationology is a study of stillness, of breath-taking, of the sudden and irreversible losses that occur unseen every day across the face of our planet. 

Production (upcoming) – Cohen New Works Festival (2023)
2022 Cohen New Works Festival Go Grant Winner

Rumpus for the End of the World OR Susan Sontag in a Bear Suit OR Pan-

There’s a Gala in the city.  (Not that one.)  In the depths of creative corporate hell, three interns throw out months of preparation as they frantically pivot to please the Gala’s mysterious new host.  On the other side of town, a prophetic rabbit competes for the title of World Champion Hopper, but he’s really more invested in letting everyone know that the world is about to end.  A farcical satyr play about fast fashion, camp, and coming face-to-face with the fury of an exploited natural world.

2022 Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission Semifinalist
Reading – Masters Salon Reading Series, UT Austin (2022)

Dog Soup for the Hungry

Playground architects design spaces that are dangerous enough to allow for experimentation, and safe enough to allow those experiments to fail without serious injury.  But when Arthur is asked to design a bulletproof playscape, he confronts an unsettling reality: that the world does not operate by the same rules as playgrounds.  This is a story about the persistence of care and hope despite the overwhelming strains being placed on the American educational system.  It is a play about learning, growing up, and grown-ups learning to play.

Excerpt published in Stonecoast Review (2023).

The Norns of Athens, Maine

Pas, Prësin, and Futur have lived in the Olde Olde Tree in the Athens dump for as long as anyone here can remember.  From there, they weave a knotted web of the lives and deaths of all who live in Athens.  A story of being forsaken, of wearing out a welcome, of manifest destiny unraveling.

Workshop – NG Arts (2021)

American Dream

In this adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae, an ensemble of first-generation grandmothers from a nursing home in Newark venture into the wilds of an unfinished megamall.  There, they serve as a test audience for the mall’s slate of virtual reality experiences – which range from climbing El Capitan to homesteading in the Wild West.  These VR escapes offer the women a chance to experience youth and agency in the context of the United States’ most famous wildernesses.  At the same time, these digitized glimpses of the American Dream painfully remind them of an American ideal that they never had the opportunity to pursue.  

Unbecoming

Charlotte Guest is a Victorian housewife and mother of ten.  She also aspires to be the first to translate an ancient collection of Welsh myths called the Mabinogion.  Within the Mabinogion, she encounters the story of Blodeuwedd, a wife conjured from flowers by a lovelorn magician. A play about women, creation, and the mythic figure of the perfect wife. 

Production – Lewis Center for the Arts (2021)
Reading – PlayPenn Education (2020)
2019 Recipient Sioned Davies Award

Trailing Rhiannon

In this adaptation of a mythic Welsh story, the audience follows Rhiannon on a trail through her life, from the Otherworld to this one, past jealous princes and stones that speak, as she struggles to clear her name of a gruesome crime she did not commit.

Workshop – Chapter Arts Centre (U.K.) (2019)
Production – Lewis Center for the Arts (2018)
Reading – McCarter Theatre Lab (2018)
2018 Recipient Alan S. Downer Prize
2018 Recipient Lewis Center for the Arts Music Theatre Award
2018 Recipient Princeton Environmental Institute Book Prize
2017 Recipient Mallach Award
2017 Recipient A. Scott Berg Award

Hygge

A ten minute play about rabbit lost in Ikea, Christmas at a drive-in, and finding home in unexpected places.

Production – Theatre Intime, 2017