Like poetry that is read before a firing squad, plays have a menacing urgency. They harbor the hope of reconciliation before the trigger is pulled. My plays are funny (metric: audience laughter) and yet deadly serious. I write stories about how women claim power and how that reverberates in the world. I have had remarkable teachers and wisdom guides including Annie Baker, Marsha Norman, Francine Volpe, Steve Hamilton, Karen Hartman, Deborah Savadge and Bram Lewis. Check me out on the National New Play Exchange.
Watch highlights here.
I, Artemisia, Made This
2 W
My current project explores the world of Artemisia Gentileschi, the fierce and deeply talented 17th-century artist whom the history books lost track of. Considered a peer of Caravaggio in her time and collected by popes, kings, and dukes, Artemisia’s work featured bold women who claimed power in their mythical landscapes. Watch the short highlights video of our first reading to get a sense of the unique way the story is told with women playing all the roles including her father, husband, rapist, and her beloved mentor, Galileo.
Reviewed in The New York Times
How to Bury a Saint
3 W, 3 M
A “men only” policy at a Brooklyn bocce club sparked the idea of this play. Saint explores family traditions and gender roles through an intergenerational cast. Bonus: recipe for best meatballs revealed on stage. A New York Times review of the 2016 world premiere directed by Bram Lewis at The Schoolhouse Theatre in Croton Falls raved, "How to Bury a Saint has both a loving, steeped-in-spaghetti-sauce authenticity and a defiantly abstracted theatricality...It's got good writing, a winning cast, and expert direction and design.”
Illustration credit: Shel Silverstein
Missing Pieces
1W, 2M
Missing Pieces is a comic drama exploring the loss and recapture of intimate family life among a woman, her long estranged husband, and their twenty something gun-shy son. Three scenes in the present, each set in a hospital a month apart, force Frankie, Ray and Brett to confront the ways in which their lives have been compromised by the goof ups of their past. While the illnesses they face are not life threatening, their connections are on life support. They must choose to repair, renegotiate, or hit the delete button when it comes to each other. In an early workshop of this play, I was lucky to have DiDi O’Connell and Peter Friedman read the estranged couple.
Published in The Southampton Review
Re-Upholstered
1W, 1M
This short play drops us into a home restoration project where a busy woman in midlife stops long enough to choose fabric for a family heirloom and ends up discovering that it’s her own life in need of renewal. Barrow Group Theatre, directed by Deborah Savadge; Netty Award – Best Actress; Published in The Southampton Review.
Inspired by Prophetic Sisterhood by Cynthia Grant Tucker
Amity
This television pilot set in the late 19th-century Iowa frontier was inspired by true events. A young woman minister, Emmeline Wilde, recently ordained at an east coast seminary, is sent to the frontier to build a congregation. Her message of radical compassion and tolerance begins to resonate with independent Iowans and she confronts the hardships of finding her way as a preacher and blooming as a woman in the harsh, no-nonsense village of Amity.