Selected Plays
You can see more of my dramatic work and script samples at my New Play Exchange profile.
i might delete this later
(Full length)
Cat has an unusual request of her family: she’d like all the family photos that feature her to be destroyed. The people in her life really, really do not take this request well.
What follows is a tragicomedy about family and memory, a Sisyphean quest to reject modern media, a debate over representation and expression, and a exploration into the very nature of seeing and being seen.
Developed as part of the Road Theatre’s Under Construction Lab and SlamFest series
Human Resources
(Full length)
Kate is having a very rough Monday morning at work. For starters, she’s got a new overly chatty officemate named Alan. Also, she’s realizing that her work in the User System QA team might be totally devoid of meaning. Also, she just found out she might be dying. As the Mondays accumulate, Kate’s existence is upended as Alan worms his way into her life. The bond between this unlikely pair moves from tenuous to surprisingly tender. However, neither can predict how the forces of late-stage, tech-fueled capitalism or Kate’s developing illness might muck up their non-romantic, workplace romance.
Selected for the Great Plains Theatre Conference.
Staged Reading at InkWell Theater
Selected for Red Theater Script Club
A small breach in protocol at Big Rick’s Rockin’ Skydive Academy
(Short)
In the 60 seconds between jumping out of an airplane and deploying parachutes, plummeting at a terminal velocity of 120 miles-per-hour, four people have much to think about their lives and how those lives will be forever changed when—or if—they get their feet back on the ground.
Winner of Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival and published in best of anthology
Frogtown: Anaxyrus Boreas
(Radio play)
First time home buyers Isa and Hannah are thrilled to be moving into their updated Craftsman style bungalow, but a near-Biblical plague of unexpected intruders pushes the couple to really get to know all of their neighbors in this environmental parable of city dwellers learning to share space.
Produced by Antaeus Theatre as part the Zip Code Plays
The Sisyphi
(Full length)
A committee of concerned citizens brainstorm strategies to remove a gigantic rock that has materialized in their town. A scientist becomes too overwhelmed with the inadequacy of language to talk geology. A woman can’t get out of bed due to the world’s exceedingly grim state of affairs — also, there’s a gigantic, invisible boulder on her chest. And, the mythic hero Sisyphus has to roll a boulder up a mountain only to watch it roll back down over and over and over and over again. Through a series of connected, enigmatic vignettes, The Sisyphi asks: when faced with your own futility and the unceasing meaningless of the universe, why bother?
Selected for Parsnip Ship Play Club
Workshopped at Actor’s Theatre of Louisville
Finalist Kitchen Dog New Play Festival
Roguish Machine
(Full length)
A new technology is poised to make you obsolete. A mysterious folk hero named Ned Ludd has come to town plotting this machine’s destruction. Do you join Ludd, grab a hammer, and swing? Or, do you wait and see how this whole Industrialization thing shakes out? Inspired by the Industrial Revolution’s Luddite Uprisings as well as the politics of our own self-driving Uber age, Roguish Machine tells the story of two siblings whose fates diverge wildly with the arrival of a newfangled, mechanical invention. Who gets left behind, and who gets unforeseen opportunities, when technology marches inevitably forward?
Workshop production at Carnegie Mellon School of Drama New Works Series. Directed by Wesleigh Gates.
Shortlisted Neukom Institute Literary Arts Playwriting Prize
ID, Please
(Opera Libretto, 3 singers)
ID, Please takes place at the politically fraught, liminal space of a border crossing of an unnamed country. In this collage-like chamber opera, a border agent questions an endless flow of travelers— represented by just two singers. Switching between sung interrogations scenes and psychological arias, the opera both exposes and occludes a set of characters’ internal lives as they attempt to flee their country of origin, return home, get through their banal bureaucratic day jobs, and more.
Music composed by Soosan Lolavar.
Premiered as part of CoOpera at Pittsburgh Opera. Directed by Stephen M. Eckert. International premiere at the opera festival Tête à Tête
Oceanus: a play about the internet's tubes
(Full length, Flexible Cast)
When a mysterious accident severs a piece of the internet’s infrastructure— a “submarine” cable resting on the ocean’s floor — the world wide web slows to an excruciating crawl and consequences big and small ripple across the planet. Happy marriages crumble, global commerce falls to its knees, deep sea sharks philosophize, and a submarine delves to the center of the earth in panoramic play about myth, technology, and the vulnerable tissue of human connection.
Developed at Custom Made Theatre as part of Undiscovered Works Series in San Francisco, directed by Rebecca Longworth
Subtenant
(Full length)
Rick can’t get into his dead son’s computer. Sasha can’t get Rick out of her apartment. Together, these two—along with the emotionally withholding computer that comes to life before Rick’s grief-weary eyes—form an unlikely household. Both people wish they knew more about the departed roommate and son that brought them together—though Sasha may not be telling Rick everything she knows about the young man’s last days.
Premiered at Asylum Theatre of Las Vegas, directed by Sarah O'Connell