Artist Statement Sitting in his bedroom—our library—we became architects of speech. Every time we created a sentence, we created a world. I learned to read with my dad. After his stroke, we built a universe together of glossy Seusses and purple flashcards. My sticky fingers and his stiff arm opened lacquer covers as we tried together to stack the slippery building blocks of language, the ones that kept slipping. Sometimes they would hold together long enough for him to say what he had been trying to for weeks. My father’s access to speech suffered because of damage to connective neural pathways. His grasp of abstract ideas remained frustratingly whole—present but veiled, lost somewhere in the journey from intangible idea to articulated speech act. Even as his linguistic skills improved, we would come to an impasse in the middle of an explanation or description. Searching for the word, he could only repeat the same, wrong word. I became part of this process of grasping for unattainable expression, participating in the search with him, riffing on his words in the hunt for the buried one. I am gripped by the way in which language tries—and the way in which language fails. The palpable dramatic tension in that disparity of almost attainment—almost perfect emotional mimesis—if we can only find the word. With my father, speech is an event, distinctive and precarious in constant question of the outcome. As I learned to construct language I became intimately familiar with its successes and failures, with how it is deconstructed, how it is destroyed. I saw language emerge—sprung forth through fricatives and glides. I learned the power of spoken language. Language even more beautiful and powerful as a deconstruction. As a playwright, I am interested in examining how linguistic expression can inform and interact with the process of finding and concealing truth. I see my work as both an exploration of theoretical artistic execution and an applied exercise in using the construction and deconstruction of language to examine the questions of human experience. Theater, like science, is used to better examine and understand the complexities of life. Because theater evolves over time, inevitably changing with each performance, dramatic language is uniquely powerful, current, and saturated with risk. The principals of Newtonian physics keep us reacting with equal force, and play worlds can stand as contained systems capable of creating their own language, their own rules, their own unique parameters. Every time I create a play, I create a world. But unlike Newton’s rule of vectors—consistent in a vacuum—the most exciting instant for me in the theatre is that occasional moment of rupture, when the structure (with its rules, its language, its parameters) collapses in upon itself. In the plays I am writing now, I am obsessed with the point at which the idea of something (the fantasy or the fear) ruptures into something dangerous—something incanted from the language and coupled with action. My play FILLING hinges on an act that brings hypothesis into practice. In SPOKEN INSECTS, the lyrical language and pulsating desperation try to invoke a society grappling with the few remaining options given to them, both doomed and then saved by the physical realization of imagination. CLEMENTINE AND THE CYBER DUCKS superimposes two eras in California history which collapse as greed and then grief permeate both. In Phantom Band I seek to explore the danger and ecstasy of experimenting with, escaping into, and saving oneself through artistic expression. The theatre I want truncates the universe(al) and the microscopic. Allows you to see multiple temporal moments, multiple systems, multiple ideas simultaneously. Allows you to see into this juxtaposition of the fantastic and the intimate, to find there a rupture of the accustomed and of the compliant. My plays are steeped in the fantastic—whether FILLING with its molting teenagers or APRICOT SUPERNOVAS where a boy adopts his own gravitational autonomy. But extraordinary circumstances without grounding in human character and physical specificity lose efficacy. I work to firmly position my work in emotional reality. I work to create language, and through language to create worlds.