Hometown: San Diego, CA
Current Town: Austin, TX, and Brooklyn, NY
Q: Tell me about Methods in Madness and Polly, a dumbshow for smart people desperate to survive the fallout.
A: Methods in Madness is an interdisciplinary “salon” investigating the connection between mental health and creativity. It grew out of research I began two years ago into a growing mental health crisis plaguing the Black community. I was interested in interrogating the ways this largely silent struggle specifically impacts artists and chose to look at four 20th-century artists who publicly or privately battled with mental health. As a multidisciplinary artist who is also neurodivergent, I have often felt a certain fragmentation or compartmentalization in my work, so Methods became a container to integrate various facets of my creative practice into one violent confrontation.
It is an experiment, a meditation, and an autopsy of sorts. I use the word experiment because it’s an evolving examination of a constantly changing relationship across various artistic disciplines. It’s a work in flux, which has been radically supported by my creative home, FLUX Theatre Ensemble. Through a series of collaborations with a mix of artists, Methods is an art installation, an immersive audio experience with filmed and live performance components that invites audiences to enter the mind of an artist and consider the ways their own “madness” informs their art and vice versa.
Polly, a dumbshow for smart people desperate to survive the fallout is a unicorn of a play. Largely written during the “Great Reset” of 2020, it worked its way out of me as I watched the world unravel. In it, we follow the eponymous character through a series of disorienting confrontations as she navigates a brutally absurd upside-down world and fights to survive the fallout of her life.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I’m forever tinkering with something and love experimenting with new forms. Flux produced a sprawling immersive audio drama, Our Options Have Changed, which I wrote for. Methods in Madness contains a fair bit of poetry and scene fragments that I find interesting. There are a few short films gestating at the moment, and I am about to return to my vault… I have a Baldwin-inspired feature screenplay, Negrosis, I’m looking to produce, as well as a Sartre adaptation that was workshopped at The Cell in 2021.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: You know, funnily enough, I don’t have lots of precise memories from childhood. Much of it feels like a wet watercolor painting. I was an only child and a latchkey kid, so I mainly remember spending time on my own, much of it in front of the television, which I suppose does explain something about me… But the first story that comes to mind happened when I was about 13. I was visiting my aunt and cousins in this remote desert town in California. She was my favorite aunt, and I loved spending time with her and getting away from home. Well, my two cousins were a few years older than me and were tasked with watching me while their mom worked the nightshift. One evening, although we were supposed to stay at home, being teenagers, we had plans of our own. My cousins had friends who lived in a town twenty or so miles away, and they wanted to go hang out.
Now, Ridgecrest, where my aunt lived, was really out in the boonies, so there was very little around. I remember us piling into someone’s Ford Escort hatchback and riding with both windows down as we traveled about 45 minutes to an hour away. It was a blur of teenage shenanigans I don’t really recall—I was an NPC tagging along after all—but I do remember at some point, we realized we had to get back before my aunt got off work. That’s when we discovered the person who drove us there couldn’t drive us back. It was late at night, and because we weren’t supposed to have left the house, my cousins didn’t want to call their mom. And, being teenagers, none of us had much money (or cell phones), so my eldest cousin decided we could walk back or at least get close enough to afford a taxi.
I don’t know how many miles it was, but I remember walking along this two-lane highway in the middle of the night, with very few cars passing. One of my cousins was crying because she knew we were going to be in deep trouble. We eventually came to a gas station, called a taxi, and waited 30 or 45 minutes, but it never came, so we walked some more and eventually made it home—after my aunt. They got grounded.
Wow! I haven’t thought about that in a very long time. I suppose it explains my appreciation for an unplanned adventure. I love road trips—really, all trips—and long dark roads with hints of danger. These things find their way into my work, I think. I often feel like that backseat passenger, watching tales unfold.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: So many, and for various reasons. In no particular order: I adore Lorraine Hansberry. I love Beckett, Brecht, and Pinter. I appreciate William Inge and Tennessee Williams. I have tremendous respect for Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, and Tony Kushner.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Visceral, embodied, uncomfortable, messy, intimate, or epic storytelling is what I long to experience in the theater. I like being challenged and completely immersed.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: I think too many playwrights are concerned with getting it right. The only way to discover your work is to identify the mysteries you’re most interested in solving and then allow them to guide your work. Chase what you can’t quite grasp—it’ll lead you somewhere you never expected. Yes, that pursuit may be long, and you may have to spend a lot of time in the wrong places, but those answers will eventually reveal themselves. If you follow them and write the things that only you can write in the way that only you can write them, you’ll do fine. And don’t worry about getting lost. That’s where the magic happens.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: Check out Our Options Have Changed and Sharing Power!
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