Artistic Statement
I am a theater artist - director, performer, producer - whose work embraces liminality and muddle, who believes that artists are obligated to embrace the messy, complicated beauty of our enigmatic world. Theater, for me, is not about providing easy answers, easy comforts, easy resolutions; making theater is about fostering curiosity, digging deep into questions, and honoring ambiguity. In that spirit, I strive to celebrate queer minds and bodies – not just treating my work as a platform for telling queer stories but as an opportunity to revel in our human harmonies and dissonances.
Other questions that are animating my artistic practice right include:
What does it mean to be American? The doorway to the nation says “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” And yet the history of this country tells a different story – of quotas, camps, raids, sundown towns, and Jim Crow. Can we reclaim an American identity? Do we want to?
How do we mete out justice? What does reparative justice even look like? With trust in formal justice systems eroding, how can we be accountable to each other without creating new systems that treat human beings as disposable like the systems we are trying to replace?
How do we find our ways back to each other? In a world that can feel hopeless and isolating, it is more important than ever to build community. How can stop putting up walls between us, and build bridges instead?
My work is unapologetically theatrical – it has been variously described as “an intimately affecting laboratory,” “staged with unlimited inventiveness,” and “brutal and brilliant” – and encourages audiences to be complicit and co-conspirators in the artistic process. The thing that makes theater a uniquely powerful art form is its ability to create communion between storyteller and audience – to allow us to share the space and the story together. I would always rather reveal how the magic trick is done and eliminate the barrier of spectacle, so that an audience can wonder at the story rather than the effect. My work has been compared to John Doyle, Ivo Van Hove, and Michael Arden, but I also find myself inspired by the work of artists like Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Demme, Simon McBurney, Mark Rylance and Emma Rice.
I believe that the theater is space of invitation, a place where the unexpected and the unexplainable can emerge.