God help me find the story in the slush of my life.

About Me and My Work

All my skills as a performer, mother, and academic come cohere to shape the way I write plays. Groomed to play classical piano, I rebelled in my undergraduate years to study acting and everything I could about theater. While acting, I continued playing music (jazz piano and bass guitar) in rock bands. I eventually wrote my first play while teaching theater at an NYC public high school, about a man who believed Marylyn Monroe faked her death, so he faked his death to meet her. The musicality of language shapes the dialogue in my plays, Mothering revealed how women wore many masks to survive and overcome the limitations of womanhood in a traditional society, so the theme of wanting to be seen and heard runs like a red thread through the stories. Rooted in a feminine aesthetic, my plays consider how gender influences relationships, implicitly or explicitly, motivating social behaviors and norms between people and groups.

There is nothing arbitrary in writing: each word, line, and beat is a deliberate choice. As I study other writer’s chosen aspects of craft and structure, I inch toward understanding how I make those choices in my writing. My artistic mission starts with the belief that storytelling (stories) should not be bound by convention. I write in many styles: naturalism, epic or post dramatic structures. The themes covered in my work gravitate toward stories about a woman’s experiences in a binary patriarchal world and an attempt to break free from prescribed expectations.

My goal is to learn: to let go, get out of my own way, and become my authentic writing self. I seek to immerse myself in continued learning – in meditation – to unleash whatever creative imagination might exist within my soul – to tell relevant stories – to look forward to writing and producing new work for a new age in American Theatre.

DD