PLAYWRITING

As a person well acquainted with personal and familial mental illness, from psychosis to Bipolar Disorder to OCD, my writing focuses on highlighting alternative perceptions of the world, undoing long-held mental health stigmas. My plays, be they comedic or tragic, work to humanize mental illness and source it beyond the hereditary, rooting it in societal injustice, prejudice, and personal or communal trauma. In this pursuit, I utilize grey areas, healthy confusion, and the bending or breaking of expected forms in order to immerse the audience in alternative modes of perceiving reality. I embrace all that is contradictory and irreconcilable, refusing clear-cut answers and living-room dramas. I frequently put science into conversation with poetry, interweaving scientific facts with rhythmic, metaphorical, song-like poetics. My work is theatrical, strange, and expressionistic, I love to smush real, character-based dialogue with wild, wacky worlds. I never let my love for theatrics cloud the core heart of each character; the truth and the intellectual and emotional clarity in my work is always my highest priority.

alien(E)

Eighty year-old Elaine is sitting on a beach and is obsessed with protecting a nest of unhatched sea turtle eggs. She is visited by Darling, who is the spirit of her trauma. Over the course of three days, Elaine relives the loss of her child, the birth of her second, and her subsequent psychotic break. The play follows Elaine as she struggles to subdue the unrelenting ghosts of her past, maintain a loose grip on the present, and run away from the ever-escaping and utterly terrifying "future". At the peak of her traumatic reliving of her life, the sea turtles hatch and Elaine, despite all her efforts, fails to get them safely to sea. After she mourns their death, the cycle begins again.

Production History:

Recipient of Vassar College’s Marilyn Swartz Seven Playwriting Award, Spring 2025

Student Production at Vassar College, directed by Robyn Lindsay, Spring 2025

Staged Reading at Vassar College, Spring 2024

dregs.

Neck, a wandering eye, and Fisch, a bent spine, are two souls picking for what’s left in the Landfill of Spirit, searching vainly for meaning in an empty world filled only by the ghosts of objects.

Production History:

Production of 20 minutes of dregs on a Brooklyn roof, Produced by Tin Can Contingency, Directed by Ella Talerico (Summer, 2025)

Salt. Fruit.

Two solo performance pieces that can be performed together or separately. A love letter to feeling lost, to lies, truth, confusion, memory, trauma, innocence, individual pain, collective pain, the stories we tell ourselves, and the simultaneous torture and fortitude we find inside our minds. Salt. follows Jo, who struggles to process and share a long held trauma. Fruit. follows Alma, the soul, who struggles to process and cope with the inevitable pain at the heart of human existence.

Production History:

Salt. at Gallery 40, 2024; Directed by Deborah Coconis and Chris Burney

Fruit. at the New York Theater Festival, 2023; Directed by Ella Talerico

Salt. Fruit. at Vassar College, 2023; Directed by Ella Talerico

Salt. at Vassar College’s Steerman 10-minute New Play Festival, 2022

It’s Something for Sure!

Fiona, a once prolific and prodigal young artist, finds herself depressed, lost, and struggling to find the will to live. She falls asleep, and wakes into a theatrical dream world where, instead of a struggling young artist, she is a struggling young actor on stage faced with a very real audience and the immediate burden of creation. Supported by friends, inspired by her muse, and challenged by fantastical characters both hilarious and terrifying, Fiona's dream forces her to wrestle with her demons and rediscover her light - the essential will to keep living and trying.

Production History:

Production at Vassar College, 2022; Directed by Ella Talerico

Staged Reading at Vassar College, 2021; Directed by Ella Talerico

Production at Ensworth High School, 2021; Directed by David Berry

Wormball.

Freti and Mawn, two early-twenties, college juniors, are stumbling over each other on their journey towards self-discovery, self-acceptance, and peace within a system which dictates at every turn the opposite: self-repression, self-flagellation, and an irrepressible urge to gaslight oneself into complete self-destruction. What happened is never a simple question. The truth of our trauma and our memory is rarely black and white, clean, or simple. Victimization is perverted and tempting. A disturbing and charged exploration of shame and its manifestations, the lies in truth, the truth in lies, and the ways oppressive norms and stigmas shape our collective psychological imagination. Plus: worms.

Production History:

Production at Vassar College, 2023; Directed by Ella Talerico

Birds with Orange Bellies

Everyone is starving. There’s a tree that produces fruit… but it’s poisonous. A play that follows a motley crew of poor and struggling misfits as they struggle to live in a dying world. Every act feels like act five. Every person on the verge of complete self-destruction. No one is safe… except, of course, the rich.

Production History:

Production, 2023; Directed by Ella Talerico