MY STORY

We can skip ahead a bit.

 

I think it can be easy to forget that any given writer or director is a real human being if you only engage with their finished art and read the sterile third-person bio, which—don’t worry, you can definitely read a sterile third-person bio on this website and my work is pretty easy to find! But that’s not really what I want to do with this section here. It’s an artist’s statement, sure. But it’s also my story.

So allow me to introduce myself.

I’ve always loved making myself laugh and getting other people to laugh with me. In my rural Pennsylvania childhood, I found comfort immersing myself in stories when I didn’t fit in with the more athletic or traditionally-minded students and adults around me. I’ve always loved watching movies, playing Nintendo 64, reading books—and starting in middle school, acting in school plays. My eighth grade English teacher and middle school play director, Suzanne Fisher, recently told me she had a feeling I was going to go places as an artist someday, not just because I was funny. While I had a precocious sense of humor (her words), what truly set me apart was that I was always a keen observer of people.

Her comment resonates with me. I craft stories to make people laugh and think. I get to do this on stage and on screen as writer, director, and in some lucky projects, both. The part of me that years ago made a good church camp counselor remains alive and well. It’s the part of me that’s a good storyteller: I seek to understand others and break down what divides us through sharp wit and meaningful questions.

I don’t believe this positioning limits my work to appeal solely to one age or demographic—on some level, I believe most people wish to be better understood—but I’ve found my stories often resonate strongly with teens, young adults, and marginalized communities.

What I create has never been just one thing, because I don’t believe life is ever just one thing. Lately, I’ve become drawn to stories where morality isn’t clear-cut and answers aren’t easy—where humor lives alongside heartbreak and people are forced to confront what they’re truly capable of—whether in a comedy, a drama, or a psychological thriller. I wrote my first play, Good Knight and Goodbye, at age fourteen. This was, on the surface, a deeply unserious knight's quest parody that nonetheless raised questions regarding blind loyalty I still think about today. I debuted Off-Broadway as the writer of Abandon All Hope, which I market as basically No Exit if Sartre was raised Baptist. Jokes aside, as a gay Presbyterian, that play distilled a lot of what I had to say about religion and identity in my mid-twenties into something that will hopefully live past me. When I directed a production of Frank Wildhorn’s Bonnie & Clyde, I found a scathing critique of capitalism tucked in the middle of a dark romantic comedy.

Looking ahead, I believe I have a long career in front of me and I can only hope each step of the way to get sharper as both writer and director. My philosophy toward personal and professional growth at the moment is not setting out to change who I am or what I’m doing—because I thank God for who I am right now and how far I’ve come—but really, I hope I continue to be like the boy in Mrs. Fisher’s classroom: a kid with a precocious sense of humor and a keen observer of people. If I continue to go through life like him, I think it’ll all work out just fine.