the controller (or a play about a marriage)

2 F / 3 M

The Controller is about a marriage in crisis when Bri, who has had to quit her job due to chronic illness, turns to a golf video game for escape. There she finds a community that gets her through a difficult season. When a misogynist accuses her of cheating at the video game, however, she goes to extreme measures to clear her name. In doing so, she may lose her marriage. The play is about identity, chronic illness, public shame, and marriage; and asks – how do you maintain your sense of self when the core things that defined you are taken?

Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, finalist, 2023

the loophole

2 F / 2 M. Darlene and Charlene, twin sisters from South Carolina, steal 20.5-million dollars from the Department of Defense through a loophole. What begins as an accident turns into a 7-year fraud that these middle-aged Baptist women justify. David,Darlene’s husband, takes the audience on this journey to understand why she committed this crime but comes away with an unexpected revelation. While *The Loophole* is a cautionary story about greed, it is also about grief and the surprising journeys of a wounded heart.
**The Barter Theatre, LORT Production, 2019**
**Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, nomination, 2018**
**GPTC PlayLab, 2017**
**O’Neill Center’s National Playwrights Conference, semifinalist, 2018**

buffalo creek

2 F/ 2 M. It’s 1972 and Bailey Seeger’s 18th birthday, the age at which he is expected to start working in the coal mine with his father. Bailey overcomes his fears to begin work in the mine but quickly finds that safety regulations aren’t being followed. When the coal waste dam busts, 100 million gallons of water and coal sludge are dumped on Buffalo Creek, leaving thousands homeless and over a hundred dead. Three generations of his family must come to terms with the coal company created disaster. *Buffalo Creek* is about the relationships between faith and family, the union and coal company, the past and present, and the region’s long-term oppression and today’s political landscape. It asks—who do you trust when everyone has betrayed you?
**Henley Rose Competition, finalist, 2022**
**The New Harmony Project, finalist, 2020**
**Bay Area Playwrights Festival, semifinalist, 2020**

MSP_When Mountians Move_-169.jpg — when mountains move

6 M/6 F. *When Mountains Move* is the epic tale of Lillie Mae Bostic, told through a chorus of coal miners and a bluegrass band. Due to the unusual circumstances of her birth, her father believes God has given her a word for her people. The story, set on Black Mountain, Kentucky, follows the decade-long labor struggle of the coal miners for the basic human rights denied them in the 1930s. In the midst of the struggle, Lillie Mae searches for her word while growing up surrounded by women who join the fight for freedom. While the play is fictional, it is inspired by historical accounts of Bloody Harlan in the 1930s, the preacher-miners who secretly helped get UMWA support, and the oral histories of the people who remember the struggle. The play explores how the power of words and a little bit of faith can move mountains.
**Commission and Production, Lee University, 2018**

memory of ice

2 F/ 2 M. Nate and Zoe are glaciologists conducting research on the rate of ice flow in an outpost on Broadmore Glacier, Alaska. While the ice beneath them moves at unprecedented speed, their marriage is in crisis. Unexpectedly pregnant, Zoe wants to leave her post-graduate research, go home, and formulate a plan for how to be a glaciologist and a mother. Roger, a freelance PR consultant, arrives to get footage of the project. Meanwhile, the trio is being watched by Trapper Max, an old woman with a secret and a penchant for showing up at inopportune times. After Nate falls and breaks his leg, Max “rescues” him… or does she? Memory of Ice asks—can loss be quantified and can hope be maintained in the face of increasingly frightening conditions?
Bay Area Playwrights Festival, semifinalist, 2022
Blank Theatre, Living Room Series, 2021
**Seven Devils Conference, semifinalist, 2019**

laundry at the coin & spin

2 F. Laundry takes on new meaning when two women take refuge in a laundromat in this 10-minute play.
**Women’s Leading Festival, Itinerant Theatre, 2019**
**The Collective: NY: 5th Annual Collective Ten, Oct. 2017**
**Rockford New Play Festival, Aug. 2017**

onthe8s_Amber_2010 — on the 8’s

3 F /2 M. Tammy, and her husband Ed, used to be members in the punk rock movement in New York, before they traded it in for a normal life in suburban Virginia. When Tammy finds out that her former lover, punk rock legend Bobby Foster, dies of a drug-overdose, she struggles to hold onto her normal routine. Donna Storm, a weather personality, offers Tammy a diversion in the Weather Station, but when it’s not enough anymore to merely watch the weather, Tammy begins creating the storms in her living room. In the end, Tammy must decide to continue living her life vicariously through other people’s experiences or to go outside and face life on her own.
**Great Plains Theatre Conference, PlayLab, 2012**

2008-02-19 20.06.33.jpg — a proportional response

1 F. Becky, a photographer, recalls an event from 7th grade in which her best friend, Saffron, stops speaking to her. For what she considers a betrayal, Becky plans a vicious retaliation. In this play about perception, Becky examines the past to discover the truth about what she did. Left with more questions than answers, she continues a life of examination by looking through her camera to craft small moments of meaning.
**First Stage LA’s Playwright’s Express, Staged Reading. 2008**
**Lee University’s Writer’s Festival, 2008**