ARTISTIC STATEMENT

To the untrained eye, my hometown of Clermont, Florida is hot, sleepy, and unassuming. Its population wasn’t much, and we didn’t even get a movie theatre until I was sixteen. While some may call my town boring, its quaintness gave me the opportunity to create my own magic. Orange blossoms perfumed the air all year round. Grasshoppers talked and dead lizards came back to life. Without a radio on, music suddenly filled my home when I began to feel lonely. Snow fell in November, and on a clear night, if I found the right hill to sit on, fireworks began to burst from a not-so-far off magic kingdom.

Years later as a playwright, these imaginative happenings have found a home in my plays where I magnify or distort the magic I once experienced in order to better understand the world around me today. I do this by theatricalizing not only the landscape but my experiences as a Black woman growing up in a small Southern town. So, in my plays, animals appear larger than life, blooming flowers bring back sweet memories, music and fireworks appear almost at random, and it absolutely snows in hot Central Florida. Those moments, along with a sense of small-town entrapment and nostalgia, are explored by women and teens trying to maintain their own beliefs while navigating expectations put on them by their families or circumstances beyond their control like racism, violence, and untimely death. My characters are working against people and situations seemingly immovable or inescapable but ultimately, they find the strength in themselves to push until something, or someone, breaks. And more often than not, that strength also comes from those family and community members they once felt stifled by. My characters are independent and bold but are a part of a much larger, loving whole...

( A full version can be found on New Play Exchange.)