I love theatre that emphasizes physicality and re-imagines reality. I love films that revel in scenery and leap across time. I frequently return to the theme of identity, viewed through the lens of feminism, race, spirituality or family, yet I never write about the same topic twice.
I love a personal, epic quest with implicit social impact. Most of my protagonists are women of every age; many of my real life heroes are women. Often, I write about ostensibly relatable people whose fanatical quest to do something that sounds absurd to other people gives their life meaning, and eventually confers some private-label version of heroism.
I love bleak humor and potty humor. I love poetic monologues and short, blunt grunts, both rendered by extraordinary voices. For me, there’s no substitute for the alchemy that transpires when my words meet an actor’s spirit and a director’s vision, and together, transform an audience’s mind and heart.
What binds me to a story every time is its mythic potential; the aspect that elevates the simple baking of a cake into a ritual act of universal symbolism. This is the level I aspire to be working at in all media; this is when I know I am reaching my audience through their gut as well as their intellect.
To sit in a theatre, listening to a crowd belly laugh at a preposterous observation uttered at a totally inappropriate moment; to have an audience member with tear-stained cheeks inquire whether you’d been a fly hovering over her family’s kitchen table during her childhood, you might start to believe that your art adds value to your world.
That is why I continue to write, and undoubtedly will, until I can’t remember how to spell.
CREATIVE CONSULTING/WORK FOR HIRE
As a dramatist and screenwriter, I bring decades of marketing and writing expertise to helping clients shape or sharpen a script or story idea, brainstorm the right medium for a concept, or hone a compelling project description.
As a musical theatre librettist, I belong to the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in New York and welcome assignments as a book-writer. Adaptations of stories or films, educational and /or children’s musicals and someday, a commission to write the book for an adapted or original opera are among the creative challenges I invite.
As a journalist and freelance scriptwriter, I’ve interviewed scads of citizens, students and celebrities, written and co-edited documentaries, directed radio and TV voiceovers, performed my own humorous monologues on the radio, composed odes in verse to celebrate significant occasions in clients’ lives or careers, and written speeches.
With years in advertising and marketing, I am a quick study, able to leap into any conversation with the trademark confidence that comes from knowing just enough about my topic to ask precisely the wrong question — and thereby obtain a very useful answer.
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