Artistic Statement

I recently came across a workshop titled “Creation, Collaboration, and Community in Writing,” which promised to explore essential questions: What responsibility do playwrights, directors, and actors have to move beyond the idea of the “individual genius” in favor of collaboration, community, and social justice? How do we create work that genuinely values the lived experience of everyone in our communities?

These are thoughtful and meaningful questions. Admirable ones. Yet as I read further, I wondered whether the intention was to open theatre to more kinds of stories or, unintentionally, to narrow the space for certain others. The language of inclusion can sometimes feel, to those of us who write from a deeply personal place, like an invitation to step aside if our work does not speak for a collective experience.

The workshop’s pitch reminded me of Lenin’s 1905 essay 'Party Organization and Party Literature' in which he states, “Down with non-partisan writers. Down with literary supermen. Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog and a screw in one great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the politically conscious vanguard of the working class. Literature must become a component of organized, planned, and integrated Party work.” (Party Organization and Party Literature, by Vladimir Lenin, 1905). In that same piece, he warned against what he called “bourgeois intellectual individualism.” The phrase still resonates whenever art is asked to trade the freedom of a single voice for the reassurance of approved belonging.

So, I find myself asking a quieter question. Is there still room for the individual playwright’s voice, whether genius or simply human? Theatre was once described as the playwright’s art because audiences gathered to hear one distinct and unruly imagination speaking into the dark.

I am not a genius, but I am an individual. I do not speak for everyone's lived experience in every community. I am a lone voice. At times, a lonely one. My characters, gay, straight, male, female, cruel, tender, consumed by love or emptied of it, belong not to sociology but to imagination. They are not surveys of a culture. They are fragments of me.

We all write from the stories we carry. We shape characters from our obsessions, our style, our private music. Collaboration, community, and social justice all deserve a place in the theatre. So does the singular voice. A generous art form can hold both.

If my plays speak to someone, I am grateful. If they do not, that’s all right too. The theatre is wide enough for many voices, and that breadth may be its greatest strength.