I am a playwright/producer who started as a musician and found myself writing when I became a single mother. Groomed since elementary school to play classical piano, I rebelled in my teenage years to study acting while playing bass guitar in rock bands. My dedication to learning everything I could about theater led me to read and watch as many plays as possible despite being an NYC “starving” artist. My early bad poetry and rock and roll lyrics gave way to monologues improvised on the streets. Eventually, I wrote my first play while teaching theater to NYC high schoolers about a man who was told Marilyn Monroe faked her death, so he faked his death to meet her.

My practice centers around a feminist aesthetic that explores how gender affects the masks people wear to survive, and the choices women make when society exerts power over our subjectivity. Conflict is born in the competing notions of both gender and social imperatives. From this starting point, two themes underpin my stories: how childhood trauma creates wounds affecting development, and the choices people make to survive those wounds, sometimes binding themselves to a prescribed culture for survival. Most of my stories examine how a woman journeys forward despite her wounds affecting their successes and failures in relationships with family, other women, or the political / cultural society at large.

Blog: The Experimental Writings of Diane Davis