photo by Nicki Pardo
I was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut to a right wing extremist engineer and a French Canadian nurse, both hyper-religious Catholics who refused to adapt to the modernizing changes brought about by Pope John XXIII's Vatican II. Together with a small group of like-minded zealots, they formed the Orthodox Roman Catholic Movement, home schooled my siblings and me, and eschewed what they thought of as the evil trappings of secular humanism. I'm in the middle of writing a book about growing up in that environment.
I have a BA from SUNY Binghamton in French and Comparative Literature, read the Symbolists while studying abroad in Aix-en-Provence where I discovered the answer to life (endless contradiction and mystery), and have built my life and work on that willfully shaky foundation. Along the way I attained two MFA degrees, one at Brooklyn College and the next at Brown University. I am a Romantic through-and-through, had my only child, Margot Alice, with brilliant, eccentric British filmmaker David Hopkins who died of cancer in May 2004.
Now I share my life with Steve, his 13-year-old daughter Allison, my eight-year-old Margot, our yorkie Maisie, Minnie the cat, guinea pigs Arthur and Buster, and a turtle named Crush. We recently moved into an old farmhouse with a converted barn in the backyard, the second floor of which will be a theatre. I teach playwriting at Wheaton College (not the Christian one; the one in Massachusetts) and write something every day.
No one from my background becomes a playwright, much less a left wing experimental playwright. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but it did.