Engines began as a kind of lamentation over dinner with a friend back in 2015. We were talking through the absurdities and cruelties of making theatre, wondering if Tony Kushner had ever endured our same humiliations: The rejections, the personalities (!!), and the near impossible balancing act of protecting both your art and spirit. Somewhere in that conversation, Tony Kushner stopped being Tony Kushner and became something else: An archetype, or a hero; a vessel through which I could imagine the best version of what a living playwright might be. 

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Engines found its first home in the Goodman Theatre’s Playwrights Unit not long after that dinner. From there, the play began opening doors I had only dreamed of knocking on - leading to further readings, development opportunities, and collaborations with artists I had admired for years.

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This play was written before the pandemic, before I understood just how reliably this country repeats its cruelties. When I first wrote Engines, I thought I was writing about another generation’s catastrophe: Reagan’s America, the AIDS crisis, artists and queer people fighting to survive while their government looked the other way. I thought I was writing about the past.

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Then I lived through my own version of it.​​

 

At its heart, Engines is a love letter to theatre-makers and our foolish, extraordinary act of continuing to make theatre in a world that gives us every reason not to. It’s about chasing impossible dreams and having the audacity to keep chasing them, even when it feels like they’ve already passed you by. Because sometimes they haven’t.