Every play I’ve written has come slowly.

Ideas reveal themselves through questions, dead ends, revisions, collaborators and years of development.

In The Canyon is the exception.

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It was the day after Donald Trump won the 2016 election and I was on a walk with my husband. It was cold and raining. We found ourselves in Andersonville when I broke down. Until that moment, I had convinced myself that Trump’s candidacy was a joke. I had been living inside a fantasy of America, one built on my own privilege and assumptions about who we were as a country. The election forced me to confront the distance between the America I believed I lived in and the America that had been there all along.

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People were already talking about the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned and imagining the legal realities that might follow if it were to happen. What would happen if states were once again given the power to criminalize abortion? What mechanisms already existed that could be used to surveil or incarcerate people seeking reproductive healthcare? And how quickly could the unthinkable become law?

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I immediately wondered what it would mean to live in a country willing to treat abortion as a felony. How did we get here? Where are we going? My imagination spiraled, and by the end of that walk, I had mapped out In The Canyon in its entirety.

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I was already under commission with Jackalope Theatre Company to write a new play, but In The Canyon arrived with such urgency I couldn’t write anything else. I managed to complete only portions of the script by my original deadline and had to ask Jackalope to push my production from 2017 to 2018. To their immense credit, they said yes. They supported the play at every turn, assembled an extraordinary team of collaborators and spent the next year and a half helping me develop it.

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Throughout that process I was surrounded by incredible artists. But this was still 2016/17, and there were moments when I could feel eyebrows rising in the room. The play imagines a future America where reproductive freedom has been dismantled and the consequences of that loss ripple across generations. To some, the script felt paranoid; alarmist even. Surely we weren’t heading there?

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Yet here we are.

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Despite its origins in fear, In The Canyon has never been a play about despair. It is a play about love and story survival and resistance. But most importantly, it's a play about refusing to allow cultural shame to define our lives. In The Canyon is a reminder that an abortion does not define a person’s worth or humanity. It is not a moral failing. It is not a crime. I believe abortion is healthcare. I believe reproductive autonomy is a fundamental human right. And I believe In The Canyon exists to remind us what is at stake when those rights are taken away.