Every play I’ve ever written has come slowly. They reveal themselves over time through questions, dead ends, revisions, and years of work. In The Canyon is the only exception. The entire play arrived in a single afternoon.

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It was the day after Donald Trump won the 2016 election. I went for a walk with my husband. It was cold and raining. We found ourselves in Andersonville when I suddenly stopped and cried. Until that moment, I had convinced myself that Trump’s candidacy was a joke. I thought the monsters I had spent my life reading about belonged somewhere else or some time else. I had been living inside a fantasy of America - one built on my own privilege and assumptions about who we were as a country.

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In the days surrounding the election, I had reached out to family members, certain they couldn't possibly have voted for him. Every single one of them told me they had. It was a devastating realization that the America I thought I knew had existed largely in my own imagination.

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On that same walk, my husband told me about conversations he had been having regarding the future of reproductive rights in America. People were already discussing the possibility that Roe v. Wade could be overturned and imagining the legal loopholes that might emerge if abortion rights were dismantled. What would happen if states gained the power to criminalize abortion? What would happen if administrations found ways to surveil, punish, or incarcerate those who sought reproductive healthcare?

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I immediately thought about the people I love. I thought about the countless women in my life who had abortions. I wondered what it would mean to live in a country willing to treat us as criminals. My imagination spiraled. And this time, that spiral became a play.

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By the time I got home from that walk, I had mapped out In The Canyon in its entirety.

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I was already under commission from Jackalope Theatre Company to write a new play, but In The Canyon arrived with such urgency that 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 the workshop process, I was surrounded by the most incredible artists. But this was still 2018. There were moments when I could feel the raised eyebrows in the room. The play imagines a future America where reproductive freedom has been dismantled and where the consequences of that loss ripple across generations. To some people, it felt paranoid. Alarmist, even. Surely we weren't heading there.

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And yet, here we are.

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Reading In the Canyon in 2026 is a profoundly different experience than reading it in 2018. What was once speculative fiction now reads like headlines. The fears that inspired the play are no longer hypothetical political thought experiments. They are our lived reality.

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Despite its origins in fear, however, In The Canyon has never been a play about despair. It is a play about survival. It is a play about resistance. Most importantly, it is a play about refusing to allow shame or criminalization to define our lives.​​ At its core, 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 was written to remind us what is at stake when we forget that.