UC San Diego

I hate uncertainty. I am a planner and I take great comfort in knowing that I’ve done everything I can do to make things go as smoothly as possible. My time at UCSD has been marked by the slow chipping away at this reliance and working on Farside throughout this pandemic was the culmination of this process at this stage of my career. Farside follows the story of Pam, an astronaut who orbits the Earth and collects orbital debris a.k.a. space trash. The play kicks off when she finally gets the chance to travel to the moon but nothing about this mission goes the way it’s supposed to. She faces all types of uncertainty: the precarity of the mission itself (which has been rescheduled multiple times for safety reasons); traversing the farside of the moon where she will be cut off from all communications back on Earth; and then, dealing with a clone that shows up in her space pod after she emerges from the farside of the moon. A clone that forces her to finally deal with the biggest force of uncertainty in her life: her broken relationship with her estranged mother whose health is quickly declining. As I was working on this play about a woman dealing with the unthinkable, I was dealing with my own versions of the unthinkable: separation from all my loved ones because of a global pandemic, the complete and total reimagining of the entire theatre industry, an existential dread that stopped me from writing anything at all for four months, plunging into a new medium (the audio play), and learning to trust new collaborators at the same time we were all learning how to collaborate remotely. Everything about the circumstances of creating and producing this play was the worst nightmare for my planning/perfection-obsessed brain: having to write it quickly because of the new audio play format, being at the mercy of constantly changing campus pandemic access, faulty Wi-Fi in rehearsal and during important recording sessions, actors and designers and crew members who were facing unprecedented emotional and physical challenges. I had to learn a new kind of patience and grace, both for myself and everyone else on the team. This required me to embrace the void and sit in the extreme discomfort of all these unknowns. Rather than languishing in the discomfort, I learned to work through it. Inspired by the tenacity and flexibility of the team, I stopped fearing the judgement of failing and took swings, trusting in the plasticity of the process. I learned to start trusting my gut rather than endlessly vacillating about script changes and design choices. I let go of the idea of trying to get the play “right” or “perfect.” And letting go of that gave me a new kind of freedom in my work. I still love to plan. I would still rather know exactly how something is going to go than deal with curveballs. Working on Farside didn’t magically “cure” me of any of that. But it did help me realize that disruptions are not the end of the world. That fracture and interruption, while uncomfortable, can lead to new viewpoints that crack open my creative process. And that embracing a new relationship to the void—one of curiosity instead of just fear—is a necessary step towards the next phase of my artistry.