EMMa S. 
RUND

I write plays about all kinds of people and all kinds of stories, but my plays tend to have two things in common: they center women, and they use a little touch of magic or metaphor, not as whimsy or escapism, but as a way to externalize what's happening inside a character. Theatre lets us make the invisible visible, and I use that permission liberally. When a character's internal life is too big or too strange to contain, I let it spill out into the world of the play.

 

My favorite thing to hear from an audience member is, "I wouldn't have known how to express what I'm feeling, but this is it. You put what's going on inside of me onstage." Stories have the power to make us feel a little less alone with the complicated, sometimes unspeakable things going on in our brains. I hope to walk with more people in that way with my work, and leave them with little glimmers of hope to hold onto.