If there has been one consistency in my life, it is my fascination (read: borderline obsession) with narrative. For me, storytelling is the be-all and the end-all.
I want to know how a story is crafted. I want to know the craftsman. I want to know how it functions and why it functions and for who it functions. I want to know how it illuminates or clouds or twists the truth. I want to know how it influences, how it manipulates, how it shapes and colors everything it touches. And I want to know all of this because narrative threads through every single aspect of the human experience. Religion, society, science, politics, economics – even math has a narrative structure. Storytelling is the most ancient, most fundamental aspect of humanity. It is integral to our ability to communicate, the miracle of our perhaps too-complex brain. To be a human is to be a storyteller.
And so, when I think about story, I think about myth. Myth-making is one of our oldest uses of narrative. It’s the most ancestral form of storytelling. It’s the first method that the first humans utilized to make sense of the first, harsh, beautiful worlds around and within them. It’s also the method that we in the present use to understand and empathize with our ancestors. Those first, harsh, beautiful worlds become a little clearer, a little more relatable when we look at the stories left behind. The fact that several myths still prevail and are retold thousands of years after their inception speaks to their power. They transcend time. They connect us with who we once were and, really, who we have always been and will continue to be. That’s magic. That’s time-travel.
And if myth is time-travel, then adaptation is the time-machine.
I have a soft-spot for adaptations, specifically of the play variety. I’m a theatre-maker, which is to say I enjoy the whole process of putting on a theatrical performance. My degree is in theatre criticism and dramaturgy but I direct, I act, I write, I research, and I occasionally sound design. But in all aspects of my work, there is an ever-present thread of mythology. I am ultimately most excited by work that connects us, in some way, to the past. 
There is something equal parts comforting and terrifying knowing that anything we have ever thought or experienced has happened before and will happen again. Myths are our oldest entryway into that knowledge. It’s why I love an adaptation. History can feel alienating. Those people from decades, centuries, thousands of years ago feel so far removed. But an adaptation, by its nature, recontextualizes the story and therefore reminds us that we’re not so different from the first audiences of Antigone, way back in 440 BCE Greece. In fact, we never really changed.
Speaking of Antigone, currently I’m in the process of developing a new adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone (an adaptation in its own right, if you want to get technical) for Riffraff Tulsa, a local theatre company of which I am the Executive Artistic Director of. Throughout the years (and its a lot of years), Antigone has been adapted by hundreds of playwrights – I’m following in an incredibly long, and incredibly humbling, tradition. Almost uniformly, these playwrights were writing in countries experiencing some sort of political or cultural upheaval or revolution. The specifics of the adaptation are, of course, specific to the experience of the playwright. But every time and every place has found its own Antigone.
When I personally break Sophocles’ Antigone down to its most fundamental components, it’s a story about grief and how that grief can (and often does) shift and crack and explode us into personal, societal, and cultural revolutions. I’m interested in how, for better or for worse, individual suffering can shape and mold communities.
I think Sophocles was interested in the same. I think he was writing about the city of Thebes. I think I’m writing about our globalized world or maybe America or maybe my own backyard. I think those ideas are one in the same.
And I think that’s time-travel.