ABOUT
The most common advice given to young writers is to "write what you know." While Daniel appreciates this advice, he also recognizes that, all things considered, he doesn't know anything. What guides him instead is the desire to write what he believes. Because he believes in questioning myths, histories, and traditions, he seeks to write towards those questions. Because he believes in examining power, in all its manifestations, he uses his writing to investigate. And, being a queer person of Jewish descent, living through the 21st Century, he finds himself inexorably drawn toward stories as complex, immediate, and unanswerable as the world which prompts them.
His greatest hope is that his creations find the strength, in their delicate, half-stolen hearts, to challenge the assumptions of their predecessors. He's rooting for them to drill their spurs into the concrete, if only to let some daylight into the cracks.
His greatest hope is that his creations find the strength, in their delicate, half-stolen hearts, to challenge the assumptions of their predecessors. He's rooting for them to drill their spurs into the concrete, if only to let some daylight into the cracks.
PLAYS
OPHELIA PERENNIAL (2018) is an adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet in five acts, and the winner of the Betsy Carpenter Award for playwriting. A loving butchery of one of the great masterpieces of the English language, OPHELIA PERENNIAL follows Ophelia's narrative arc, exploring the boundaries between duty, destiny, and individual will–– that undiscovered country from whose bourne no character returns. As her world derails itself, and her story turns inside out, Ophelia finds herself scrambling for meaning, neck-deep in the rising tide of someone else's story.
T-MINUS (2019) is an absurdist tragicomic parable on heroism, cowardice, and the machinery of American death. In the underground control room of a nuclear missile silo, our unworthy heroes, Frank and Benny, are suddenly confronted by the end of the world. As the afternoon ticks by, the two men gradually descend through trivial bickering, quiet dread, abject panic, and back again. Meanwhile, the specter of Death sits idly by, eating potato chips, narrating to the audience in another language. T-Minus is a snapshot of an empire, a bleak and inevitable tragedy, and a cautionary tale.
To request a reader's copy of either play, Daniel invites you to contact him.
T-MINUS (2019) is an absurdist tragicomic parable on heroism, cowardice, and the machinery of American death. In the underground control room of a nuclear missile silo, our unworthy heroes, Frank and Benny, are suddenly confronted by the end of the world. As the afternoon ticks by, the two men gradually descend through trivial bickering, quiet dread, abject panic, and back again. Meanwhile, the specter of Death sits idly by, eating potato chips, narrating to the audience in another language. T-Minus is a snapshot of an empire, a bleak and inevitable tragedy, and a cautionary tale.
To request a reader's copy of either play, Daniel invites you to contact him.