Complete: “A fast-paced comedy in which two obsessive linguists, a nine-year-old zealot, and a magnetic seminar leader meet head-on in a time-splitting wrangle over the power and perversion of language.”

Complete was born from my impulse to examine the philosophy and teachings of a well-known American “large group awareness training,” to document the speech patterns and rituals of this community, and to observe them in the context of the life of a young character who has no control over her environment. The fictional “training” in the play maintains that all individuals, including children, create every experience they have. While recent popular discourse – reflected in best-sellers such as The Secret and widely viewed television programs such as Dr. Phil and The Oprah Winfrey Show – shows that it can be useful to consider to what extent our intentions “create” outcomes, the extreme philosophy of the training, as well as its repurposing of language, invite inquiry.

I wanted to bring the perspective of language science to this inquiry, as well, and have syntactic and semantic analyses of the training’s jargon performed on stage. I wanted to see how these three worlds – the training and its jargon, a child who has no control over her environment, and linguistic analysis – resonate on stage together. What do we discover from their combination?

I also wanted to see how the training’s jargon and philosophy are set into play with adult characters, and how that might differ from a child’s experience. And all throughout, I wanted to look at the “grayness” of human experience. A character who feels herself to be repulsed by the training is simultaneously attached to and obsessed by it. I wanted to create a play that lives in the world of “both… and…” as differentiated from “either… or…”

And of course I wanted farcical elements, fainting, and public outbursts. I wanted instantaneous scene changes, humiliation, and wrestling. Characters whose needs and fixations precipitate comically shameful behavior. And a nine-year-old harassing the whole theater with her steadfast certainty that we can each create ourselves being any way we want to be.