Your Play Doesn’t Need to Be About Something Important
And that doesn’t make it any less worthy for a spot on the stage.
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Hello! Welcome to my weekly newsletter!
Enjoy a dose of my playwriting process,
writing confessions, and all the mess in between.
There’s this pressure, especially when you’re emerging, especially when you’re brown, queer, marginalised, etc, to write plays that are about something.
That say something.
Something important.
Something urgent.
Something that makes people nod and say, “Yes, that’s so necessary right now.”
I’ve been there.
I have thought things like:
Is this political enough?
Is this saying something about the world?
Am I supposed to say something? Since I belong in multiple marginalised groups?
Will this get programmed at a festival because it checks a box?
Will people watch something without a “morale value” behind it?
And what I’ve found is that there’s nothing wrong with writing plays that are big and bold and full of chaos or the complete opposite.
You don’t need to always talk about being queer, being brown, being differently-abled, being different — bullying, sexual harassment, climate change, the rise of AI, your country’s eroding politics, the global politics, lord I can go on.
But you don’t want to force yourself to do that.
Because that is essentially performative activism.
If your heart isn’t in it, it can come across as fake.
And sometimes,
I just want to write an interrogation scene.
Or a boy and his friend the cockroach.
Or a woman who murders someone with a fork.
Is that “important”?
Maybe not. But it came from the heart.
And arguably, that matters more.
What Feels Important Is Often Personal
If you're writing with care, curiosity, and guts,
even the most bizarre or “irrelevant” premise can hit harder
than a play that tries too hard to be meaningful.
Sometimes what people need isn’t a lesson.
It’s a moment of recognition.
A breath.
A strange feeling they can’t explain.
A space to see themselves, or lose themselves,
or get disturbed in a way they didn’t expect.
Or simply to be entertained.
And that’s theatre too.
Small Stories Are Still Human Stories
You don’t need to solve climate change in 120 minutes.
You don’t need to write a trauma memoir thinly veiled as fiction.
You don’t need to explain your culture to an audience that already
decided what they think of it.
What you can write about is:
One person in a room they can’t leave
A sibling fight that never ends
A failed birthday dinner
The way someone keeps buttering toast but never eats it
The silence after a text that never gets answered
If it’s real to you,
if it tugs at your heartstrings,
then it’s worth writing.
And you don’t need to justify your story.
You don’t need to prove your worth with pain or politics or prestige.
Just write.
Write the weird little play.
Write a 10-minute nonsensical timewarp.
Write the scene that makes no sense but won’t leave your head.
Write what feels true, not what feels expected of you.
And trust that it’s enough.
Because you, are enough.