With a distrust of rhetoric, a love of the drastic, and a conviction that the political, the personal, and the theatrical are inevitably bound up in each other, playwright Anne Washburn writes mischievous, inquisitive plays which are both heartcatching and formally provoking. Often using found elements - overheard or transcribed speech, snatches of other plays (Macbeth, Seneca's The Octavia), pieces of literary works (the Bible, Anna Karenina) - each play is an attempt to negotiate the personal and cultural unknowable. Working on the frontier of new American theatre, Washburn creates plays that propose both the narrative satisfactions of the straight ‘realistic’ theater, and the liminal satisfactions of performance based work.