My play, Suppressed, explores a moment in the life of a twelve-year-old Horse Girl, Marcy McEwan, as she navigates her coming of age - and her reluctance to do so. She grapples with identity, self-confidence, and finding community; not knowing whether to conform or go against the grain. This play explores the cringy stage of childhood we all hope to repress or surgically remove from memory. The person we were and hope never to be again, but paradoxically cherish. 

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Suppressed dives into the cringy tween-aged stage of childhood we all hope to repress, or excise from memory: the person we were, and hope never to be again, but paradoxically cherish: personified best through a most poignant archetype, “The Horse Girl” and “Horse Girl Energy”. Horse Girl Energy (HGE) is unfathomable confidence in one’s ability to exist honestly - as our most authentic selves - in total ignorance of the world around us. Horse Girl Energy transcends the gender binary. Anyone can exude HGE.  How do our expectations of people (particularly young people, femmes, Disabled people, etc., those who have found themselves amongst the “socially unacceptable”) restrict our empathy for personal experience? Who are we without superlatives - self-conferred or otherwise? Who is the Horse Girl we fear in life and in ourselves? Is there freedom on the path repressed?                             

 Through this one-hander theatric extravaganza, we watch the journey of our tragic hero engage with all things Cringe from seventh-grade school presentations to the ergonomics of sharing a sleeping bag to the full fledge "horseification". I worked on and developed Suppressed throughout my final semester of my undergrad, with the excellent guidance and keen eye of Paula Wing.