What inspired you to set Green Machine in the District’s embattled marijuana gifting industry? 

I’m a hophead, not a stoner. But even I noticed the “gifting” shops that sprouted like weeds after D.C. (more or less) decriminalized marijuana in 2014. When one popped up near me, I felt there must be a play lurking inside, but I had no idea how to bring that subculture to the stage. 

Then I saw Mosaic Theater’s Eureka Day. It’s a play about a private, but progressive, day school in Berkeley. It pokes fun at lefty parents who pay tens of thousands of dollars to pull their kids from public schools and consider themselves Social Justice Warriors. But even as Eureka Day reveals the hypocrisy of those parents, it shows their decency as well. In that story of a little school, there’s an ambitious comedy of manners.

Seeing that community on stage, I saw my way into writing Green Machine. The play’s eponymous weed shop is in D.C.’s Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, the community I’ve lived in for more than twenty years. When I first got here, Mt. Pleasant was that rare urban enclave where the population was truly diverse. Now that it, like the rest of the city, is filling with wealthy white people, I feel more and more like a parent in Eureka Day. My intentions may be good. But my actions? My inaction?

In Green Machine’s little weed shop, I see a place where our community can wrestle with those questions, and I hope in a shambling, stoner way, find a few answers.

Green Machine offers windows into far more than marijuana, or even gentrification. Can you talk about the interplay of family, friendship and neighborhood dynamics in the play?

I worked hard to get the weed references right in Green Machine, but I hope no one will mistake it for a docudrama about the gifting industry.

It matters that Green Machine is set in a sketchy weed store. But our characters don’t spend whole scenes cataloging cannabis strains. It really matters that the weed shop is in Mt. Pleasant, whose Black population dropped from well over 50 percent in the 1970s to just 11 percent in 2020. But at no point does any character cite statistics on stage.

Green Machine is a story about D.C. that bubbles up from the messy reality of our characters’ lives. Nothing is messier than a dysfunctional family, and we’ve got that with Mike, one of the weed shop’s three partners. Mike is that spoiled yet eternally resentful son. How he’s hobbled, and enabled, by his family—his sister and nephew also appear in the play—have all sorts of repercussions for his partners.

Friendship is found with the store’s two other partners, Corbin and Leon. Corbin is an aging hippie who rails against gentrification while living in a $2 million home. Leon is a Black realtor raised in Mt. Pleasant. He’s made his peace with the housing market, which drives Corbin just a little crazy. But they have a bond that goes back to Leon’s father, who helped Corbin in a time of need. As Corbin admits, “Leon’s father was a very proper man, and I…was not.” But neighborhoods, when they are healthy, bring people together in ways you can’t quite foresee.

In one of the play’s pivotal scenes, a police officer recently transferred to Mt. Pleasant tells of a tragedy in the impoverished D.C. neighborhood where she’d last worked. Certainly, a look at the crime and income statistics in Mt. Pleasant suggests that our neighborhood is healthier than it’s ever been. But Green Machine looks deeper, at the bonds between people, at the people who are no longer here, and asks how healthy we really are.

Balancing comedy and drama is no easy task for a playwright. Did Green Machine start as one or the other? How did it find the balance? 

This play came to me so quickly—right as I rode home from Mosaic’s Eureka Day—I didn’t have time to consider what genre it was. I finished the first draft in ten days and felt it must be some sort of serio-comic gem. Soon after, director Catherine Aselford gathered a great group of actors, including four members from the current cast, and did a first reading. I quickly saw the flaws in my flawless gem. Lots of the comedy wasn’t funny. The drama in it was melodrama. And it was as well-balanced as a Raven regular after last call. Fortunately, Catherine and the cast gave me many wise and gently worded notes.

The kernel of a good idea was in there, I think. And the idea would’ve been stillborn if I hadn’t let it pour out of me. (A problem with so many other works lying lifeless on my laptop.) But it took many, many rounds of revisions for Green Machine to stand up straight. The first draft was little more than a character study. Some characters told jokes, others told sad stories, but there was no plot holding them all together.

If I’ve found a balance between comedy and drama, it’s because the play now has the spine of a plot to steady it. So much stoner humor that cluttered the first draft got cut when it became clear those jokes did nothing to advance the story. Especially when you’re writing a story about stoners, you have to avoid wandering aimlessly into the weeds. But enough with the lame weed jokes. To state it plainly, I hope I found the balance in this dramatic comedy by letting the work flow freely, finding a plot to unify it, and relentlessly revising.