We had proposed a new show to the Crown Point Festival, but their curator had seen The Girl Detective and hoped we'd be willing to remount it. We were thrilled because it is such a fun show to work on. It's also unusual for me to start from a complete production and have the opportunity to look at how I'd do things differently. The Girl Detective is the story of a sleuth who has taken on the mystery of her own mother's disappearance. It's about the strangeness of loss, which we've all experienced in some form: the death of a loved one, friends we don't see anymore, romantic relationships that end, memories that turn hazy, meaningful objects that disappear. Ultimately, the play says that though these losses are permanent, how they define us is a fluid thing and we can be reunited in unexpected ways.

I loved Taylor Mac's The Young Ladies Of. He is definitely a girl detective. He investigates who his father was to create a relationship with someone he never knew. I also enjoyed The Civilians' Gone Missing for the fun and theatricality they bring to their discoveries about loss. Debate Society's The Eaten Heart and Transfigures at Women's Project were also favorites this year.

Ariane Mnouchkine and Theatre du Soleil, Complicite Theater Company, Sfumato Theater, Kelly Link, Judy Budnitz, Aimee Bender, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milorad Pavic

I'm drawn to ambiguous, often fragmented stories so it is a challenge to find a balance between the things I want to be clear and the things I want to be open to interpretation. I'm interested in elements of a story that are felt more than understood, but I want that to be within a plot the audience can follow. The other challenge, which is the fun of adaptation to me, is making something intended as prose active. To adapt a story into a "normal" play one would typically take out all the exposition, but I love exposition! The stories we've adapted have fascinating, funny narrative voices that are often preserved because I love a zany Greek chorus. This approach says we are a group of people coming together to tell a story to the audience using every tool we have. From there, we get to discover what the scenes are. Again it is a question of balance alternating between the presentational and something more intimate. As for my approach, I usually start with a very faithful adaptation of the story based just on how I see it in my head when I read it. When I see that in the hands of actors on their feet I begin to deviate and elaborate. That's my favorite way to work, but it is time consuming and requires daring actors, which I am fortunate to have.

I was directing my own work almost from the beginning. My writing is completely linked to how I see directing a story. Another Ateh member, Alexis Grausz, directed "Flush" (one of the plays) in Long Distance. It was the first time I'd ever had one of my scripts directed by someone else and it was strange to think of my work as mostly complete while just on the page. It was great to see the script stand on its own and gave me an understanding of how the process of writing for someone else will be different than writing a script that I consider just a starting point for my work in rehearsal.

In terms of theater I've seen: Theater du Soleil's Le Dernier Caranvans rail at the Lincoln Center Theater Festival a few years ago blew me away and I still think about it all the time. Also, I saw amazing plays when I studied in Eastern Europe, traveling to festivals in Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. I was seeing plays in languages I couldn't understand a word of, but I was still so viscerally affected. As attached to words as I am, I still aspire to making work so visually compelling as to be understood without sharing the language. My most memorable experiences creating theater have been with the Ateh. I have an astounding, sometimes scary, amount of freedom and support artistically. I can bring them any crazy idea or a script that doesn't look like a play on paper and they will dive in. All these women are amazing problem solvers with lots of ideas and I couldn't work they way I do without their trust and adventurousness. They don't even blink when I ask them to learn to walk on stilts or tap dance or do back handsprings all while acting the hell out of the play. We've also been fortunate to work with actors outside the company who bring the same level of commitment despite having less reason to trust me.

The Ateh Theater group is Kathryn Ekblad, Emily French, Alexis Grausz, Madeleine Maby, Sara Montgomery, Elizabeth Neptune and myself. We had worked together for many years before forming officially to produce The Girl in the Flammable Skirt in 2005. The Ateh has had an action-packed year. One production turned into five as we kept having ideas and opportunities came up like our residency at chashama and the Crown Point Festival. We started off the year performing The Girl Detective at the Connolly Theater with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in the mornings. At chashama, we performed Long Distance and our late night choose-your-own-adventure Mr. A's Amazing Maze Plays. As for what's next, I am working on a new play that I'd like to develop over a longer period of time, and Sara also has something in the works. So I think after nearly a year of being in rehearsal or production non-stop, we will take a few months for writing and planning. But not long enough to lose all this momentum.