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Without a bachelor’s degree, I worked as a line cook, waiter, insurance investigator, standup comedian, a Kansas Department of Corrections halfway house employee, and an actor. Eventually, I earned a graduate degree in education and became a teacher myself.

Sometimes I feel like there’s so little I can do, but in this case I knew exactly what I could do: write. Write the most passionate and informed play possible about how we save the lake. Draw on the work of scientists and journalists and activists and inspire people by showing them what we can and must do in defense of our home.

Artistic Director Jerry Rapier asked playwrights Matthew Ivan Bennett & Elaine Jarvik to share the process of co-creating JUST ADD WATER.

It’s my hope that, after seeing EB & FLO, students will have conversations with their grown-ups and will grow up trying to keep the lake alive.

Juan Jose is an amalgamation of myself as a kid, my critiques of Harry Potter as an adult, and boosting my culture and background, combining them to create a ridiculous yet hilarious narrative.

The Utah Review’s year-end “Top 10 Moments of the Utah Enlightenment” has included a Plan-B Production every year since the list began in 2015.

“I kept circling around this moment in 1882, the first time that she stayed in the land that would become her eventual home. She was only 16 and I knew in my gut that this moment helped define her as a person, as a writer, as an artist, and as an activist. I wanted to explore this younger Beatrix – before she became the Beatrix Potter we all know. But it wasn’t until I discovered Edith Rawnsley that the story clicked into place.”

“To tell this story, I had to tell my own—how I found my connection with Wat Misaka, and how he reconnected me with my own family.”

“… it is important to listen closely to the innate use of words, the tone, and the things that are being said, or not being said.”