This spring is turning out to be twice as nice for playwright Liz Duffy Adams.

她本赛季有两个在休斯顿阶段的戏剧。“狗法”上周在主要街道剧院打开，而“出生的牙齿”是由于大流行而取消的，终于在5月6日落地在胡同剧院。

“我对此感到非常兴奋，”她说有两个表演几乎同时生产。“我很高兴这季节决定保留（”天生“）。”

The through line from “Dog Act” through “Born With Teeth” is how she explores the future and the past.

With the former, you might not think of a postapocalyptic wilderness as fodder for comedy, but with Adams, the unexpected is what drama is all about. The play, for mature audiences, follows the journey of Zetta Stone, her sidekick, Dog, who was not always that species, and their theatrical comrades as they travel to China from what used to be the United States. With a high quotient of dark humor, the play incorporates Adams’ fascination with the need for narrative and language, no matter what the state of the world.

游戏中扮演的概念强调故事如何嵌入故事中以及如何挖掘这些叙述。她对对话感兴趣，它可以采取的频谱，并将我们对道德，情感和表达的怀疑置于最极端的情况下。

When asked how she realized she wanted to be a playwright, Adams described it as “a very long slow dawning about where I belonged in the world,” beginning with a love of theater as a teenager.

She eventually earned a bachelor’s in fine arts from New York University, where she experienced the Stella Adler studio and the Experimental Theater wing of the Tisch School of the Arts. Stella Adler “had a method” similar to Konstantin Stanislavski’s system that was “kind of a formulaic process for me,” but “naturalism and classical acting” was a plus. In addition, her training in Shakespearean acting was “incredible training for a playwright.”

Adams worked on “collaborative experimental theater pieces” and spent a period trying to be an actor. “That was not a congenial life for me,” she said. “I wasn’t sure I wanted only mainstream theater.”

她决定后，感到有点“丢失”，她会为别人写一场比赛来表演。她把“一个神话般的野兽”送到纽约的一个剧院，他们立即制作。

“作为一个演员为我打开了我的门作为一个剧作家，”她说。

The show, with Edie Falco in the lead, ran off-off-Broadway in 1994.

She describes “Dog Act” as “postapocalyptic, but there’s hope in it. I love playing with language: heightened language, theatrical language.”

The characters come from different subcultures, and the play explores “how the way characters talk reveal and create who they are. They have their own sorts of dialects, rhythms of speech, and people tend to respond to that.”

On the other hand, with “Born With Teeth” — set in the 16th century — Adams says, “I recently started calling myself a landscape playwright, like a landscape painter, using context and time and being interested in the past or the future as a way to talk about the past obliquely” and allowing the audience to have “a gut sense of what the physical life of the place is.”

“Teeth” dramatizes William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe collaborating on the Henry series of plays that some scholars contend they wrote together.

“我曾经写过更多的Poctapovalyptic和科幻小说，现在更历史悠久，”她说。“但两者都是关于现在正在发生的事情。”

Translating history into art is part of that enterprise. “I grew up in New England, where self-promotion was very much frowned upon. Identity is the focus of a great deal of interest. I like to disappear into the work,” she explained. “One of my ancestral tracks is I have great grandparents who were Ukrainian Jews — I also have dual citizenship with Ireland — so I am really interested in history and how different characters and we are all incredibly aware we are living in history — part of our common humanity.”

For Adams, the theater is unique place to experience history transformed into drama.

“I want to feel more alive — I want to be surprised, energized and thrilled by language, humor, events and ideas, and that is the experience I am hoping to give an audience,” she said. “The word ‘surprise” is a supreme theatrical virtue. I want everybody in the room to know they are in the room together, having this experience together, feeling present and awake.”

Doni Wilson.is a Houston-based writer.