I may be the world’s most improbable playwright. Until I began writing Tribes USA in 2023, nothing in my life story hinted at a future creating musical theater.
My father was born in a West African village and was the first person in his family to learn to read. It is likely he was the first literate sprig to emerge from that branch of the human family tree in the quarter-million years since Homo sapiens first walked out of East Africa. My mother came from relatively more privilege. The two met in high school in Africa and came to the States for college where they got married and produced two kids while still struggling to graduate.
As the second of those two kids, I am the fortunate beneficiary of the promise of America. Just one generation removed from illiteracy on my father’s side, I have had an embarrassing wealth of opportunities to flourish in the Unites States, perhaps the only country where a story like mine is possible.
I graduated from college with a degree in physics and served 21 years in the Navy – first as a nuclear submarine officer and then an F-18 fighter pilot.
While in the Navy, I earned five Navy Air Medals for flying more than 70 combat missions from the decks of aircraft carriers. Following my last assignment as commanding officer of a fighter squadron, I retired from the Navy and earned a Master of Business Management as a Sloan Fellow at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. I have worked in the life sciences industry for nearly 20 years since then. I have a wife and two children who are the prime motivation for all I do that is worthwhile.
Along my career journey, I’ve periodically taken a few months off from my day jobs to indulge in writing. After years of watching us sort ourselves into ideological tribes — often speaking past rather than to one another — I decided to write about the emotional, psychological, and performative dimensions of current US political culture. Inspired by seeing a live performance of the Broadway hit Hamilton in 2022, I decided musical theater would be the perfect vehicle to tell this story. It is my fervent hope that audiences will find Tribes USA to be an entertaining and enlightening musical theater experience that blends satire, storytelling, psychological drama, and social commentary.