Meet the
Playwright:
Alyssa Haddad-Chin

Alyssa Haddad-Chin is a playwright, screenwriter, and educator of Lebanese and Italian descent. She has worked out of Brooklyn for many years and has written several full-length plays. In addition to writing, she teaches writing workshops and is the direct assistant of Tony Award-winning costume designer, Bob Mackie.

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Her inspiration for this play started on the subway; she had an inexplicable desire to grab a man's hat and wear it. After realizing this was how girls were taught to flirt in the early 2000s, she thought about the lack of plays about the early 2000s. Alyssa created this piece using her own experiences growing up in the early 2000s as a half-Italian half-Lebanese girl (like the main character Leila). Many of the microaggressions Leila experiences are inspired by the microaggressions experienced in Alyssa's teenage years (Hambley).

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Concerning her identity as Arab American, Alyssa said via Instagram, "Even though it took me 20+ years to allow myself to identify this way, I’m so lucky and proud to be Arab-American. I'm celebrating our beautiful and diverse community of different shades, religions, and experiences. I’m celebrating that this was a play I was told not to write by a theatre company that felt there was only one way to be Arab-American, but I now have the opportunity to see it blossom because I come from a long line of stubborn Lebanese mfers."