William: For the sake of the interview, can you introduce yourselves and share a fun fact?
Hillary Gao: Hi, my name is Hillary Gao. I’m a writer, creator, and director based in Ridgewood, Queens. My fun fact is that when I was a child, I drank so much orange juice that I had to be hospitalized. I became obsessed with it, and my mom kept buying those giant jugs. The irony is that the hospital orange juice was even better.
Ann Marie Dorr: I’m Ann Marie Dorr. I’m a theater maker. My fun fact is medical too: in April 2020, my appendix ruptured, but I didn’t go to the hospital for six days because it was peak COVID. I thought I just felt bad. Turns out, it was very serious.
William: Hillary, I feel fortunate to have just worked with you on another play at the Starr Reading series and Ann Marie and I have a long history of collaboration. Can you talk about the general impetus for your work, and then the specific piece you’re bringing to The Exponential Festival?
Hillary Gao: In general, I’m often thinking about sound and texture…how sound can translate into writing and into an audience experience. I’m also thinking a lot about family dynamics, especially my relationship with my mother, and about being Asian American in an immigrant family: the values you’re raised with, and the process of unlearning them.
The piece I’m showing at Exponential is called I Want to Hold On to Something Beautiful and Empty. The sound that started the piece was late-night tennis at Highland Park—the ping-ponging back and forth in the dark. At the same time, the piece is about the death of a matriarch, and about characters trying to understand that loss while being pulled between American individualism and more community-oriented Eastern philosophies. The tension between those things is really at the center of the work.
Ann Marie Dorr: For my writing, I usually start with an image on stage. I think a lot about photography, and I’ll imagine a kind of photograph and then ask what feelings live inside it. I follow intuition and the strange or uncomfortable emotions that come up—often gross or sad things.
The piece is called I’m Going to Take My Pants Off Now. It started at an Exponential salon a couple of years ago. The initial image was very simple and kind of wild: what if I asked the audience to spank me? I wrote a monologue around that, and it became one of the more raucous moments of the salon. I put it away for a while, but later that monologue found its way into a larger piece about the body, research, memory, and death. Those themes all kind of orbit each other for me.
William: I feel like both of your work uses the personal and the ephemeral. Does that feel accurate?
Hillary Gao: Yeah, definitely. When I saw Ann Marie’s work at the salon, what stayed with me was how intimate it felt—these really direct, one-on-one moments. In my piece, I’m working with ASMR as a kind of performed intimacy. It’s about asking the audience to listen differently. I think both of our works are inviting people into something that feels personal, even if it’s constructed.
I’m also really interested in lying in a specific way—starting from the truth and then changing small details so it feels slightly unreal, like a dreamscape. I think starting from truth gives the work a grounded feeling, even if it becomes abstract.
Ann Marie Dorr: I wrestle with what “personal” means—how much confession is actually there, and how buried it is. But the ephemeral feels unavoidable to me. That’s just part of theater. Things happen once, in a room, and then they’re gone.
I remember Hillary’s piece from the salon really clearly—there was a box, ribbon, a sense of the work taking up space. That kind of presence sticks with you, even when everything else blurs together.
William: Both of you developed work downtown, in front of audiences. What happens when you’re alone with the work? Does it feel less theatrical?
Ann Marie Dorr: When I’m writing for myself, I don’t always put all the theatrical mechanisms on the page right away. A lot of that emerges in rehearsal. But when I’m writing something that I know other people might produce someday, I become more obsessive about making sure everything I want is clearly written.
Hillary Gao: I think that’s why sound is so important to me—it gives the work theatricality even when I’m alone with it. But honestly, I don’t think I’m great at being a lone writer. I want the words to hit the ground as soon as possible, to be in bodies, in space, so I can adjust and shift from there.
William: It feels like your work asks something specific of audiences. It’s not participation exactly, but presence.
Ann Marie Dorr: Yeah. Presence is the word. It’s about asking people to be there, to look, to listen.
Hillary Gao: And trust. I think audiences at places like Exponential or The Brick come in with a willingness to go on the ride. There’s a built-in trust that makes experimentation feel possible. That trust is everything.
William: Why this piece now, and why Exponential?
Hillary Gao: I work from strong impulses, and this is the piece I’m excited about right now. I can’t work on multiple projects easily. I follow the thing I can’t stop thinking about. Exponential feels like home. It’s a space with my peers, where I can really experiment. In this piece, for example, I’m interested in live translation—having a person speak English translations just a beat behind the Chinese text and seeing how that affects sound and experience.
Ann Marie Dorr: For me, now just feels like the moment. I finished my MFA, a lot of life has happened in the last five years, and this piece holds all of that. The last time I showed work at Exponential as an artist was January 2020. Now feels like the time to say these words out loud. No one else can say them.
William: Can you each give a one-sentence preview of what audiences might see?
Hillary Gao: A woman tries to answer emails.
Ann Marie Dorr: You might have to look somebody else in the eye.
Ann Marie Dorr is a theater maker and playwright. Their work has been presented at The Exponential Festival, Life World, Atlantic Stage 2, NACL, The Brick, Soho Rep, and The Museum of Human Achievement (Austin, TX). Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab 17/19. Associated Artist of Target Margin Theater. Brooklyn College Playwriting MFA ‘25.
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