Abraham Johnson is so excited to use the IDEA Capital Grant to develop their new play “and we will eat your grief.” Following two sisters mourning the death of a family member, this is a story of how their once-best-friendship splinters into separate paths of grief. June (13, cried at the funeral) turns towards making #sad #grief into #art and broadcasting #aesthetic creations across the internet. Meanwhile, Lane (13, didn’t cry at the funeral) feels stuck. Lane tries swimming. And kayaking. And hanging out with the neighborhood turtle. But nothing seems to help. When the world around these sisters grows increasingly abstract, they are forced to reckon with what it means to grow up––and also why they keep pulling Zebra Cakes out of… well, everywhere?

Abraham’s three-step development of this play will involve 1) creating set models to physicalize the abstract nature of this world, 2) organizing and producing an all-trans/nonbinary artist workshop to fully realize the relationship of gender, grief, and transformation in this play, and 3) presenting a new draft during at the 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference, where Abraham will be a Playwriting Scholar.