Playwriting is a solitary experience for most. Not so much for Love and Warcraft’s Madhuri Shekar.

The winner of the Alliance Theatre’s 2013-14 Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition finds it tough to write a play if she hasn’t talked it out with someone first. Maybe because dialogue is her favorite part.

“I like theater in general,” says Shekar (as in “shaker”). “That experience of sitting with other people, and everyone’s going through it together, and the people you are watching are not just people on a screen who’ve been edited and carefully orchestrated. They’re actual, real people in front of you, and they’re creating stories with their bodies and their voices, and they’re inviting us to use our imaginations to fill in that story with them.”