She attended Northwestern University and starred as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. She obtained an MFA in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. While working on her degree at Yale, she was playwright-in-residence at Evanston Repertory Theatre, and her one-act farce, Fits and Starts, a "soap-opera satire", was performed by the Womyn's Theatre in Seattle in 1978.
