Some people write to make audiences feel like everything will be okay, Ali writes in the hopes that audiences will go and try to figure out how to be okay. Her work is designed to make you laugh at the absurdity of characters’ actions, until you’re crying because you’ve realized they’re pursuing the same basic things we all want - love, connection, acceptance, and understanding. Her plays, screenplays, and musicals ask audiences to humanize dark and difficult subjects by asking, “Now that you’ve seen this, now that you know this can happen, where do we go from here?”