Playwrights From The United States

"…I've been in the theater for ten years now, I've done some of the things I wanted to do. I want to go a little deeper in a way. I can see myself writing something more serious, the satirical kind of thing…"

"…We Latinos have a rich, dynamic and complex history full of narratives that are dimensional, intelligent, tragic, comedic, absurd, philosophical, violent and loving. There aren't enough stages for our stories. I’m humbled and honored that these have come into my life…"

"i think its important to write plays that aren’t safe. often, that means that you are criticizing the institutions who’s help you need getting produced. and often, that means that you are engaging with audiences in ways that aren’t easy for them. every time i start a new play, it feels like the first time. it’s terrifying. it’s daunting. it feels impossible. i think that is a tremendous undertaking. [sic]"

"I’ve always resisted being called a ‘gay’ or a ‘Latino’ playwright…I certainly talk about them in my plays, but I don’t want to be defined by them. Not because I’m not proud — but the minute you define yourself in a certain way, there are huge assumptions about what you’re supposed to be. And those boxes don’t really fit anymore."

"…As curanderas say when a patient suffers from susto (the separation of the soul from the body), “Vente. No te quedes allí. Come back. Don't stay over there.” As playwrights we have no choice but to raise our dead."

"I’m a little bit highbrow and a little bit trashy…That’s what I think good storytelling is. If you can lure in an audience and have a good time with them, but also teach them what it’s like — to be a person of color, to be poor — that’s a success."

"…For me, interviewing was like being a detective and listening for cues into a story. Ana Deavere Smith says that as an actor she listens for emotions. As a writer I listen for both emotions and details. People sometimes get emotional and sometimes they get descriptive when recalling a memory. Sometimes it seems people are visualizing what they see. Other times memories involve the senses, like the smell of burnt beans, or nana’s eucalyptus leaves…"

"Some writers write every morning, or every day. I don´t tend to do that. I am of the Wendy Wasserstein mind. Going to the movies is research. Walking down Central Park and seeing cute boys in tank tops is research. Going to the Museum of Modern Art is research. Having dinner with my best friends is research. Because research, when it comes to being a playwright, most importantly means living. It means experiencing and engaging with the world…"

"…Truth is, my colleagues are my heroes, my fellow Latinx playwrights and directors. We’ve created this landscape together. We’ve elbowed a space for ourselves, and each other, in the American theatre. I think only we know what it was like when we could barely get a crumb, and honestly, we had to just keep going…"

"…The reason I write the plays is to open up some sort of dialogue or just to have this in the conversation. I mean what I would love is to have the guy—the Republican who thinks that the only issue is keeping brown people away—he is my ideal audience. That's who I would love to have in the audience. So I get a little bit tripped up because, on one hand, I want plays that my family can go to. You don't have to be an artistic person. You can go in and actually get something from it."

"…With theatre, I’m attracted to stories of social or political relevance to the world we all live together in… With film or TV, I approach them much more as an audience member—stories I’d like to see…"

"…see theatre that moves you, theatre that challenges you, and theatre that bores you to the point that, as a beautiful human being once told me, instead of focusing on the performance, you begin attempting to levitate in your chair…"

"…It’s more complex because the longer I am writing, and living, I am coming to understand that there is a deep truth that we all have these experiences in some way or another. While we might not all be multi-ethnic (or at least not consciously presenting or celebrating it), we all have multiple identities at play. And it’s not just our genetic or familial cultures, but our societies, our social circles, all the complex ways we come to be who we are."

"Don’t let anyone “should” all over you and don’t “should” all over yourself. Writers: nobody knows the story you want to tell better than you do. You get to decide what feedback serves you and the rest of it you can leave behind…"

"…I think borders do not protect us, they wall us in. I think White Supremacy can be defeated by people reclaiming their histories and seeing how structural racism once excluded many from Whiteness that it now includes–a testament to its problematic construct. I think cultures, like our personal identities, are fluid, not rigid, and inform each other, and we should celebrate that as well. I believe that when we see this history, we can understand that the people and the forces that are working so damn hard these days to keep us separated from one another are a part of the long arc of history that has been doing so since this country began, and probably well before that…"

"I remember a young playwright of Puerto Rican descent named Lin-Manuel Miranda, who told us in the photo line before an evening of poetry, music, and the spoken word that he planned to debut the first song of what he hoped would be a hip-hop musical on the life of America's first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. We were politely encouraging but secretly skeptical, until he got up onstage and started dropping beats and the audience went absolutely nuts."

"…more than half the struggle is putting the pencil to the paper and trusting. If trust is too hard right now, know that page is the one place where you can always go back and use your eraser."

"…For acting, I have no other place to begin besides my body, history, memories, and cultural points of reference. In my process, I’m my foundation and then the research, and additional character development gets layered on top. For writing, I admit I’ve got an agenda and I start from what I know—me…"

"As I mature as an artist and human being, what wants to “express” itself through any of the areas I love: acting, directing, writing, singing, teaching and storytelling—all of it has a mind and heart of its own now! My task now is to stay out of the way and let it have its way with me! It’s a “beginner’s mind” with every encounter!"

"…what I’ve learned about it throughout the years is that it’s my way of giving voice to the often voiceless; I write mostly about the sort of people on the opposite end of flush, and so when I hear them speak in this kinda jagged form of poetry, it moves me in a way I can’t even really describe. Technically speaking, some actors sing it beautifully, others can’t wrap their minds around it."

"…I think if you want to make a recipe for making a writer, have them feel a little out of place everywhere, have them be an observer kind of all the time, and that's a great way to make a writer…"

"The honest answer is there are things inside me I want to make – Hamilton is one of those things, Heights was another. And since the success of Hamilton, my life has been about finding the balance between the things I always wanted to make and the opportunities that are so incredible I’d be angry if they opened and I wasn’t in them. So Mary Poppins and Little Mermaid definitely fall into that category. I think there is always a part of me that is checking in with childhood Lin and asking: ‘Would little Lin be freaking out about this?’ If the answer is yes, then I say yes."

"I hear a chavalo named Lin-Manuel in New York is pretty good."

"…Historically, musical theatre is a genre that doesn’t have a wide palette; its subjects have been very white. Thank God for Hamilton, (and In the Heights before that) for breaking down some of those doors! Before them, Zoot Suit got slaughtered when it moved to Broadway because it was too sophisticated and ahead of its time. The critics were condescendingly saying: “Don’t these people know that this is not a musical?” Actually, no one said it was a musical; it is a play with music!..."

"…I like the word impressionistic more than experimental for some reason. I think experimental, I think of abstract language met with geometric stage gestures, while my writing tends to be worlds and people that we know and recognize, but the rules have changed on them. And on us, the audience, but the struggle is that I want the audiences to not spend time trying to figure out the rules, rather to accept them and see what it means to them as the world unfolds."

"It’s a text and movement conjuring of Latina archetypes and the women who embody them— past, present, and future. There are archetypes/stereotypes that are often placed upon Latinas (i.e. La Virgen, La Llorona, hot tempered, sexy, etc.) and I wanted to know what happens if the images we think we understand are, in fact, more complicated and more human than we thought? And then what happens if those “images” not only talk to us, but each other too?..."

"…with any story there are infinite ways to tell it, infinite character arcs to follow, when you drop the needle into the story, and when you pick the needle up."

"There are a few people who only like hip-hop music, and a few who only like theatre music, and the rest of us just like good shit. It doesn’t matter what form it comes in. I think we’re all a lot more eclectic than we give ourselves credit for…"

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) …Also Lin-Manuel Miranda; “Hamilton” blew me away, and I can’t wait to see what he does next."

"…The play does not purport to be the play of the community—it’s really about that artist’s idiosyncratic voice and what that encounter elicits in them…"

"I had Chavo Guerrero in mind a lot when I was writing this play…Chavo’s job was to make guys look better than they were, which meant he lost a lot. And he was so skilled at it that there weren’t a lot of guys who could play that same fall-guy role for him so that he could be the champion."

"…I’ve been thinking a lot in terms of how growing up in the context impacts a person’s sense of place in the world. My sense of it. Never quite believing that anything is permanent, uncontested. Never quite landing. You always are a little bit “observing”…"

"Television has lapped theater in a lot of storytelling techniques — realism, depth of character, complicated storytelling…What we have that’s different in the theater is the audience in the space with us. And I’m not interested in ignoring the space between us."

"…I think, from being an actor, I got the gift of understanding, respecting, and admiring what actors do and the ability to speak in a language that is useful to them…"

"If you’re a playwright who doesn’t want to do people-on-a-couch plays, there are not a lot of avenues…You can go and do television, or you can stay and fight with organizations that aren’t really equipped to support work by people of color or experiment with form."

"The reason why I fell in love with being a playwright and why I fell in love with theatre is because I grew up in it. My first poem was published at six and called “I Am Stronger than Hate.” I proclaimed then that, “I am stronger than hate, I will open the gate, the gate to a kingdom of love, it doesn’t matter what your race, or the color of your face. I am stronger than hate,” and of why I am a poet and playwright. This work is about community."

"I think that if we’ve done our job well and we articulate this individual’s life well, the themes inherent in that translate…It’s about legacy, about how much do we do with the time we’re given? And then there are themes that wrestle with the American character, but only in that Hamilton’s life is a rough-draft version of the arguments we still have as a country."

"…There’s momentum about making our presence known. We’re here. We’re Latino playwrights and theatre professionals. Eventually there’s going to be a tipping point and more of our stories will become part of the American canon. I write what I know and for now I focus on Latinos because going through school, I longed to read about my experience…"

"I was like, “Man, young people in Chicago need to hear these young people in Ferguson articulate that, because that’s so powerful for young people to come to that political awakening on their own—outside of academia, outside of institutions that they’ve been denied access to.” And so we were really inspired to build with them. And we came back the next week and asked them if we could launch a pop-up gallery on their campsite. So we printed the photos that we had taken the week before, we brought down easels, and we created a pop-up gallery on the camp site—that was sort of the first gesture, the first portal of this loose collective of artists that would later become #LetUsBreathe, using art as an access point for political education and engagement, turning the Ferguson protest’s occupation into an art gallery…"

"My inspiration for this play derives from a combination of my personal and the collective grief around the mass shooting in the United States. These incidents made me pay attention to the National conversation around the topic of gun violence. On social media I constantly read “lone white shooter” and I started to think about the cycle of how news is dispersed, interpreted, re-dispersed and reinterpreted. This cycle is destructive. From this news, what assumptions do we make about the shooter? About the victims? And about the moments between gunshots?..."

"I never saw [Paps] as a bad guy, that’s the kind of work that I’m drawn to, stuff that’s not black or white but sits in a grey zone, where you’re not sure how to feel about things. I think that’s life."

"Chicago for me means life. I have lived in Chicago all my life. It keeps calling me back even though I have tried to escape. Chicago is a city filled with some of the most corruption and also some of the most courageous and successful organizing resistance overall. Chicago will always affect how I represent myself when I travel. It is home…"

"Richie, when all is said and done, is a romantic lead. There’s not a lot of romantic leads out there for Latino actors, and it allowed the industry to sort of see me as an everyman…"

"…I realized that what I had been watching was a fairly remarkable hybrid storytelling form: part live theatrical event, part polished television production, part sports spectacular, part collaborative improvised dance — and so much more. It’s a art form that synthesizes tons of other art forms into what appears to be simple, mindless entertainment, and it’s fascinating…"

"…There are assumptions made about the kind of work Latinos make. I think that remains a challenge because when people are looking for Latino plays, they’re looking for plays of that “type.” Some of that gets defined by your ethnicity…"

"I pretty much live in the details of them, and they teach me while I’m writing. I don’t come to it thinking, “I want this character to serve this function in the play.” I have a very inside out approach as opposed to outside in…"

"It’s what I know best. It’s roots. It’s Dazed And Confused and Friday Night Lights. It’s border life and El Pato and Whataburger and getting drunk in a back of a pickup. It’s dancing every weekend to country music, or Tejano music, or club music. It’s the beach. It’s, for better or worse, home."

"My grandfather saw a lot of violence and a lot of poverty, and really was incredibly, deeply tortured by it. It was always this elephant in the room that we never talked about growing up. He spoke fluent Spanish, but never in front of us. I think he was really afraid that we would be judged and held back by our Mexican heritage, like he was. Part of writing this play was like digging up my own family ghosts and things that I personally had always been afraid to talk about, because my family never talked about them. Also, because I’m Mexican and I’m white, I often struggle with wondering if I’m “allowed” to tell stories through this lens; growing up, the white kids always told me I was Latina or “ethnic,” and the Chicano kids always told me I was a “gringa,” so I never really felt like I fit in anywhere…"

"When I left South Texas, I realized that I became the other. I was the token of the room. Most of my friends were white so when I went to a party or a wedding or a work function, I would scan the room and only see my face in the people who were serving the drinks or passing around the appetizers. I realized I was the hanging fruit in the room, the living and breathing statue in the room, the object in the middle of the photograph, surrounded by white eyes."

"A play is like a free-flowing poem in some ways. The play, as you write, will tell you what the structure will be. But, sometimes you forget to ask those questions as you write and you end up spending a lot of time trying to find the essence of the play…"