Playwrights From The United States

"When I’m writing, I can see myself in all of the characters I write."

"Deep in my psyche, I am no different than any American—I have a greater command of their language than they do. I am a composite of all of the heroines in the books I’ve read—legendary, mythological, fictional ones. I wonder if I am real? I want to be!"

"“Survival isn't lying down and saying, oh, poor me. It's finding ways to live and keep your light shining in the midst of the darkest circumstances.”"

"What happens is this: when we come to believe that the only way to make change is to murder one another, the idea of “the other” makes less valuable the human life it possesses. As a consequence, we can kill the “other” and not feel guilty. Unfortunately, human beings spend too much time rationalizing that war is right under certain circumstances; that it’s okay to threaten and kill other human beings."

"We’re just getting out of domestic situation plays in which we were examining our lifestyle. We’ve been portrayed as a unique, complex kind of people…and there’s a lot more that we can bring to the public. The truth is we do everything."

"We speak [in traditional portrayal] one abominable language—hip; we have one interest—women. Our lives have no beginning, no ending. We’re highly emotional in terms of reactive violence, and we do not use our minds in any way."

"I didn’t start writing to tell happy, little stories. I started writing to make some impact on the world in which I live. If you don’t want to say anything about sexual assault, that’s your business, but I want to say something about it. I think it is absolutely and unequivocally wrong. We have no right because we are in the military to rape fellow soldiers who just happen to be females. A lot of victims are male as well. In the Army I was in, the life of the person next to you was as valuable as your own. You would never do anything to hurt your comrade. Your life depended on him, and in the case of Iraq, those gentlemen’s lives depended on the women they were raping. It’s horrifying."

"My plays are clean. Most plays have four, five vital moments in the play and the rest of the play is just getting to it. It’s just fill. I don’t know why, whether it’s just to create the sense that it’s real or that you have to spend two hours to experience the power (you have to see not just snapshots). But I find it very boring. I go to sleep when I see plays like that, and I go to sleep writing it…"

"Art is something you don’t just reproduce—what you see everyday doesn’t seem to be inspiring to them. But you do something with it so that it’s not bound by the law of reality. My work has always had that influence. I’ve never felt that it was necessary at all to write realistic plays…"

"It’s a 21st-century play…The overarching theme is, how do we find peace in the present? Through love, understanding and learning about our cultural and religious differences."

"Theater is a service where the god keeps changing…Sometimes it’s the actor. Sometimes it’s the director. Sometimes it’s the stage manager. Sometimes, but almost never, it’s the playwright."

"(Why do so many South American Jews write about oppression?) People like Timerman and Dorfman were part of generations that suffered terribly because of dictatorships. So they write about what happened to them and their countries, and have the courageous belief that an author should write about things as a witness."

"when 9/11 was taking place in the U.S., few journalists, except people like Ariel Dorfman, few of them mentioned that there was another 9/11 that took place in Chile created by the terrorism that the United States government, in a way, was supporting through the CIA...Dorfman wrote a wonderful editorial in The New York Times, an op/ed about two or three days ago, and he said that Pinochet's dirty dealings with his money were found because through the Patriot Act they discovered that he had money in the Riggs Bank, and he became like a terrorist that stole $8 million, but he also says that it was the same secrecy that Pinochet governed that allowed him to steal the money. So secrecy is dangerous no matter how you look at it, and he was talking the secrecy of the Patriot Act."

"My favorite definition of magic realism is by Ariel Dorfman, who said in an NPR interview about his play, Widows, "When people who have nothing demand everything, that’s real magic.""

"The past is really unknowable, but it’s got to be knowable enough so that we can seek forgiveness for our crimes…"

"This story contains many elements of my journey as a writer. As a Spanish-American, I gain much of my inspiration from the Latin world and often write about how the Anglo and Latin worlds collide, intersect and transform each other. I also draw huge inspiration from my father's Spanish family of artists. Dealing with loss has also been an area I've continually explored as a writer…"

"Having a play directed by someone else is like going to a religious school when you’re a child, you listen and obey…"

"Not to belong anywhere, to be displaced, is not a bad thing for a writer…If you can deal with it. If it doesn’t destroy you."

"More than a traveler, I’m a displacer. In other words, I’m a person who is constantly meditating on what it means not to arrive at a place, but to be on my way somewhere else."

"I am interested in beauty. I think with beauty comes poetry, comes the lyrical. I think beauty is concerned with justice…"

"I think that's beautiful when you also find contradictions, or you find ambiguity with your character. Ambiguity is a good word in the world of art."

"When I was 8, my best friend was raped and murdered and thrown off the roof of our building. That's when my serious writing began--when writing became an outlet for me to express my feelings and emotions…That is when I began to understand the power of writing. Other kids played stickball; I'd write weird journal entries."

"I think the audience I'd like to reach is increasingly an audience that stays home--a poor audience, a Latino audience, people of color, or people who feel disenfranchised. They're not going out and they don't feel entitled to theater. Theater is becoming more and more elitist because we just do it for each other. It seems that there are more theater people at the theater than regular people, and that's not good."

"I can only respond as an artist, because that’s what I am. I’m not going to become a politician all of a sudden. I am a politician in terms of the plays that I write, the way I embrace culture, the way I embrace characters that, in my particular case, have to do with the Latino world. And I embrace the Latino experience…"

"I believe it’s something that happens when one is around art, and when one is close to books: they seep into your system, into your blood, and start to activate something in your life. We start living in the way that some of these characters live, with some sense of their sensibility. It’s almost as if the reader becomes the writer and the writer becomes the reader…"

"I wanted to write a play about racism, about poverty, about the negative forces that haunt us and make us murderous—and the positive forces that do daily battle for us—like love, friendship, family—which lead to some kind of hope..."

"Respect your history, listen to your ancestors, tell the truth, and write your own story—or someone else will write it and get it all wrong."

"I think the genre decides for me—which sounds like a way of avoiding the question unless I explain first that this chameleon-like border crossing, this shifting of genre identities is, I realize, parallel to, or anticipates, or recollects my own life. I’m probably fluctuating across genres perhaps because my identity itself is always in flux…"

"If I could change one thing about U.S. theater, theater companies would produce a wider, broader range of plays by women and men who fully represent the cultural complexity of twenty-first century U.S. culture. Theatergoers would then have access to a huge selection of diverse theatrical worlds that would challenge, entertain, delight and intrigue them…"

"I’ve always been at the peripheries of the Chicano Movement because the Chicano world does not consider me Chicana enough. They, however, respect me as a writer…"

"When I was a child, poverty was a common suffering for everybody around me. A common suffering is a richness in itself."

"When I started writing, there were only two women writers that I knew: Lorraine Sutton and Margie Simmons. There were very few Latinas writing in English... So when I started, I was mainly surrounded by men-Pedro Pietri, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Tato Laviera. Many of them had books already published. I was like a sponge, absorbing different things from these male contemporaries."

"I write music with my mouth — first lyrics, then song, then rhythm."

"In the Lower East Side, the Puerto Ricans had already been ‘project-ed.’ The people were used to living in the projects. They worked on ships on South Street or in hotels. There were a lot of people collecting records, so music became a really important connection between New York City and Puerto Rico. We spoke English in the street and Spanish at home. A lot of music from Puerto Rico was played in the streets and in people’s homes. We listened to Bomba, Plena, pop music and Salsa."

"Puerto Rico in particular intertwines Caribbean Black Spanish. We dare to claim it. It is a source of pride and we are not linguistically crippled. My claim to fame is I can experiment, and sound intelligent with my linguistic experiments."

"Her (Sandra María Esteves's) struggle for language, like Tato Laviera's, is not just linguistic, cultural or national, but also racial."

"I happen to feel that [Piñero] was a romantic character and there was something about his love for land that was very wonderful, the way he held Puerto Rico, that elusive homeland in the foreground of his thoughts and writing. For all of us who are uprooted and thrown into this city, to keep a semblance of that is always so dignified. That would make it perhaps a bit nostalgic for me because people like that don’t seem to be around anymore."

"When I started writing, there were only two women writers that I knew: Lorraine Sutton and Margie Simmons. There were very few Latinas writing in English... So when I started, I was mainly surrounded by men-Pedro Pietri, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Tato Laviera. Many of them had books already published. I was like a sponge, absorbing different things from these male contemporaries."

"People would call us "dirty Mexicans." I remember going to a movie in Reedly where we weren't allowed to sit in the Anglo section. We were told by the ushers to sit with the rest of the Mexicans, because this section was reserved for whites. Those are things you never forget."

"His poetry and the plays are so fraught with the things that aggravated and influenced him and ultimately made his life successful. He took this form and infused it with an urban, Latin lifeblood that had never been used in poetry before. He was remarkable as a writer in terms of never really self-editing himself or censoring himself."

"Luis Valdez said it long ago: The beauty and the frustration of theater is it is one permanent long shot…You never get up close in someone’s eyes. And that kind of blew me away (while shooting) a close-up. That was all new storytelling for me, and I had to figure it out on a very fast learning curve."

"Theater is the only thing that still belongs to the people"

"We were and still are recreating our own reality. Our vision is that we have been a hard working, courageous people. There have been three prevalent images of the chicano in this country— 1) the pachuco, a violent, urban vato loco; 2) the farmworker, a passive peon, Don Juan-Yaqui brujo type; and 3) el Spanish grandee or Latin lover type."

"Prison is a society within a society. It’s a reflection of life in the streets. The jargon may be different, but we think and feel the same as on the streets and we recreate it in prison."

"I mean, I’m middle class. I’m upwardly mobile. I’m not a communist; I’m not a socialist. But when I visit the prisons, when I see the new homelessness in L.A., when I see a declining middle class and the growing Occupy movement in a rich-get-richer America, I find that the remnants of colonialism are alive and well. In the barrios, on the reservations, and certainly in parts of the Sonoran desert on the American side…"

"My parents were migrant farm workers who moved between Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. I was born in Delano and that's where the ranch was. For my dad, this was the high point of his life. The whole family was very proud of the fact that he had a ranch and we had family events out there. When we lost it at the end of the war it was a tragedy. We were back on the migrant path, and I remember asking my older brother, "What happened? We used to be rich." And he said, "We weren't rich, we just had the ranch and it wasn't even ours." He was older so he was wise to the fact that the Japanese-Americans had been forced out. I realized with a shock and a sense of guilt that we'd taken over somebody else's ranch and they'd been imprisoned in a camp."

"We thought that would be fun to honor the people that do the mundane daily chores, the people that are part of the work service backbone of places like Los Angeles and Orange County…So much effort is made to vilify [these people]."

"It was bad enough in 2013, and it's worse now. My approach to political theater is that the way to the mind is through the heart. If you can touch the heart, then people will come to the ideas themselves. The American idea of social equality and human respect has to be constantly defended from generation to generation. What happened to the Japanese is echoed tragically in what's happening to Latinos on the Mexican border. Those are prison camps and in some ways the Trump administration is declaring war on Latin America. It's a struggle, but I'm also an optimist and I know it won't last forever."

"History echoes. We mustn't ignore the past, because we're constantly reliving it. Just like the seasons that these farm workers organize their lives around, it's all a big cycle."

"I was one of the Asian American theatre people who protested the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in the musical MISS SAIGON when it came to Broadway, as an example of “Yellow Face” casting.. The intensity, vehemence, and anger I felt, on both sides of that issue, left me shaken for many years afterwards. So I wrote FACE VALUE, a comedy of mistaken racial identity, to explore the question, “What does it really mean to ‘play’ another race?” As noted above, FACE VALUE became an infamous flop, but the idea of doing a comedy of mistaken racial identity stayed with me for the next fifteen years or so. Eventually, I found another way to realize this notion with YELLOW FACE."