I Interview Playwrights Part 541: Laura Marks

Laura Marks

Hometown: Lexington, KY

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  Tell me about Bethany.

A:  I wrote this play in early 2009 right after I’d been laid off. It’s a darkly funny study of desperate people in desperate times, set in a community that’s been decimated by the foreclosure crisis. Since writing it, I’ll confess that I’ve been anxiously watching the news for signs of economic recovery, worrying that my play would stop feeling relevant. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I don’t think that’s been the case…

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I have a spooky play called Mine that’s getting its Chicago premiere at the Gift Theater this summer, and I’m working on a new play called Gather at the River which is about religion, morality and the extreme ends of the blue-state vs. red-state divide. It draws on my Kentucky roots.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  I can’t think of a truly definitive story, but there’s a character in Bethany who’s a wilderness survival enthusiast, among other things; and working on that play reminds me that one of my favorite childhood books was the US Air Force Combat Survival Manual. I don’t even know why we had this in the house. My dad must have bought it at some Army-Navy store around the same time when he started keeping canisters of freeze-dried eggs and sausage in the garage, just in case of nuclear winter. He’s a thoroughly rational guy, a doctor —not your typical doomsday prepper. But I have a bunch of his love letters to my mom when they were in college, and even as a young man he had this strain of concern that I find very moving: he was already worrying about protecting my mom and their as-yet-unborn children.

So anyway, we had this insane book. And it was about the stuff every kid wants to know: how to stay alive after you’ve been shot down in enemy territory. You didn’t just learn the basics like how to build a lean-to or ensnare wild animals. There was crazy shit in there, like how to distill your own urine if you couldn’t find clean water. And there was a first-person account from a guy in a Vietnamese POW camp who had performed a hemorrhoidectomy using the sharpened steel arch support from his combat boot. He described the postoperative patient as “living in considerably greater comfort.” I mean, you can’t read that as a kid and not have it etched in your brain.

I have two little girls of my own now, and I’m often surprised at the extreme scenarios they’re drawn to in their make-believe games. But it seems utterly normal and healthy for them to work a few things out this way. Marsha Norman once said, “Plays are about survival.” And I think that’s true, whether the plays are being done with LEGOs in the living room or on a professional stage. We all like to imagine how we’d act under different types and levels of duress, how we’d function and survive.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  I wish it wasn’t just for the rarefied few. I wish that audiences—and the people who make theater—were more representative of the whole community.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  For sheer pluck and doggedness, I’d say Helene Hanff and Moss Hart. They’re not heroes in the Olympian sense. They feel accessible. Hanff wrote a book called Underfoot in Show Business—I believe it’s out of print now, but it’s this wonderful, humble memoir of her time as a young playwright trying to get produced in the 1940’s and 50’s. It’s the perfect antidote to self-pity. And Moss Hart’s memoir, Act One, has the most epic account of a rewrite that I’ve ever read.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  “To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be… the greatest the case permits of.” – Henry James

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Apply to the Emerging Writers’ Group at the Public. Apply to Juilliard’s playwriting program. Send your stuff to the Lark Play Development Center. Apply to New Dramatists. Join the Dramatists Guild.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  This spring, I can’t wait to see Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit ’67 at the Public and Tanya Barfield’s The Call at Playwrights Horizons.

And my play Bethany will be at City Center Stage II, running January 11-February 17, 2013. The Women’s Project is producing it, Gaye Taylor Upchurch is directing it, and the cast and creative team are an absolute joy.

I Interview Playwrights Part 540: Don Zolidis

Don Zolidis

Hometown: Janesville, Wisconsin. 



Current Town: Austin, Texas and Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. 



Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’ve got about 800 new projects. I just finished a new play, TRUE BELIEVERS, about a disgraced Astrophysicist who teams up with fundamentalist Christians to write a biblically-based Astronomy Textbook. 



Q:  Tell me about the Edgerton Foundation New American Play Awards and the two plays you are having produced as part of them.

A:  The Edgerton New American Play Awards are grants given to theatres to help with producing new work. The theatres apply for them, and then the Foundation selects the winners. They’ve had a pretty good track record for picking the most-heralded plays of the year. Unbeknownst to me, both of the theatres producing my plays in 2012, The Purple Rose Theatre in Michigan and The Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis, applied for awards independently. Both of them won, which was quite a shock to me.

The plays I had selected really couldn’t be more different. WHITE BUFFALO, which ran in the spring at The Purple Rose, is the story of a miracle birth on a small farm in Wisconsin. CURRENT ECONOMIC CONDITIONS, which is a comedy about a 20-something returning to live at home after losing her job, played at the Phoenix.

I was honored to receive both awards, but I only learned about it from Google alerts! Funny. 



Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.


A:  Like most children of the eighties, I spent a great deal of time in front of the television watching cartoons. Most of that time I was violently annoyed that the heroes always seemed to win and the villains were always morons. I was usually yelling at the screen for the villains to simply get their entire gang together (why did Skeletor only choose one of his henchmen for a task? Send everybody!) and then pick off the heroes one by one. I spent a lot of time diagramming how this would happen, and playing out scenarios in my mind where the good guys were captured and murdered and the bad guys won. I don’t think I was really an evil kid, but without getting too pretentious about it, I think I was striving for narrative complexity and actual danger. The preordained happy ending drained the drama out of everything. I guess that’s why I like writing plays, where the outcome is often in doubt and not always happy, and probably why I also like Game of Thrones.

Q:  
If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?


A:  Just one thing? I’d like to confront the mindset of New York City as not only the center of the theatrical world, but the only place where important theatre happens. There are many great regional theatres in America producing outstanding work (Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, DC, etc…) and there are certain publishers who won’t even look at plays that didn’t play in New York. This may seem like a small thing, but it undercuts a play’s ability to live after its first production, if it premiered in a smaller market. It’s hard enough making a living as a playwright, but when your career seems arbitrarily defined by your ability to land a New York production, it makes it even harder. I don’t like to whine, but there is excellent theater being done outside of New York, and making it unpublishable and unproduceable is a shame.


Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?


A:  David Lindsay-Abaire, Christopher Durang, Eugene O’Neill, Shakespeare, Paula Vogel, Sarah Ruhl, I could go on and on…


Q:  What kind of theater excites you?


A:  I like theatre where the situation is clear but the outcome is in doubt and the path is surprising. I know that’s vague, but it’s hard to be specific about this entirely. I think a lot of theatre out there now is intentionally obscure and atmospheric rather than dramatic.

I also like huge theatre. Theatre that takes risks, that has twenty people on the stage, and deals with enormous, world-shaking themes. You know, the kind of stuff that’s almost impossible to get done.

Q:  
What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?


A:  Hook in with a theatre group of your peers. It’s so hard to be sitting alone somewhere, emailing out stuff for eternity and listening to silence. You need to be part of a community of like-minded individuals. Get together with your friends and produce your own work. It’s not that expensive to rent a miserable little dive, charge a few bucks at the door, and put on a show.


Q:  Plugs, please:


A:  My newest play, MILES AND ELLIE, will open June 20th at the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Michigan and run through August 31st. (a 77-performance run for a world premiere! It’s such a joy to work with them. From there, it will move to the Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis and then the Montgomery Theatre outside of Philadelphia. Playscripts will be publishing my 48th play, A BRIGHT SWARM OF BEETLES, about the life of Soviet playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, early next year. Also you can check out my website at www.donzolidis.com

Entrevisto a Dramaturgos: Concepción León Mora

Concepción León Mora

¿De qué estás trabajando ahora?

En un texto que cuestione la pertinencia del ritual en una sociedad tan confundida y egoísta como la actual. La “particular” interpretación del fín del mundo en el calendario Maya ha sido uno de los grandes temas tocados por mucha gente, como Yucateca, creo que es un buen momento para ponerlo a tela teatral. Escribo la historia de un anciano sabio que debe preparar la bebida sagrada para salvar al pueblo. Esta bebida incluye alcohol, el sabio fue alcohólico, omnubildado por el alcohol mató a su hijo a golpes. Ahora debe elegir entre rechazar su sabiduría o volver a beber.

Dime, si se quiere, una historia de su infancia que explica quién es usted como escritor o como persona.

La relación con mi abuela es mi motor de escritura, ella era una narradora nata, plena de sabiduría y amor, escribo como parte de aquel ritual nuestro que nos mantenía la boca llena de historias y el espíritu asombrado.

Si pudieras cambiar algo de teatro, ¿qué sería?

Las formas de producir y las estrategias de publicidad.

¿Quiénes son o fueron sus héroes de teatro?

No creo en héroes, en todo caso eso sirve para las taquillas del cine, al teatro le sirven los seres humanos, sin capacidades fantásticas e omnipotentes pero con finitas cualidades humanas. En ese sentido admiro a todos los que hacen teatro sin estar persiguiendo o arañando tal o cual beca.

¿Qué tipo de teatro te excita?

El que no tiene una producción apabullante y confía en la capacidad de los actores para llenar el espacio vacío.

Plugs, Por Favor 

Mis más recientes colaboraciones con “Teatro de ciertos habitantes” y “Carretera 45” son obras que recuperan la memoria convocando algunos miedos de infancia y poniendo en primer plano la identidad de los que estamos en escena.

I Interview Playwrights Part 539: Concepción León Mora

Translated by Andrea Thome and Lily Padilla
Concepción León Mora

Q:  What are you working on now?


A:  A text which questions the relevance of ritual in a society as confused and selfish as our present one. Many people have been making their own strange interpretations of the Mayan calendar’s supposed “end of the world.” As a Yucatecan myself, I think now is a good moment to address this this on stage. I’m writing the story of an old wise man who is supposed to prepare a sacred drink in order to save his town. This drink contains alcohol, but the old man had been an alcoholic before and, possessed by alcohol, had beaten his son to death. Now he must choose between rejecting his own knowledge or having to drink again.

Q:  
Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.


A:  My relationship with my grandmother is my fuel as a writer. She was a born storyteller, full of wisdom and love. I write as part of that ritual of ours that kept out mouths mouth full of stories and our spirits amazed.

Q:  
If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?


A:  Forms of production and publicity strategies. 


Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  
I don’t believe in heroes; in any case, those are useful to movie theater box offices. What’s useful to theater is human beings without fantastic or omnipotent abilities but with finite human qualities. In that sense, I admire everyone who makes theater without chasing or grabbing for this or that grant.


Q:  What kind of theater excites you?


A:  That which doesn’t have overwhelming production values and which believes in the ability of the actors to fill the empty space.


Q:  Plugs, please:


A:  My most recent collaborations with “Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes” and “Carretera 45” are works which recover memory, drawing on certain childhood fears and highlighting the identitites of those of us who are onstage.

Sunday 7pm at the Lark, reading of Mestiza Power, translated by Virginia Grise and directed by Daniel Jáquez

I Interview Playwrights Part 538: Saúl Enríquez

Translated by Andrea Thome and Lily Padilla

Saúl Enríquez

Hometown: I’m from Cardel, Veracruz, a beautiful town in the Gulf of Mexico, but I grew up in a magnificent valley in Orizaba, Veracruz.

Current City: Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico



Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m creating a play about the reckless side of teenagers. It is part of a three play series on adolescence that I’m working on.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.


A:  I grew up in a place where people are used to creating stories; talking about legends that are constantly breaking down and being reconstructed. I remember one time when people swore they had found a werewolf on a mountain and that he had been captured by soldiers. I was a child, but to me the story seemed implausible. I was more fascinated by the fact that people believed this story than by the story itself.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?


A:  The theater is a rare animal without rules…I like this. 


Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?


A:  I don’t know about heroes, but playwrights that I have always admired are Shakespeare, Racine, Moliere, Beckett, Chekhov, Strindberg, Mamet, Albee, Miller, Kane. And the Mexicans: Liera, Gonzales Dávila y Olguìn, Leñero, Berman. Directors and actors are another list.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?


A:  All theater that creates a new universe and stays true to its own invented logic.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  I am beginning. But I like to focus on substance over form.


Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My theater company’s facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nuncamerlot-Teatro/336899535544?fref=ts



Reading of Schnauzer Duck at the Lark in New York this Sunday at 3 translated by Mariana Carreño King and directed by May Adrales.

Entrevisto a Dramaturgos: Saúl Enríquez

Saúl Enríquez

Procedencia: Soy de Cardel Veracruz, un pueblito hermoso del golfo de México, pero crecí en Orizaba Veracruz un valle magifico.

Ciudad Actual: Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico


¿En qué estás trabajando ahora?


Estoy construyendo una obra sobre el lado temerario de los adolescentes, pretendo escribir 3 obras sobre adolescentes.

Dime, si se quiere, una historia de su infancia que explica quién es usted como escritor o como persona.


Crecí en un sitio donde la gente tiene por costumbre crear historias, platicar leyendas que se están quebrando y construyendo todo el tiempo. Recuerdo una vez que, la gente juraba que habían encontrado un hombre lobo en una montaña y que lo había sido apresado por los soldados. Yo era un niño, pero la historia me parecía inverosimil, encontraba mas fascinación en que la gente creyera esta historia más que en la historia misma.

Si pudieras cambiar algo de teatro, ¿qué sería?

El teatro es un animal raro y sin reglas... eso me gusta

¿Quiénes son o fueron sus héroes de teatro?¿Qué tipo de teatro te excita?

No sé si héroes pero dramaturgos que siempre he admirado: Es Shakespeare, Racine. Molliere, Beckett, Chejov, Strindberg, Mamet, Albee, Miller, Kane... y mexicanos: Liera, Gonzales Dávila y Olguìn, Leñero, Berman. Directores y Actores esa es otra lista.

¿Qué tipo de teatro te excita?

Todo aquel que crea un universo nuevo y se sostiene sobre sus propias reglas.


 ¿Qué consejo le darías a los dramaturgos acaba de empezar?

Yo voy empezando. Pero me gusta ponderar en el fondo sobre la forma.

Plugs, Por Favor


La pagina de mi grupo: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nuncamerlot-Teatro/336899535544?fref=ts

Entrevisto a Dramaturgos: Bárbara Colio

Bárbara Colio

Procedencia: Mexicali, Baja California, México.

Ciudad actual: Ciudad de México.

¿En qué estás trabajando ahora?:

Estoy trabajando con tres estupendos actores mexicanos, mi obra "vuelve cuando hayas ganado la guerra" ésta obra la terminé de escribir hace poco, pero esta vez, como no lo hacía desde hace varios años, la quiero dirigir yo misma, como una extensión de la escritura. Volver a meterme a la escena viva para aprender de ella. La estrenaremos en abril del 2013 en un espacio alternativo.

También estoy ansiosa por asistir al estreno de  mi obra "Cuerdas" en Madrid, en febrero 2013, la misma obra que estoy trabajando en esta residencia con Lark Play Development Center.

Dime, si se quiere, una historia de su infancia que explica quién es usted como escritor o como persona.

Cuando era niña, cada domingo, mi papá me llevaba a lo que se llamaba "el bosque de la ciudad" en mi ciudad natal. Mientras yo me divertía en los juegos y con los animales del pequeño zoológico que había ahí, mi papá practicaba su hobby favorito: la fotografía. Tengo cientos de fotos mí, en ese bosque, de cada domingo. Mi favorita, una donde estoy con cara de susto, cargando a un pequeño tigre, que mi papá hizo que sacaran de su jaula, solo para que posara conmigo.

Si esa foto no existiera, yo hubiera olvidado que un día, abracé a un tigre.

Si pudieras cambiar algo de teatro, ¿qué sería?

En Mexico, que existieran más facilidades para producir teatro.

¿Qué tipo de teatro te excita?

El que no me da respuestas, sino que me deja pensando en más de una pregunta.

¿Qué consejo le darías a los dramaturgos acaba de empezar?

Que lean, que vean, que escuchen, que vivan, que se detengan un momento a contemplar lo excepcional.

I Interview Playwrights Part 537: Bárbara Colio

translated by Andrea Thome and Lily Padilla

Bárbara Colio

Hometown:  Mexicali, Baja California, México.

Current Town: Mexico City

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I am working with three stupendous Mexican actors on my play “come back when you have won the war”. I recently finished writing it and this time, as I have not done in a many years, I am going to direct it myself as an extension of the writing. I’d like to immerse myself in the live, active scene to learn from it. The premiere is in April 2013 in an alternative space, a building in Mexico City’s historical center.

Also, I’m eager to attend the premiere of my play “Ropes” in Madrid in February 2013, the same play I’m working on in my residency at the Lark Play Development Center.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  When I was a little girl, every Sunday my father would take me to a park called “The City Forest” in my hometown. While I was playing on the playground and looking at zoo animals, my father practiced his favorite hobby: photography. I have hundreds of photos of myself; my favorite one is of me looking terrified, holding a baby tiger that my father asked the zookeepers to take out of his cage, only for the photograph.

If this photo didn’t exist, I would have forgotten that one day, I held a tiger.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  That in Mexico, there would be more support for producing theater.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  That which doesn’t give me answers, but which leaves me thinking about more than one question.

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: Read, observe, listen, live and pause a moment to contemplate the exceptional.

Q: Plugs?

A: Reading at the Lark of Ropes, translated by Maria Alexandria Beech and directed by Lou Moreno. Saturday at 7.

I Interview Playwrights Part 536: Liza Birkenmeier

Liza Birkenmeier

Hometown: St. Louis, MO

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q: What are you working on now?

A:  I am working with collaborator-director-friend Katherine Brook on a piece that uses archival audio from interviews I recorded at a coffee house in Missouri. We are in the process of chopping up recordings of young transgender and queer people in the Midwest and gluing them to the structure of Arthur Miller’s ALL MY SONS. It follows a piece that we collaborated on called AMERICAN REALISM that used congressional archive recordings from the Dust Bowl. (We recently traveled with it to the San Diego Museum of art and LACE in Los Angeles). Also…I’m drafting some commissioned pieces—one is musical collaboration with Christopher Limber and Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, another is collaboration with Washington University and a large PR2 robot, and the third is a site-specific play that will premiere at a Laundromat next summer.

I'm also writing a play called INFIRMARY SHAKES about the Kentucky Narcotics Farm and the invention of gunpowder.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  I had an extremely blue time shortly before I turned twelve. I became spontaneously terrified of everything. In this painful, pre-pubescent era, I found incredible comfort in fantasizing that I was personally chosen as this planet’s primary liaison. Alien families were sent to me to learn about earth when they arrived. I would imagine taking them to my house, explaining the purpose of carpet, cooking them meals (they may never have seen food), telling them about how grass grew, showing them why humans had knees, and witnessing their first experience of hearing a song or drinking an orange soda. It made the world (even my small suburban-chain-link-fence- Wonderbread one) an incomprehensibly beautiful living museum, crammed with oddities and wonder.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  Everyone, EVERYONE, everyone, all people from all places in all income brackets with all interests, would get really excited to see it. More excited than for scratch-off lotto tickets, Christmas, the Oscars, a PBR bucket special, low gas prices, or seeing a celebrity at the airport.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Some people who have changed/influenced my brain chemistry in the past couple of years: Rob Handel, Madeleine George, and the rest of 13P, Sid Vicious, Carter W. Lewis, Marisa Wegrzyn, RN Healey, Stefanie Zadravec, Will Eno, Lisa D’Amour, Gregory S Moss, Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, Katherine Brook, Daniel Fish, Karen O, Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, Son House.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Many kinds. Quiet plays, epic plays, short plays, violent plays, operas, musicals, the circus, rodeos, elementary school holiday pageants, confrontational bathroom graffiti, rock concerts, intimate and public cell phone conversations, drunk arguments on the L train, debutante balls, family gatherings, laboratory experiments, sidewalk preaching, glass blowing…excite me very much.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  I either AM or at least FEEL like a playwright just starting out…I will share this one thing I'm in the process of learning: The perfect, healthy day with no obligation or worry, with no “other work” or family need, with no sleepiness or social plans, with only the ideal, sunny room or quiet dark—isn’t really on its way. The plan to have spontaneous and concurrent freedom and genius is a myth. Write the entire play now, in the hour you have in the hotel lobby, in the two-hour plane ride, in your bed when you wake. Write it on the living room floor and finish it. Don’t let anyone read it until you are finished. Their criticisms/questions will be confusing or even insulting when they are guiding what the rest of the play will be. They will only make the “end” farther from you. Don’t rewrite th first act forty times before you start the second. Finish it. The ache that says tomorrow/next week/next month will be a better time is the fear that the end won’t be as “good” as your initial spark. It won’t be! It’s the inertia of work. It isn’t always going to be hayrides, petunias, and muses. Parts will suck. PARTS OF YOUR PLAY WILL SUCK, MAYBE TERRIBLY. Just write them down, regardless. Usually, after a first draft, I’m pretty sure my ENTIRE PLAY SUCKS TERRIBLY. This doesn’t have to be scary. Writing forward and deleting things can be acts that are not precious or spiritual. Truth/beauty/brilliance aren’t waiting in some corner/time you haven’t yet discovered. Allow your play to suck today instead of waiting for it to be perfect next winter. Most of the work will be repairing it, anyway. SO. Finish it now. Shaping it into the glory-genius-potential you once imagined won’t actually begin until it is written. Trusted voices can comment on the whole journey. Take notes, start again, do what you will to fill the gaps and sculpt the world/words. Today…finish the play.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Look out for Katherine Brook’s LADY HAN in February at Incubator Arts. Stefanie Zadravec’s THE ELECTRIC BABY will be in Chicago and New Jersey in 2013. I’m excited to see I HATE FUCKING MEXICANS, now extended at The Flea.

I Interview Playwrights Part 535: David Gaitán

David Gaitán

Hometown: Mexico City


Current Town: Mexico City

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I'm writing a play for a specific group of actors; the peculiar thing (for me, at least) is that their average age is 75. I've always worked with people around my age... I’m writing a play based on the idea of randomness; I’ve seen this done on stage many times, but not often as an experiment that departs from the script itself. 


Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.


A:  I was born with a deformity in my legs. I had two surgeries in order to correct this; later on, I used special shoes until I turned 6. During that time, my parents would make sure that my special shoes (up to the knees) were not seen (by me or the rest of the kids), so that nobody could identify me as handicapped. Along with this, I was encouraged to do everything... walk, run, jump, play soccer, dance... 
Eat the whole cake.
  Now, I work as an actor, playwright, and director.  Many times, simultaneously.


Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?


A:  I would make it for free.
 Always.
 And somehow manage to pay everybody in the play.


Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  They've been changing lately.
I began with the obvious, classic ones: Shakespeare, etc.
Then it changed to my direct teachers.
Now, I don't know.
I would think that my heroes are my closest friends, those who are trying to understand theater in a different way.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?


A:  That which that suggests a different way of doing things.  Given that theater is a system in itself, I admire those who manipulate the system in order to create something new, to make the spectator's experience evolve.


Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Learn the technique.
Then, go against it.
But first, learn it.


Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  In New York, at The Lark, Saturday, December 8, a reading of Leakages and Anticoagulants, translated by Julián Mesri and directed by Mallory Catlett.


In Mexico City I will be acting in Disertaciones Sobre Un Charco, written by Edgar Chías, directed by David Jiménez. I will also be acting in El Camino del Insecto, which I wrote, also directed by David Jiménez. Both these plays are produced and performed by our company, Ocho Metros Cúbicos.