Aaron Higareda is a southern California playwright who earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside. The first play in his "Rhino Cycle", You don't even speak Spanish! was a 2023 O'Neill National Playwright Conference semifinalist and a 2022 Latinx Theatre Commons Comedy Carnaval finalist. He has had workshop productions with Casa 0101, El Teatro Campesino, and Frida Kahlo Theatre. His short play South Hope St. was a Best of Playground-LA finalist and was selected for the 2024 KCACTF Region 8 National Playwriting Program. As a theatre professional, Aaron was the 2018 Marketing Fellow at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, a House Manager at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and a Data and Membership specialist with Theatre Bay Area. With his UCR MFA Playwriting cohort he co-created AKA productions, where he loves to help out wherever he can to bring more theatre especially new plays to the Inland Empire. When Aaron is not working, or writing, or worrying about working and writing, he enjoys chilling with his partner and their three crazy ass kids!
Why join and fund this experiment?
To prove that playwrights can be financially independent and produce their own plays without depending or relying on the failing American Regional Theatre industrial complex, nor the antiquated not for profit theatre model.
To support and get full access to my playwriting process, invitations to participate as an audience member and provide feedback for private staged readings of my work, and other exclusive content such as theatre reviews, my Dramaturgical Discourse podcast where I offer a fresh take on old ass plays, and other creative projects and writings.
To learn to write your own plays and create the type of American theatre you want to see!
On a personal note:
I write because I don’t want to be a coward and a liar anymore. Writing forces me to face my fears and confront myself and the world. Writing forces me to be honest with myself and honest with others.
Every word I write is a challenge/ an invitation/ a temptation/ a choice to be courageous and honest or to be a liar and a coward. Sometimes I win and sometimes I lose this subconscious and conscious battle, but the point is not in the winning or losing in and of itself, the point for me is the practice and discipline of showing up to do the work every day. To write every day. The point is perfecting craft and technique to tell the most courageous, honest, and dopest plays I can.
Ultimately, my work questions the political, socio-economic, and cultural conditions of the Southern California Chicanx community because I am both proud and disappointed in it.
My creative practice stems from and is grounded in the Chicanx community theatre philosophy: “A theatre for the people, and by the people”. I have benefited from and have been inspired by Josefina Lopez’s Casa 0101 Theatre in Boyle Heights policy of “no one turned away for lack of funds”, to Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino tradition of agitprop techniques and a rasquachismo aesthetic.
“to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself…now that, my friend, is very hard to do.”
BRUCE LEE
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