"It's not my first or my last"
A staged reading journey of "You don't even speak Spanish!"
I love and I hate these things. I love that I get to work with amazing actors and pay them. I love that I get to work with an amazing director and see what style and ideas they bring to the script. Most of all, I love hearing the work and words out loud in front of an audience!
At the same time, I hate the uncomfortableness of jokes that don’t land and plot holes that have yet to be fixed. I hate sitting in the audience wondering if people know that I wrote the play, and if they do know, wondering if they are judging me. Most of all, I hate the fact that a staged reading is only a staged reading.
I know that I should be grateful and appreciative that I’m getting this opportunity, especially at a theatre like Playwrights’ Arena, and don’t get me wrong, I am. But in general, I didn’t become a playwright to have my plays linger in the new play development purgatory of the American Theatre for the rest of eternity, waiting for an Agent, Artistic Director, or Literary Manager to absolve them of their sins before they can ascend onto the stages of the League of Resident Theatres.
And I know staged readings are great opportunities for theaters and audiences to get introduced to playwrights and their voices.
And I know they’re a great tool to see if there are any good potential artistic match ups and relationships between actors, directors, and dramaturges.
And I know they’re also a great first test to consider the risks of plays both financially and aesthetically.
But to be honest, I’m a little tired of readings, especially for “You don’t even speak Spanish!” If you can believe it, I had my first reading of this play back in 2013/14. I just finished taking my second playwriting class at Casa 0101 and I thought this playwriting stuff was easy. I write a play, I have a reading of it, and then it gets produced. Shit was I wrong.
In that second playwriting class I took, Josefina Lopez encouraged us to trust and start with an image. She was using techniques and strategies she learned from Maria Irene Fornes, and for whatever reason an image of a mother dumping spaghetti on her son as he proposed to his new girlfriend at dinner got stuck in my mind. Voices came naturally and the family dinner scene practically wrote itself. In fact, little in that scene has been significantly changed ever since.
At the end of that class we had an in house reading of the 60 page script and everyone was laughing and seemed to enjoy it. The next logical step for me was to self-produce a public staged reading. I wanted to get this thing out in front of people, so I rented a space from Casa 0101 which was affordable at that time ($200), and Josefina and the Casa 0101 community supported me along the way. I had no idea what I was doing but I learned a lot about the script, producing, and that I still had a lot to learn about this thing called theatre.
After I self produced that staged reading, I didn’t know how to get to the next logical step: A full production. I thought getting a degree in theatre would do the trick, but when I transferred from East Los Angeles College to the University of California Riverside, my play collected dust in a folder on my laptop for three years. I didn’t know what else to do with it, so there it sat as I concentrated on earning a Bachelor’s of Art degree in Theatre, a minor in education, and writing new plays.
Then I thought, what if I get a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting? Surely that would lead me to the next logical step of getting a full production. So, I opened back up “You don’t even speak Spanish!” and started revising. I only applied to UCR’s MFA program at the time and fortunately I got accepted. I thought this was it, I was finally going to become a professional playwright and get my full production. However, as fate would have it, my partner also got accepted to UC Berkeley that same year, so I had to make a choice. I decide to put my MFA dreams on hold, and went up to the Bay Area and luckily became the 2018/19 Marketing Fellow at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco.
I never read, talked about, nor seen that much theatre in my life before. A benefit of being a fellow was that I was able to take classes that A.C.T. offered for free. So I signed up for a playwriting class taught by Jonathan Spector, (And even had Christopher Chen as a guest instructor for a class once!) It was in this workshop that I realized “You don’t even speak Spanish!” was missing a whole first act, that “meet cute” moment. I went back to the drawing board and made some revisions. After my fellowship concluded, the artistic fellow that also took that free playwriting class with Jonathan Spector, invited me to present “You don’t even speak Spanish!” at the San Francisco Public Library as part of a staged reading series she was producing there.
Oh this reading was painful. I didn’t have the same community support like I did in Boyle Heights, only a handful of people were in the audience, I was late to my own rehearsal, and the actors, some of whom drove up from San Jose I think, weren’t compensated. My biggest take away from this reading was that this play wasn’t nearly as ready for a full production as my naive twenty three year old self once thought. It felt like I wasted people’s time. Back in the folder on my laptop it went.
Next season I went across the bay and started working for Berkeley Repertory Theatre and a smaller theatre called Shotgun Players as a house manager and concessionaire. Again I was inundated with theatre. Again I thought I could do this shit, and set out on a mission to try and figure out how these plays get on these stages. Then the pandemic hit, but I had already made up my mind that I was going to apply to MFA playwriting programs that year. I was turning thirty years old, and I’ve been writing for ten years, and I needed to know if I have what it takes to become a professional playwright.
I set out to produce a zoom staged reading of “You don’t even speak Spanish!”. My goal was to raise enough money to pay the actors and artists involved, to help me cover the cost of MFA playwriting applications, and to develop the best script I can to submit with my application materials. I opened up my laptop, dug out my script, and went back to the basics. Line by painstaking line, I asked what is this piece of dialogue doing? I re-read “Saving the Cat” and followed the hero’s journey with index cards all laid out and shit, I studied the genre of Farce, and by the time my 30th birthday rolled around the play was in the best shape it could possibly be.
This reading was different. Not just because it was on Zoom, but I felt there was a real sense that I was on to something here. The theatre industry was struggling to survive, and here I was in the same league as the big boys, putting on a zoom staged reading similar to what the multimillion dollar theatre companies were doing. This play and my voice weren’t going to be denied.
But denied I was. I was denied to every MFA playwriting program I applied to but one. Good old UCR took me back three years later. The University of Texas, Austin told me no. Brown, USC, UC San Diego all said no. Columbia, where I had an interview with David Henry Hwang, put me on a waitlist, but that tuition was a hell no for me. So my family and I packed up and came back down to southern California.
My first year at UCR’s MFA writing program I was invited to participate in the student theatre group Latinx Play Project’s Comunidad staged reading event. Space was limited, so I only submitted the first 25ish pages of “You don’t even speak Spanish!”. The homies Sergio Solis and Esther Banegas Gatica helped bring this piece to life in front of a nearly full house of college students. It was dope to be reassured that this first act works, and knowing that the best part of the play is still yet to come, was even more reassuring. But again a staged reading is only a staged reading and I still wasn’t sure how to go to the next logical step of getting a full production.
Then during my second year in my MFA playwriting program I had the opportunity to present and produce my 4th staged reading of “You don’t even speak Spanish!” at the Frida Kahlo theatre in Los Angeles. This reading almost didn’t happen. I was stressed out with school, work, and family, and I dropped the ball. I wasn’t ready at all to produce a stage reading, I didn’t have any actors or a director in place to make this thing happen. Thankfully, Ruben Amavizca-Marua gave me a second chance and allowed me to present the play a month later in April of 2023.
As the producer and playwright of the staged reading at Frida Kahlo theatre, the first thing I had to do was to find a director. Then I had to get a casting notice out and/or ask folks directly if they were interested and available to read. I was still trying to understand the Southern California Theatre community at the time. It had been 9 years since I first produced this play at Casa 0101, and most of my network was an hour away in the Inland Empire. Luckily the director Able Marquez had his own network of phenomenal theatre makers from Fullerton and we went ahead with the project.
This process was too fast and too short, I think we had one zoom rehearsal and a couple of in person rehearsals and that was it. Not to mention I had little time to really focus on the play and the writing itself because I was so caught up in the producing aspect of everything like marketing and shit. However, I was still getting notes from the universe that this play is on the right track. It’s doing something. The Frida Kahlo theatre audience is predominantly elder Los Angeles Latinx folks with a sprinkle of some younger heads, and they were both laughing at the play. There was a nice balance between old chicano history and lore and that of post 9/11 politics of the surveillance state and chicano pop culture.
Thankfully, the Artistic Director of the Frida Kahlo theatre recorded the reading, but he handed me a dvd copy of it! Who has a dvd player anymore? Luckily, a few months after the reading I received a writing residency near Lake Arrowhead called Yefe Nof in June of 2023, and their was a dvd player in the house! So I popped that bitch in and started watching film like a high school football coach. This process was painful as well. There I went, line by line again, stoping and pausing the video, asking the page what is this line doing for the character, for the comedy, for the plot, for the theme? Again I thought this play was air tight and ready to go, but rewatching the performance, and remembering what it felt like to be inside the theatre with the audience, I reluctantly realized there is still a lot of “air” that is slowing down the play. I cut chunks out of the first act, reworked the ending, and tried to keep the dialogue and action moving 100 mph.
After I came back from my solitude in the mountains, I submitted this play to as many opportunities as I could. Ironically, the opportunities were all to have another staged reading of the play, but the only place that was interested in the script was Playwright’s Arena, and thus concluded my fifth and hopefully last staged reading of “You don’t even speak Spanish!”
I still need to go over the recording of the staged reading and make more edits and revisions.
I still need to figure out how to behave during these things. Like, I struggle for real between wanting to take copious amounts of notes about every laugh, cough, or shift in a seat, versus just enjoying the moment and being present and downloading the experience into my memory.
Lastly, I still know that this is not my first or last stage reading.
Thank you all again for taking the time to read this long ass post. This journey has been crazy, and when I lay it all out like this, it truly amazes me how I didn’t give up on this play, and how long this process has taken.
I can’t wait to share with you some very exciting about “You don’t even speak Spanish!” in my next post.
Wishing you all the best, and if you would like to check out the recording of the staged reading you can do so here:
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