Strictly Playwriting #5

Cry Now, Laugh Later

This past Sunday I had a reading of a play that I haven’t heard in 3 years. And this particular draft of this piece, I actually have never heard it out loud before.

I am beyond grateful for Miguel Angel Lopez for not only believing in me and this play, but also for orchestrating this google meets virtual reading. I am also beyond grateful for Melissa Lopez, Alex Murillo, and Matias Ponce for offering their time, energy and talents that Sunday morning to read my play.

I’m not going to lie, this play sucks. Not like a shitty commission that’s contractually obligated to be presented sucks, but like the shit it deals with sucks: Intergenerational Trauma, Domestic Abuse, Co-dependency, Alcoholism, Drug Use, and Homelessness. Not to mention the playwright (me) is a character in this play, so this shit is super personal and super vulnerable.

I struggled with how to tell this story. On the one hand, I have this conviction to tell the most honest, courageous, and dopest stories possible, but on the other hand I have a responsibility to tell these stories responsibly and to not stereotype or caricature my characters.

This play started with a scene. A pretty fucked up scene:

Lights up on a hospice bed. Thalia (60s) is crocheting a white blanket while Mel (60s) is dying of cirrhosis of the liver.

I first wrote this scene back in 2016ish. I was an undergrad at UCR taking a playwriting class, and after visiting my grandparents, I couldn’t stop thinking about my step-grandpa dying from cirrhosis of the liver while my grandma stood by his enlarged side.

Is this love?

Then I couldn’t stop thinking about my childhood and how influential they were to my up bringing and sense of identity. From the oldies they listened too, to my grandpa teaching me how to ride a bike at Lincoln Park and to my grandma teaching me how to dance in the living room. To all the cigarettes they smoked and the beer they drank, I was tripping out on their relationship and what it means.

I wrote this scene that had a Greek bent/ending, and I knew it was powerful. I asked some UCR classmates to read this scene for me, and I’ll never forget Gloria Ines’s cold reading the ending monologue and it bringing her to tears. I was like holy shit, I didn’t know my words could be that powerful. I then submitted this play to El Teatro Campesino’s Palabra Showcase Vol. 4. in 2019, and again I witnessed a fellow artist coming to tears. Again, I was validated that I have something powerful here.

I then moved on to Grad school and knew I wanted to expand this piece and turn it into a full length play. I thought I was going to do this reverse narrative technique, where the story starts with this hospice scene and we go backwards until Thalia and Mel first met, like Pinter’s Betrayal. But that didn’t go as planned. One, that shit was hard to go backwards, secondly, I found my self stereotyping my characters and realizing I really didn’t know who my grandparents were. Then I started questioning myself and what gives me the right to even tell my version of their story.

I was all fucked up my first year of grad school, and got into Luigi Pirandello's “Six characters in search of an author”, and thought I was all bad, just kidding, but I did get inspired and now had a container and device to try and tell this story as best as I could.

The fact of the matter was, that I didn’t know how to tell the story, and thus, that became the story I needed to tell. ( I know, meta, bear with me)

So then I presented this piece at UCR’s Culver Center for the Arts in collaboration with AKA productions. Dr. Ricardo Rocha directed the piece and I read for Mel’s character. Boy was that shit tough. Dr. Rocha, did a hell of a job to bring this difficult script to life, but I have these experimental sections where it’s verbatim from Wikipedia, and that shit was boring as fuck. It felt like a stand up comedian bombing up there. I just wanted the staged reading to be over as quickly as possible. I put this piece back in a folder, and didn’t look at it for while.

I attempted to rewrite the piece a couple of times, but they were mostly false starts. It wasn’t until the fall of 2023 that I took a serious stab at rewriting this piece to get it ready for a few submission/competition opportunities. Since then it became a semifinalist for the Bay Area Theatre Festival in 2025, and is currently a 2026 semifinalist for the O'Neill Playwriting Conference.

The digital reading that took place last Sunday gave me the encouragement and inspiration to keep going. To take another stab at making this the most honest, courageous, and dopest play it can be.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post and for your continued support. Wishing you nothing but the best,

Key takeaways and questions I jotted down from the reading:

• What does it mean to be a Chicano/a/x?

• These characters all have alter egos

  • Does the playwright need to have an ego death?

    • What does that mean, and what would that look like on stage?

• The playwright is a narrative tool, so use this tool effectively to clarify moments.

• The Wikipedia/academic moments of the play need to be carefully looked at and considered.

  • It pulls the audience out of the “plot” and needs to be more intentional.

  • There is the Ryan/Rhino motif don’t lose sight of it or forget about it.

• There is a lot of domestic violence, is all of it necessary?

• Pacing is going to be hard.

• This was a random note/idea:

  • “take a moment to take out your phone and google the word cholo and share what you see”

• There is the glamorization or romanticization of cholo culture contrasted with the reality of cholo culture and gang violence.

• The play forces the audience to be an active participant.

• The memory moment of this play is at the heart of what I was trying to get at.

• What’s up with the ending.