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San Diego Rep’s Latinx New Play Festival Returns

 August 27, 2019 at 10:40 AM PDT

Speaker 1: 00:00 From a surreal shopping channel sale to a soul searching ice agent from comedy to drama. The San Diego Rep once again presents a new series of works by Latin x playwrights. The festival returns this weekend for a third year. It's a chance for up and coming Latin x artists to feature their work in this annual festival of staged readings. Joining me is festival producer Maria Patrice Amun who was a professor of Latin x theater studies and Patrice, welcome to the program. Hi Marine. Thank you for having us and play right Eliana pipes whose work dream house will be presented at the festival. Eliana, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. But Theresa, you've said these plays represent some of the most exciting scripts being written in the u s today, right? Speaker 2: 00:45 Why is that? They represent some of the most exciting scripts being presented because they are speaking to the truth of humanity in a way that is grounded and authentic, but also very approachable and accessible. They are tools and are challenged to make our communities closer together, to bring us together through stories to bridge understanding and connect people. Now there are four new plays and they were chosen out of 93 submissions. What were some of the specific qualities that you were looking for in a play to feature it in this festival? Yes, there were over 90 submissions and it took a long time to read all of them. Um, but we have a wonderful team of readers. We were looking for plays that were dynamic, um, plays that were challenging plays that really had characters that you fell in love with that you wanted to see more about. Readings are interesting because it's not a fully staged production. Our actors will be standing at music stands and reading from the scripts on the page. So for a very successful reading, you have to have a story that pops, a story that really pulls the reader in. And Eliana, can you Speaker 1: 01:59 give us an idea since you got one of the selected readings is going to take place at the festival? What your play dream houses? Speaker 2: 02:07 Sure. A dream house fellows, two Latinex sisters who are selling their family home in a gentrifying neighborhood and they choose to do it. And HGTV style reality TV show. And the show takes a huge left turn. One sister really gets plunged into the family's past. The other becomes fixated with the family's future. And the is asking questions about how culture can be bought and sold and what the cost of upward mobility is in America. And what was the inspiration for the play? The inspiration for the play was really two fold. One was sort of grappling with my own gentrification story. The neighborhood that I grew up in changed a lot as I grew up in my family left when I was about 13 and on one hand I lost my hometown. But on the other hand that move changed my family's financial future for the better. Speaker 2: 02:53 And so sort of grappling with the complication of that. And the other motivation was that as I've sort of moved into the professional of playwriting, there's a market around plays by diverse playwrights and in the creative arts experience is a commodity. And I felt like I was being asked to sell my culture for money and I wanted to. And so this play has really been a space to sort of grapple with what that meant for me. That's fascinating. Retreats. Tell us about some of the other plays that are going to be presented at the festival. So we have a broad range of plays. We've got a comedy in Alexis shares, laughs in Spanish about a young woman who owns an art gallery in Miami during art basil and all the paintings go missing. We have a denomic heart wrenching story in David Davila's, Aztec pirates and the insignificance of life of Mars. Speaker 2: 03:41 It really investigates what it means to be a Latin x person within the border patrol and to be facing the challenge of daily immigration dealings with people who look very much like you and in Jordan Ramirez pockets to saints and stars. We have a really endearing story about two best friends, two girls who have been best friends since they were small children and now have grown up and find themselves as that at a crossroads. One is an astronaut preparing for a major mission and the other is the wife of a pastor who has to decide what her family is going to look like in the future and they find themselves diverging while they still really want to connect with each other. Eliana, what has being in this festival done for you as a playwright? Does it help you develop as a playwright, as your play goes through all the iterations and speaking about it and working with it? Speaker 2: 04:38 Absolutely. I mean, first of all, getting to be flown across the country to have a reading is a gift for a playwright at any stage. And so the fact that San Diego Rep is dedicating these resources to underrepresented playwrights is incredible. And being able to work with this play with a new set of collaborators has been fascinating. You really learn new things about the play every day. And specifically in this process we have a Dramaturg, which is a huge gift. I've been so excited. Um, and getting to see what a new set of actors bring to the piece changes it every day. Even after our first rehearsal yesterday, we went back and we have some new script changes for today. There's always something new to think about in addition to the four stage greetings that you're going to be having. A, you're going to ha be presenting an older play. Speaker 2: 05:22 The festivals main showcase production is 57 Chevy. What does that story about? Patrice 57 Chevy has a really funniest story. Um, it's about a young man played by Rick Salinas from culture clash and he is growing up in the La Valley and his family moves from a very predominantly Latino community to a suburban, um, wider community and he finds himself sort of in a new world, in a new cultural exposure. Um, it investigates some of the cultural moments from the 1960s as well as the resonances that play through to today. This was the third year of the Latin next playwrights festival. Patrice, how have you seen this festival grow? Oh, it has grown exponentially in just three short years. We started in our first year sorta scrappy, hoping to get this thing up off the ground. I'm in the second year. We grew to I think over a hundred place submissions and that while this year we are down to 90. Speaker 2: 06:28 That's nothing to sneeze at. It's still a lot of plays. And this year is the first year that we actually get to bring in artists from across the country, which has long been a goal for us. Having the playwrights in the space with us really allows us to investigate the work to develop and grow the pieces. Have any of the previous festival readings gone on to have full productions? Oh yes. Um, so last year we featured Herbert sequences better embrace good wives and it's actually going up in our rep season. It'll be opening in October, the very next show in our season. That's exciting. But third annual San Diego Rep Latin Nick's new play festival opens Friday and runs through September 1st at the San Diego Reps lyceum space theater. I've been speaking with festival producer Maria, Patrice Amun and playwright Elliana pipes. And thank you both so much. Thank you for having us.

The third annual Latinx New Play Festival opens Friday and runs through Sunday at the San Diego Repertory Theatre's Lyceum Space.
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