Las Lunaticás borrow from the tradition of LUNADAS: nightly bohemias sharing poetry, song, and story under the moon by staging readings of new work (plays) by Latina voices from across the nation.
Check back often for lineup changes, and event announcements! This is the third year of our LUNADAS New Works Reading Series.
For questions: readingseries@teatroluna.org
Lunadas 2012: Blog Interview MTA
Blog Interview with Playwright and Poet Marisela Treviño Orta
Click the link above (her name) to be linked to her blog where she writes about her writing process. Interested in producing her play? Send her an email through her blog!
When and how did you become interested in the theater?
I’m an accidental playwright. I came out to San Francisco to get my MFA in Writing, but my sole focus was poetry. So I’m one of those playwrights who started out as a poet.
I didn’t really have very much theatre exposure growing up beyond reading Shakespeare and a few other plays in English class or seeing classmates in something like Arsenic and Old Lace. It’s funny. As a child I wanted to be a novelist. As I grew older I focused on poetry, but it never dawned on me to consider theatre or playwriting. Perhaps that was because all the plays I had encountered were not by contemporary playwrights.
But back to how I actually became a playwright. I got my MFA at The University of San Francisco which is a Jesuit institution and really big on social justice. I got an on-campus job as a graduate assistant in the Office of Service Learning and my first assignment was to produce a short film highlighting how USF professors were incorporating service learning into their courses. One of the professors we interviewed was a theatre professor who had established a theatre company comprised of Latino immigrants in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Now I’m a very image driven writer and when I saw the members of El Teatro Jornalero! doing movement exercises I immediately wanted to just sit, watch them and write poetry. I had been searching for inspiration for my poetry and knew that my muse needed this kind of stimulation.
I ended up joining and became their Resident Poet, but I was more like a Girl Friday. I took photos, wrote poems, developed their playbills, recorded performances, bought props and even once ran a rehearsal.
After a year with ETJ! and watching them collectively develop their script I got curious about playwriting. I had no idea where to start, but I was drawn to the possibility of exploring themes in theatre that I had avoided in my poetry. You see ETJ! was a social justice theatre company and politics was something I purposely avoided in my poetry because I hadn’t figured out how to write about social justice issues without sounding like I was on a soapbox or just hitting my reader over the head.
But theatre nurtures a human connection between audience and actors, something which is so necessary for establishing empathy. And for me political theatre is all about creating empathy.
Long story short, I audited a playwriting class at USF taught by visiting playwright Christine Evans and wrote my first play Braided Sorrow. It was that play that opened a lot of doors for me and I was just lucky. Just the right amount of success and encouragement and by 2006 I was focusing mainly on playwriting.
What was your inspiration for Woman on Fire?
I call Woman on Fire my Antigone play even though it’s not really an adaptation of Antigone, but the classic play is very much the jumping off point for my play. I read Antigone as an undergrad in a philosophy course and I’ve always remembered how my professor described the conflict in the play: a higher law vs. the law of man.
ETJ!’s second play focused on deaths along the border and I had the opportunity to look at some of the research they were gathering—statistics about how after 9/11 border deaths—that is the number of immigrants who died while attempting to cross the border—had increased due to the clamp down on the border. I remember this one photo of a man’s passport. His coyote had led him into an ambush where he was robbed, beaten and left for dead. In the pages of his passport he wrote his good-byes to his family before he died out in the desert.
Around this time I had just re-read Antigone and that central idea of a higher law vs. the law of man seemed very à propos to the immigration debate. I decided I wanted to try and write Antigone along the US/Mexico border. But as I began writing it, Woman on Fire became a more of a reimaging of Antigone. For example, the main character Juanita is an unwilling heroine unlike Antigone who is very ready to go against the King’s edict.
And I should also mention that originally Woman on Fire was a one act play. In fact it’s the product of a bake-off held by Austin Script Works and Teatro Vivo for their Latino Playwrights Initiative (LPI). After participating in the LPI festival, I later received a commission to expand it to a full length which is the play that Lunadas is presenting.
Any words of wisdom for our readers?
The world is rarely black and white. I believe we live somewhere in the grey, which usually means there are no easy answers to the issues our society struggles with. But I think struggling with social justice issues as a writer or as an audience member gives us a better understanding of the nuances and complexities of the human condition.
I mentioned earlier that theatre has the ability to connect the audience to the actors on stage, to the story of the characters and to nurture empathy. Empathy is a very important trait in my book and a very powerful tool for a playwright exploring a social justice issue. In my opinion, good social justice theatre is not about the issue you want to write about, it’s about the characters and their story. If your audience can identify with and/or care about your characters, then they’ll care about the unjust situation those characters are forced to grapple with.
Marisela Orta’s: Woman On Fire
FREE RSVP’S will be taken online, but feel free to show up at the door too!
ABOUT MARISELA ORTA:
Marisela Treviño Orta received an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco.
Her plays have been read at the 2005 Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF), 2006
[Inside] the Ford Summer Reading Series, 2007 Primer Pasos: Un Festival De Latino
Plays, 2007 BAPF, Marin Theatre’s 2007 Nu Werkz, and 2008 In The Rough. Her first
play, Braided Sorrow, won the 2006 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize in Drama, received its
world premiere in 2008 at Su Teatro in Denver, CO. and won the 2009 Pen Center USA
Literary Award in Drama. Marisela is a former member of Playground’s writers pool and
recently concluded a three year residency at the Playwrights Foundation in San
Francisco, CA. Currently she is participating in AlterTheater’s inaugural AlterLab.
Stay tuned for our blog interview with the talented Marisela!
xox,
The Ladies of Luna
See you at the Reading!
