I’ve been in this playwriting game for ten plus years now, but I still feel like I’m all over the place.

So here are my 10 steps to trying to get organized:

1. Avoid getting your shit together.1 2

   1. *This might take 20-30 years depending

2. Admit you are not organized.3

   1. *This might come as an epiphany or happen slowly over the course of multiple failures.

3. Do nothing.4

4. Do something small.5

5. Do another small thing.6

6. Don’t beat yourself up if you forget or can’t or don’t have the desire to do that second small thing. 7

7. Keep doing small things, and celebrate them. Eventually those small things are going to add up.8

8. Set some goals and plans to accomplish what you want to accomplish and break that down into little things and follow through for yourself and your dream.9

9. Take a break.10

10. Look back, reassess, and try to be more organized than the day before. 11

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5

I’ve tried to organize my plays in binders, in boxes by project, in different folders on different devices and accounts, but nothing is seeming to work really well yet. But more recently starting this series and putting down my playwriting thoughts, plans, and feelings in this journal has helped me to better compartmentalize my playwriting life with my personal and professional life. (I know it all the same and interconnected)

So first, it’s been this journal and series for me that forces me to think about being a playwright, then it’s having this Substack and the separate google account that I have associated with it, and finally it was realizing that this separate google account has a calendar connected to it and I have been adding/documenting playwriting or theatre related things I have done or will like to do in the future. This small realization has been pretty cool, and it makes me want to be consistent. And fell up my calendar with small and big wins.

I never been a gate keeper before.1 It’s kinda weird and stressful, but I kinda enjoyed it too.

It’s weird because after submitting countless scripts to festivals and workshop opportunities, I am now on the other side of the page. I could only imagine the mental gymnastics these playwrights had to go through to submit something to somewhere hoping for the best, and assuming the worst.

It was a little stressful because I know the time, energy, and courage it takes to submit a script that you love and want to see grow. So I wanted to give every playwright and their script the time and energy and careful read that they deserve from me. (Plus, I talk a lot of shit (in my head) and can imagine one of the rejected playwrights probably talking shit (in there head too):

Yet at the same time, I enjoyed it as well. I know when something is dope, and done well, even if it is not my style or taste. I know the state of the theatre and how disconnected it is to reality. I believe in this craft, and in this art form, and felt it was my civic duty to select a play that can move the craft and art form in the right direction to evolve with the times and connect audiences.

This past June, I had the honor of being on a panel to select Theatre Bay Area’s 2026 Rella Lossy Awardee.

I read slow. I knew that when I accepted to be on the panel in February of 2026 yet still I procrastinated to read all 10 scripts by June 4th.

With one day left to go before the panel was set to meet, discuss, and decide which script deserves the award, I had only read 3 plays. Reading the first script took me the longest. I just wasn’t into it. I caught myself rolling my eyes at the clichés, the cringy jokes, and the predictable structure. The second play I read started off strong and had a unique voice with something interesting to say, but then that shit went off the rails real quick, and I was all for it for a moment, but then it became clear the playwright lost control of the play. The third script was hard to get into, the world building needed to be refined because it made the audience/reader do a lot of heavy lifting to understand the jargon and what exactly was going on, but after twelve pages in, the story really started to take off and I actually enjoyed reading the script and appreciated the craft.

Then with less than 24 hours to go, I devised a method to read more efficiently. First, I did a quick scan of the scripts and weeded out the ones that were formatted incorrectly, the ones with no page numbers, the ones with inconsistent character names or misspellings, and the ones that felt unoriginal or like ChatGPT wrote the damn thing. I put those three scripts off to the side and IF I had time, I would come back to them.

For the remaining three scripts, I started on page 1 for all three and continued to read all three of them simultaneously for the first 10 pages. From these three scripts, one script in particular forced me to ignore the other two scripts. This play captivated me through its unique use of dialogue, and through the command of it’s characters and structure. It was clear that the playwright knew their craft and should still be in the running for this award. I finished the play and then went back to finish the other two scripts.

It was easy to tell if the playwright, and the theatre that they were associated with, knew what they were doing or if they were just winging it. I looked for red flags like incorrect formatting, simple grammatical errors, and unoriginal dialogue to tell me which script was worth my time or not. It tripped me out because if you really cared about the characters and the story, then you should also really care about polishing your script.

After a while of reading scripts till around 2am, I realized I was getting tired and grouchy and I didn’t have time or patience for bullshit. I caught myself looking for reasons to say no. Like the one script that didn’t even have page numbers. I found myself getting mad at these types of playwrights because I wanted them to succeed, yet based off their script, it looked like they weren’t really trying, like they didn’t really care.

The panel was cool and quick. On June 4th I blocked off three hours to be in a zoom room with , Victor Cervantez Jr., and Lisa Mallette all facilitated by talking theater. It reminded me of being back in my MFA program discussing scripts and shit. Then it made me wonder if this is what Artistic departments are like when building out a new season; having to defend a script, explaining the artistic merit, combating that against the “market” and if the play can make money. I was like, I can do that.

After two rounds of voting for which play, playwright, and theater should receive the award, we all unanimously landed on play #6, and I was happy for the playwright and proud that I contributed to the Bay Area Theatre community to support new plays!

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But then… nothing happened.

I don’t know what I was expecting to happen, but June came and went, and July is nearly over now.

I catch myself in this pattern of thinking that my “big break” is right around the corner, just over the horizon, that all I got to do is reach my hand out and feel the palpability of the moment and take advantage of it before it slips through my fingers. But life gets in the way, days become weeks, unread message begin to pile up, and before I know it, that moment I was suppose to capitalize on, that dream I was chasing starts to dissipate.

Am I my own gatekeeper?

I thought on the bus, as I stared out the window looking at the dark glare of city streets, tired and stressed, coming back from my job, seeing in the reflection of the window, other folks on the bus who are also tired and stressed coming back from their jobs.

As I get older, and as this experiment is set to come to and end by October of 2030, its hard for me to reconcile this dream I have of being a playwright with my reality of being a playwright.

My reality consists putting in an 8 hour shift, doing the household shit: dishes, sweeping, groceries, laundry, the night time and morning routines, the emotional and mental labor that goes into raising a family, then trying to take care of my own emotional, mental, and physical well being, not to mention trying to find time to “be” a playwright: sneaking in an hour to write, to read, to think, shit to actually watch a play would be nice once in a while. Then there is the human logistics of being a playwright like taking care of the artistic relationships I already have: being a good friend, responding back to folks who have reached out to me, supporting and congratulating other folks’ wins. And at the same time, I need reach out to new folks to form and foster new artistic relationships, but all this shit is exhausting and on one hand I’m starting to feel burnt out.

But on the other hand, I'm pissed that this is the plight of the working playwright in the American theatre in the 21st century. This anger gives me the fuel to make me want to go on a run to make a concerted effort, to not stop or take no for an answer until my plays get produced. To say fuck it, fuck this gate.

I'll go around the gatekeepers, I’ll infiltrate them, but I wont become one of them, I’ll break the gate down if I have to.

Or perhaps this post, and all of you who have read, supported, and rooted for me thus far, is the key that will help me unlock the gates that live in my mind, heart, and soul as I continue on this experiment of being a playwright.

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Thank you all again for your time, energy, and attention. Wishing you all the best, and nothing but success.

Quick wins/updates:

• Being asked to be on this panel was humbling and dope.

• Two of my Tia’s and cousins challenged me to write a play inspired by A Raisin in the Sun . (I’m taking this as a commission in my mind)

  • I read the play for the first time.

• is trying to get a reading of Cry Now, Laugh Later going in the near future.

• I got offered to teach Intro to Theatre Class for ELAC’s duel enrollment program for a high school.

  • I accepted the position

• I attended a workshop reading of Tacos La Brooklyn when it was presented at CTG.

  • That shit was cool just to be in the room and environment with community folks like that. The play had cool moments too and was really wrestling with similar themes of identity and Los Angeles, that I usually wrestle with.

• Lastly, and most recently, I attended Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble’s SIN BARRERAS free online playwriting forum facilitated by !

  • It was nice to be in the space with Melanie again, to be in community with other writers, and to reclaim some time for myself and my writing.

I found peace and would zen out when I would have to do standards in school. Back then, it was a form of punishment, but now I find myself resorting to the torture from time to time when I’m stuck. The act of writing just to write usually does the trick to unstuck me.

I also find myself writing standards when I need to remind myself of something, in this case, I was compelled to crack open my playwriting journal on my bus ride home to remind myself: I am a playwright.

I wrote this shit over and over and over and over again because I didn’t know what else to write. I wrote this shit over and over and over again because I like the way it sounds, I like the way it looks, I like the way my wrist begins to ache, and the feeling of my fingers starting to cramp. I like the challenge to fill up the whole page with this phrase, I like feeling accomplished like I did something that day, I like thinking someone will one day find and read this and think I’m crazy, I like thinking no one will find or read this and no one will know I’m crazy but me. (and now you, but don’t tell nobody.)

I know this act might seem silly, my kids would call it cringe, but its how I cope with this crazy ass theatre world constantly reminding me I ain’t shit. This act of writing “I am a playwright” over and over and over again, also reminds me of the act of graffiti.

Like graffiti artists, I’m just trying to say I exist. To most people, being a playwright means your plays get produced or published, but when that shit ain’t happening, I got to constantly remind myself of who the fuck I am. So I write.

As I am writing this post, number eight in this series, I realized a theme is starting to emerge in this playwriting experiment of mine.

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It appears I’m constantly battling this inner monologue.

Am I a playwright, or am I not a playwright, that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

rejection after rejection after rejection for little to no money,

Or to take a good paying corporate job,

And walk away from the theatre for good. To stop writing—to stop trying,

No more; and by not trying to say we end

The constant ear-ache of the thousands of voices in our heads

That playwrights are heir to: Tis a bitch

Devoutly to be wished. To not write, to not try;

To not hear those voices, those stories that need to be told—

Ay, there’s the rub:

For in that silence and solitude within a cubical

What voices and stories may come,

When we have stopped submitting to festivals and competitions,

Must we cease to exist— the thought

That our words will never be spoken by others

For what playwright actually speaks their mind aloud

Th’ director’s wrong, the actor’s sarcastic remarks,

The pangs of a dramaturge love’s, the stage manager’s delay,

The insolence of artistic departments, and the generic emails

That literary assistants send out in mass,

When they themselves are dying to be a playwright? Who,

in their right mind would work on a play for years,

But that the dread of not working on a play,

In the corporate world, under florescent lights from nine to five

Sitting in traffic day after day after day, puzzles the will,

And makes us repress our contemptment for regional theatres

Rather than producing our own work or others we know not of?

Thus hope doth make cowards of us all,

And thus the thought that one day my play will get produced,

And audiences, and critics alike, will feel something

Myself included, I too want to feel something,

With this regard keeps me writing for now

And keep the name of playwright. 1

As always thank you for reading, wishing you nothing but the best, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

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So I’m fucking up this month when it comes to playwriting shit. Last post felt like I was going to get my playwriting life together, but I don’t know what happen.

My first fuck up was that I made an unrealistic deadline for myself to finish a draft of a short film. The deadline was set for April 1st, but I guess the joke was on me. Then I told myself April 15th would be my next deadline for that first draft, but Tax day came and went, and so did my integrity.

Then I thought about dropping a post about some exciting playwriting updates, or a post about my analysis and insights from reading Death of a Salesman, or a post about watching Kim’s Convenience at the Ahmanson, or finally coming around to draft, record, and post those mini lecture series on “Intro to Theatre” that I was so excited for, but none of that ever happened.

April kept compounding. Life kept life-ing, and I kept wanting to write something. I guess that “Year of the Fire Horse” I kept seeing on my Instagram feed back in February really came to bite me in the ass huh?

Anyway, not only have I been dealing with my own personal family matters this month, but work at Center Theatre Group really rapt up with the new 26/27 season announcement that dropped on March 30th. Endless menial tasks began to flood my work inbox, and I began drowning in subscription questions, concerns, and requests. I even started dream about those damn subscriptions. But the mantra that has kept me afloat during this renewal period has been “Stay grounded, Stay solid, Stay focused”. And for the most part, it’s been holding me down.

Then, this past Saturday, while I was on my lunch break, I went on a search for a plate and fork to eat my left over arepa. My department is housed in a back bungalow behind the actual CTG administrative building, and there are usually extra utensils in one of the rehearsal rooms for actors to use. Rehearsal Room A is currently occupied by the cast and team of Primary Trust, so I headed for Rehearsal Room C to get what I needed. As I rounded the corner of the hallway, I noticed a paper taped to the doors. Walking closer to the room, I could hear actor’s voices. Then on that paper taped to the door, I could see times, titles, and names evenly spaced out in Times New Roman font. One of those names I recognized was a Playwright’s name that’s been all over the festivals and workshops in southern California, then I realized what was happening in Rehearsal Room C. This was the closed reading session of new plays the artistic team put together for CTG’s writers workshop.

There was a slim space where the doors closed. I could kinda see through it and make out bodies. I had the urge to put my ear next to the door to listen in, but I thought better of it and slowly walked away. I walked back to my departments bungalow and warmed up my food in the plastic container I brought it in. I went to go eat lunch at my normal spot: the back of the campus that overlooks the traffic flowing up and down the 101. As I ate my warmish arepa with my hands, and as I stared out at the river of concrete and cars, I wondered what those playwrights were doing that I’m not. I wondered what I have to do to be on the other side of those doors of Rehearsal Room C.

Then I realized, I have access to Rehearsal Room C most days. There’s nothing special about that room, that’s just where I get my utensils. I finished my arepa and went back to work.

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With two months down in 2026 already, and eighteen days going into March, I am well aware of the goals that I set for myself in:

I haven’t really done shit to make them happen yet.

The other day I noticed that Death of a Salesman is playing at A Noise Within theatre and I would love to check it out, but the one day I’m available to see the show, the tickets start at $70 for the cheapest seat. Shiiiittt, that made me remember real quick that I have this play on my bookshelf. It also made me remember one my goals this year was to read a play once a month, and so far I’ve been 0 for 2.

So I started writing this post on 3.11.26 listening to 311. That night I got my ass up and grabbed the play off my bookshelf. I’m not to sure where and when I got this copy, but I know that I haven’t visited this play since high school. I literally and figuratively dusted the play off and tried to get into it that night. I usually start by reading the introduction, but this time I skipped it and went right into the long ass stage directions. That shit was a page and a half, and it put me to sleep. I get it, it is the Penguin Classics version and the publisher needs to paint the scene for the reader, but god damn.

Anyway, I was determined to finish the play as quickly as possible, and I know I’m a slow reader, so I took it with me in my backpack and tried to read it on the bus on my way to work, but I barley made a dent. I kept on stopping and writing my thoughts, questions, and observations in the margins. I was like holy shit, why did I like this play so much? I also felt hyper focused on the playwriting and trying to understand Arthur Miller’s structure and the choices he made to produce the emotions and actions he was after using dialogue. Lastly I also had this wider scope and knowledge of theatre and kept on wondering how the hell was A Noise Within going to present/produce this play.

After about a week I finished the play and that shit was dope. I really enjoyed reading it and analyzing it and trying to reverse engineer the whole thing. :) Plus, I was proud that I not only got back on track and accomplished the goal that I set out for myself, but I was also proud that I prioritized my playwriting for myself. I wasn’t stuck on Instagram or Youtube, or consumed by the anxiety of the world and my current situation.

Thank you all again for continuing to support me and this experiment and for taking the time to read this check in. I plan to share my thoughts and learnings on Death of a Salesman hopefully in a podcast version or something, and I am still working on recording the Intro to Theatre class lecture series.

Wishing you nothing but the best, and all the success.

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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,

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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.

It ain’t 2009 no more.

I came across this picture when I became an adjunct professor for the Theatre Arts Department at East Los Angeles College, and I was like holy shit who is this guy. Look how lost my eyes are. This shit looks like a damn mug shot rather than a community college ID photo. On one hand, this person is unrecognizable to me. I feel like I’ve grown and changed so much since then, but on the other hand… I still feel like I got that lost look in my eyes sometimes, (but now with two styes).

Back then, I was going through the motions of being a first generation college student. I was taking remedial classes, so I could take general classes. I didn’t know what a major was or where I was going to transfer too, or even how. I thought I was going to be a revolutionary, then a poet, and finally an English Teacher.

Part of the requirement to transfer was to take an art class. I was horrible at drawing, but I remembered I enjoyed listening to Death of a Salesman in high school, so I took an intro to theatre class, and for whatever reason I didn’t feel so lost anymore. At the time, ELAC was under construction, but the theatre arts building was brand new, and I just liked smelling that new building smell. Learning all the different areas of the theatre really felt like there is something here for everyone. Acting warm ups reminded me of P.E. or baseball warm ups; if you were handy and knew how to use tools you could help build sets and if you weren’t afraid of heights you could adjust lights; if you were organized and liked to tell people what to do, you could be a stage manager. Shit was cool. For me, Playwriting came natural, but I think the great late Edward Albee said in order to be a great playwright, you need to know everything there is to know about the theatre. He also said, every playwright should know how to say “Fuck ‘em” (or something like that, I can’t find the Youtube clip anymore where he said something to that effect). Anyway, trying to know everything about the theatre became my obsession. I wanted to know about Q-lab and rigging and turntables and front of house operations. I then wanted to learn about the administrative side of theatre too, and the economics of it all, and who the audience is that comes to see this shit. I wanted to learn it all.

So when I got the opportunity to teach Intro To Theatre at ELAC the past two semesters, it was super gratifying. (Not to mention it is was always a goal of mine to be a professor at ELAC one day. Now my new goal is to get one of my plays produced there one day.) But don't get me wrong, the first year of teaching was tough because I wanted to teach the students everything I knew and more. I also didn’t really know what I was doing. My “lectures” sucked ass, and I was often scrambling the night before to create a lesson plan. When I tried to lecture about theatre stages, or lighting, often times I would be staring out to blank faces.

But the second time I taught the course I found my stride/style. My syllabus and lesson plans were already built. I felt more confident and comfortable teaching the material. My lectures still sucked a little bit because I would rush through them, but I realized it might be more important for the students to get a practical and tactile understanding of the material by participating in exercises/activities.

Teaching intro to theatre for the Fall of 2025 made me realize just how much joy this shit brought me. As I would unlock the door to the classroom, I would take a deep breath before I entered and just appreciate the quietness. As I exhaled and began setting up, I would quickly remind myself that I have this great opportunity to teach something that I love. In the Fall of 2025 that classroom became my refuge, my solace, my happy place in a time when I needed it the most.

Unfortunately, this spring I didn't get a class to teach at ELAC. However, I found myself still craving the joy that teaching brings me, so then I thought of this million dollar idea:

What if I teach an Intro To Theatre course through this Substack; an experiment inside of an experiment if you will.

The plan is to do 10 to 15 minute mini lectures on the following areas:

Part 1

1. Intro to Intro to Theatre (or a reintroduction)

2. The Audience

3. The Play and the Playwright

4. Acting

5. The Director and the Producer

6. Theatre Spaces and Scenery

7. Costumes

8. Lighting and Sound

Part 2

9. Early Theatre: Greek, Roman, Medeival

10. Early Theatre: Asian

11. Renaissance Theatre

12. Restoration through Romanticism theatre

13. Modern Theatre

14. Theatre Today

15. Final Project

The idea is to share my knowledge, love, and experience in these areas with y’all through my own unique stylized lectures and exercises.

The hope is to practice preparing and giving lectures while also creating an archive of learning resources/materials. To establish a baseline with my readership so you all have a better idea of where I am coming from when I write about theatre, my plays, or my playwriting process. I also would love your feedback on my lectures and to create a dialogue around these areas in an informative and entertaining way.

So what do you say?

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I cleared two inboxes this last week. Does that count as strictly playwriting business? I’ve been avoiding those inboxes for like a year, and anxiously watched as they numbers kept increasing: 300, 667, 948, 1334…

How do you stay organized and prioritize your writing? I guess there is no right or wrong way, as long as the writing gets done. I don’t think there is correlation between bloated inboxes and writers block, but there was something oddly satisfying removing all this junk into the trash. Not to mention the satisfaction of clearing enough space so that I don’t have to purchase extra space from goggle. With those inboxes cleared, I felt a digital weight lift off my digital shoulders.

Last week, I went back and looked over my goals in my first strictly playwriting post and realized those goals are vague as fuck.

1. Read more plays

2. Write more plays

3. Watch more plays

4. Write about the plays I watched

5. Rewrite old plays

6. Revisit plays I never finished

So then I started to break down these goals into something more tangible. I challenged myself to read one play a month, and to attend a production once a month even if I have to pay for it. I also challenged myself to finally start rewriting scene two for “You don’t even speak Spanish!”, but with only a few days left in January, I might not get to reading a play or working on scene 2 this month.

I did however attend a production the other day, and I even paid for it too. I went to go check out Playwright Esther Banegas Gatica’s play Come Tomorrow directed by Miguel Ángel Lopez at the Frida Kahlo Theatre for their 10-minute play festival part 1. It always feels cool walking into that space, seeing familiar faces, and knowing that there is a place that is still accessible for new work in Los Angeles.

After every show I ask myself what did I learn as a playwright from that production. What I walked away with after watching those ten 10-minute plays, was how important it is to have fun and to be yourself. Esther’s voice and perspective is distinct and I loved how the title of the play, very cleverly and subtly worked on me. A poetic line that I loved was the phrase “creating worlds with your words” and Esther’s humor is always on point. Miguel also did a great job creating these frozen moments that allowed the play to expand into a magical realm, which I thought was very clear and effective.

I was inspired to go and write and practice the craft again, especially after not writing anything new these past couple of years. (Maybe that is another smart goal, write a 10-minute play or 10 new pages once a month.)

I also walked away reflecting on how fragile everything is right now. I don’t know if fragile is right word, but…tomorrow is not guaranteed and we as playwrights have this captivated audience for only a brief moment, (out out brief candle) and it would be a shame if that moment was wasted if it was all sound and fury signifying nothing. Sitting in the audience, I asked myself what do I want, and more importantly need to say, that no one else can say in a way that I can only say it to an audience right now.

I went back to clearing out my inboxes and preparing myself for the year ahead. Then I came across this:

Every time I get one of these, I simultaneously brace myself for the hope and the heartbreak. I get a flashback feeling of sitting in an auditorium in grade school hoping my dumbass did enough to get an award. This rejection email buried the lead in the second paragraph, but I didn’t feel like a dumbass for this one. I shrugged it off knowing that A.) I’m not a dumbass anymore, well maybe just a little bit, but I’ve come to accept it. B.) The play that I submitted Laugh Now, Cry Later has reached semifinal consideration in other places, so I know there is something there.

Rejection is a part of life, so I like to keep these types of emails in my inbox because it reminds me that I am trying. At the end of the day, in this fragile world, during these trying times, maybe trying is enough? Or maybe not?

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At the back of the bus, just in front of the rear tires, I sat looking out the window. Behind me, a younger dude and his girl sat in the last row talking loudly. They shared a bag of chips even louder. Enter this bigger younger dude, with a strange look in his eye. Before he sat across the aisle from me, I made eye contact with him and gave him one of my nods that say I see you, I acknowledge you. He ignored me. I could smell the alcohol on his breath and noticed him fidgeting.

He then got up out of nowhere, I even think while the bus was still in motion, and sat in that one seat on the bus that sits awkwardly, the one that faces the window rather than facing the same direction of all the other seats. He stares the younger dude down, the one with his girl, and asks “Where you from, homie?”

Immediately, the younger dude blurted out “oh I don’t bang”. Unsatisfied by the answer, the bigger dude got up and announced “City Terrace Gang, Homie” and went to go sit back down in his original seat across from me. I pulled out my journal and started writing this encounter down, but then I stopped to wonder why this interaction would be one of my first entries into my strictly playwriting series…

• Was because I never heard someone get hit up so close to me before?

  • Was it because I liked how the words sounded?

• Was it because I noticed the strangeness of the power dynamics at play?

• Was it because I was reminded of my play:

Nevertheless, I jotted this encounter down, and made a note to myself that I’ll also be sure to capture the beautiful and quiet moments of public transit equally.

Shortly after both dudes exited the bus at different points in the route, the bigger dude with alcohol on his breath and tattooed ink on his neck, and the younger dude with his girl and his bag of chips, I couldn’t help but replay the scenario in my head and ruminate on what I just witnessed.

First I started to think about the younger dude, and how quiet him and his girl got after that moment. I wondered if they talked about this incident as soon as they got off the bus, like what the hell was that guys problem. Or worse, I wondered if they never talked about this moment again. I wondered if she thought less of him, I wondered if he thought less of himself.

Then I started to think about that bigger dude and where he was going with that type of energy. Because when the bus stopped and he was about to exit, he made it a point to make eye contact with the bus driver through the rearview mirror to thank him and to promise him that he’ll pay him on the next ride. I found his politeness in juxtaposition to his aggressiveness… conflicting.

Then I started to wonder why the bigger dude didn’t ask me where I was from. Maybe it was because of my dress shoes, or my badge hanging around my neck. But then I wondered what my response would be if he did ask me where I was from… “I don’t bang” is not really something that’s in my vocabulary. Perhaps I would’ve answered his question with a question: “what’d you mean?”… and then my mind was off to the races with options for dialogue.

“you know what I mean, where you from homie”

“what’d you mean, what’d you mean”

“Don’t play dumb with me, homie”

I was having fun riffing on the back and forth of this imaginary scenario until the bus came to my stop. I pressed the button, and an automated voice announced “Stop requested”.

Playwriting Ponderings:

• I was tripping out on the grammar and my memory of how the bigger dude said: “where you from, homie” vs. “where are you from, homie”

• This bigger dude tripped me out, because I wondered why he felt like he needed to assert his dominance to this younger dude.

  • The younger dude didn’t look like a gangster.

  • The bigger dude didn’t do this shit to other dudes the same size as him.

  • I wondered why the bigger dude was already drunk, why was he so polite to the bus driver, and where the hell was he going?

• It was fun to riff on the infinite options of dialogue and my inclination was to take it in comedic route and see where it goes from there, but what is most interesting and challenging to me to is to turn into a play is the quiet moments between the younger dude and his girl.

Interested to know where your plays, poems, ideas, concepts or stories come from? Or how do you mine for story?

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I’ve been writing in journals now for 16 years. (If you are new here, first welcome, secondly, you can check out why and how I started writing by following the link below)

My notebook of choice is a classic black and white composition book. (Moleskin is too pretentious for me. Oh yea, this year I’m also challenging myself to not give a shit as much and to be more me, so yea, Moleskin notebooks are pretentious, or maybe I’m just cheap.)

Anyway, my good friend Miguel Angel Lopez, AKA , got me a beautiful Oregon Shakespeare Festival light brown leather notebook, that is not pretentious at all last summer when he was a FAIR Assistant Director, and I wasn’t sure what to use it for. It sat on my desk for the past five months until I decided to take it with me on a trip to Central Oregon recently.

Not wanting to soil the first few lined pages with black ink of incoherent thoughts, I scribbled on the first blank page “Strictly Playwriting” as I sat in the drivers seat of a rented van, in the parking lot of a Bi-Mart, as my three year old daughter slept in her car seat. I liked how it sounded. I liked how it looked:

This could be a journal where I keep track of my playwriting efforts or lack there of. I started to list some of my 2026 playwriting goals:

1. Read more plays

2. Write more plays

3. Watch more plays

4. Write about the plays I watched

5. Rewrite old plays

6. Revisit plays I never finished

Then I started to reflect on 2025.

• In January and February of 2025 my short play South Hope St. was doing it’s thing at the Frida Kahlo theatre.

  • I learned a lot about what it takes to have a 4 week run, and the amount of effort it takes to try and promote and sell tickets.

• In April and May of 2025 “You don’t even speak Spanish!” was being produced at Cal State San Bernardino.

  • I learned that my words and this play really resonated with a lot of folks, and that a lot of people believe in me.

• In October of 2025 shared an excerpt of “You don’t even speak Spanish!” at CTG for the BIPOC Showcase.

  • It was great to work with Jesus Reyes, Raul Vega Martinez, and Josephine Nunez, and to be an artist again.

• In December of 2025 I was notified that my play Cry Now, Laugh Later reached the Semifinalist Round of consideration for the 2026 O’Neill National Playwright Conference.

  • One of 250 out of 1650 scripts.

Looking back, 2025 wasn’t too bad for me as a playwright, but to be honest, it was one of the worst years of my life. Despite everything that I was going through, and still kinda going through, I found and find myself returning to my essences, to poetry, to who I am. Hence this “Strictly Playwriting” Journal was born. It is a recommitment to my writing and to myself.

Thank you for reading, and happy New Year!

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My play came and went, like I knew it would, and I was afraid of that.

My biggest fear was that I didn’t do enough to capitalize on this moment. Rather than enjoying this moment for what it was, I found myself fixating on what comes next.

Did I do enough social media posts?

Did I send enough emails?

Did I invite the “right” people?

All these questions lingered in the back of my mind, and were present while I was sitting in the audience watching people watch my play.

I wanted this moment, this whole experience, to last forever, but I also wanted it to be over as soon as possible.

It’s been five months since the production of You don’t even speak Spanish! was presented at California State University of San Bernardino, and for the past five months I’ve been struggling to find the words, time, and courage to write about it.

A lot of shit has happened in my personal life since then, but a whole lot of nothing has happened in my playwriting life.

For the past five months I’ve been busting my ass at Center Theatre Group listening to callers in our call room talk to subscribers, donors, and single ticket buyers as they pitch subscription packages and pitch the importance of donations for non-profit organizations.

Most of the time the phone rings and no one picks up, and for the most part, when patrons do answer the phone, they are generally polite, even if they are not interested to what the callers have to say, and hang up. But sometimes, some patrons are rude as fuck, and sometimes, I find my self questioning the purpose and value of theatre. (I know I'm not supposed to let that shit get to me, but sometimes it does.)

Especially when everything was going down in downtown L.A.: Helicopters hovering overhead, a menacing police presence in the streets, and a curfew set in place for some, while others were able to freely congregate on The Music Center Plaza… it all just made me wonder why. Why the hell are we doing any of this for?

Why would someone pay $944 for a premium subscription?

Who has that kind of money for theatre?

How are those folks, with that much disposable income, ever going to relate to the shit I got to say in my plays?

And I know it costs a lot of money to produce quality theatre: equity actors, union crews, sets, costumes, and all the marketing and administrative tasks associated with creating a live performance.

But damn, this shit makes no sense. Somewhere along the way theatre lost its way. This model and the way we are currently doing things is unsustainable. Yet, I find myself working my ass off to support this failing regional theatre industrial complex, so much so that a couple of months ago, when a new caller said,

And I was like, oh shit, I guess I am, huh, as I took my leftovers out of the microwave in the breakroom.

Just like that, I had forgotten who I was. I was too busy striving to be the best cog in the regional theatre industrial complex machine. And don’t get me wrong, I’m learning a lot, I’m enjoying the work, I have a lot to offer, and this job is very supportive of me and my family, financially, as well as my schedule flexibility, but it’s coming at the cost of my artistic expense.

It was only recently that I started to pick up my pen again. Friends like Esther Banegas Gatica, Melanie Queponds, and Miguel Ángel López reminded me that I am a playwright.

• Esther texted me congratulations on my play “Cry Now, Laugh Later” making it as a semifinalist for the 2025 Bay Area Playwrights Festival. (Her play “LatiNext” was also a semifinalist)

• Melanie emailed me and encouraged me to apply to the Seven Devils Playwriting opportunity and I did. :) Thanks Melanie.

• And Miguel called me to say he wants to direct “You don’t even speak Spanish!” and that he would like to pitch the idea to a local theatre company.

Then there are all of you, the readers and supporters of this great playwriting experiment, reminding me that I have a job to do. Every time I see an annual or monthly contribution made, I remember I have to live up to this contract:

To be the most honest, courageous, and dopest playwright I can be. And to write about it. To give you access to my thoughts, process, and reflections.

Maybe for the past five months I didn’t have anything to share, or maybe for the past five months other things were more important than theatre. Or maybe I just had to let my self be a human for a little bit.

I don't know… I’m still trying to find the words for not writing…

I’m still trying to find the words for not even thinking about writing for these past five months.

I’m still trying to process and find the words to measure the metaphysical impact my play had on me, the cast and crew, and everyone that sat in the audience those nights and witnessed the performance.

I guess I’m slowly realizing and accepting that part of the reason why I started writing in the first place was because I want to be remembered. I want to remind myself that I exist, that the people and places that I love exist. But the contradiction of the craft of playwriting which produces a script/document/archive, coupled with the ephemerality of the art form of live performance really trips me out when I start to think about it.

As a playwright I write this script, and that exists on paper, but if no one ever reads that script it doesn’t exist in the world, right? It only exists until some crazy mother fuckers like Dr. Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez and Dr. Ricardo Rocha want to make it exist as a performance, or to study the script as a scholarly artifact.

Jumping into playwriting 13 years ago, I never really considered this paradox, but teaching intro to theatre at ELAC, and having the experience of one of my plays produced, made me reflect on my role as a playwright, as a human, and as a figure of speech full of contradictions.

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Your continued support in this experiment has not only provided me with the motivation and inspiration to keep on writing, it also has provided me with a much needed coffee or beer from time to time. It helps me afford submission fees to some of these playwriting festivals and contests, and at times it has even put food on the table or tires on my car.

• This production will forever always go on my resume

• This production will forever always be archived in CSUSB’s theatre department.

• This production will forever always have a lasting impact on me, and I can only hope it has had an everlasting impact on those who experienced the play.

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Hey everyone,

Hope all is well. My apologies for not being more active on here. It’s been nearly four months since my last substack post, and a lot has happened in between then in now.

Besides the Eaton Fire, January was a crazy month for my family and I, but we managed to get through it.

February was exciting and busy. I started teaching Intro to Theatre at East Los Angeles College, my son turned twelve, and my short play “South Hope St.” was being performed at Frida Kahlo Theatre.

March was a blur that went a little something like this:

• Mondays

  • Wake up the 7th and 6th grader between 6-7am

  • Lesson plan from 7:30am-9:30am

  • Teach Theatre 100 from 10:35am-12pm

  • Work at my full time job at Center Theatre Group from 1pm-9pm.

  • Come home, and try to help with the night time routine.

• Tuesdays

  • My day off, but full time Dad duty.

  • Wife goes to work as a ceramic teaching artist.

  • Hang out with kids, cook, and clean.

• Wednesdays

  • See Monday

• Thursdays

  • Chill out and grab a coffee and breakfast with my little one and my wife.

  • 1pm - 9pm work at CTG.

• Fridays and Saturdays

  • Work 8am - 4pm

  • Try to chill in the evening.

• Sundays

  • My day off, but trying to do family shit.

  • Also getting ready for the week, and getting ready to do it all over again.

April started off great. I gave one on one time to my two oldest. For my son, we went to an arcade and then to the batting cages. For my daughter, we went to go see Harry Potter at the Pantages, left at intermission, then briefly walked around Hollywood. Then for my wife and I’s one year wedding anniversary we went to go eat smash burgers then race K1 go karts. But less than two weeks into April our world got turned upside down.

Life has been busy and crazy and beautiful and boring, but it’s all just a happening. Life is happening all around me, and these last four months I’ve been learning how to truly appreciate everything that is happening.

My little sister is going to have a baby boy. My wife is going to be a part of an art show at the end of this month, and my play You don’t even speak Spanish! will be opening next Friday April 25th at Cal State University-San Bernardino at 8pm!

Get your tickets here!

Thank you all again for your continued support, for taking the time to read this post, and for believing in me and my writing.

Wishing you all the best,

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Holy shit, I don’t even know where to start.

January 2024

2024 started with this Substack. Creating Aaron Higareda’s Playwriting Experiment was something I wanted to do for a longtime. This medium, versus social media, comes more natural to me, and I don’t know, it just feels more private and personal if that makes sense. So if you’ve been reading these posts over the past year thank you. For 2025, I’m going to try to build more community on here rather than just these kind of blog-y/diary things. I’m hoping to do maybe more zoom type things, perhaps feedback on script submissions for paid subscribers, or some type of group writing session/”classes”. Oh! and finally getting around to that podcast I said I was going to do.

February 2024

This shit came and went. I was occupied with KCACTF, Post MFA depression, as well as starting my first year scrambling how to be an adjunct professor.

March 2024

March was even more of a blur.

April 2024

I freaken got married to my beautiful, artistic, and crazy ass partner after 13 years of being together!

We got married and then ran away to Catalina Island for the day with out the kids!

May 2024

I was invited to attend South Coast Rep’s Pacific Playwrights Festival as a guest. I initially tried to apply to be a P.A, but the hours wouldn’t work out, and graciously Artistic Coordinator Rob Salas put me on the guest list. This has also been something I’ve wanted to attend for a long time since first hearing about it back in 2017ish. Next goal is to hopefully have one of my plays read on this stage in the near future, and be in front of the mike answering questions for playwright panel.

June and July 2024

I don’t really remember these months either. I think I was in full blown panic trying to find full time employment. Also, my wife (still haven’t gotten used to saying this) started working on a conservation mural project with the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, so I was also full time dad mode during the summer.

August 2024

Since November of 2023, I was working for the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse as a deck hand. I had no idea what I was doing, my hands were only good for picking up a pen and typing. At the time, I could barley unscrew a light bulb. (Like for real that shit still scares me because of the electricity and shit.) Anyway, first I started as a spot operator and burned the hell out of my arm trying to follow a jumping ballerina for The Nutcracker. Then they had me putting up platforms and helping out with strike, load in, and restoring lights. (I learned real quickly I don’t like going up in that damn shaky lift)

After 7 years of theatre education, I had no idea how to coil a wire/cord properly, nor how to focus lights. I was thinking the whole time, damn I should have taken more advantage of the theatre facilities at UCR. I learned so much on the job, and it really gave me a deeper appreciation of the what the folks back stage do, and also just like a more comprehensive understanding of what goes into creating and producing theatre.

In August, there are typically no shows, so it’s maintenance month in the theatre, and they started training me to learn the rail and fly system.

Man, I never worked this hard in my life. This shit was physically demanding, and I’m still struggling to understand the mechanics of it all and how the counter balance system works. Not to mention the psychological pressure of not killing someone. If something goes wrong or falls, I’ve heard countless stories of people dying.

One of the most nerve racking things I’ve done, and proud that I did, was climb 64 feet up a ladder to the grid. (Just writing that previous sentence makes my palms sweaty) When I was up there I was holding on for dear life. I kept hearing Eddie Murphy’s voice “Shrek, I’m looking down.” But we did what we had to do up there, I didn’t drop no tools, and made it safely back down.

September 2024

I think because I used tools and muscles I’ve never used before, specifically a Swager or Crimper for rigging, I may have developed a blood clot. That shit scared the hell out of me when it happened, and I don’t know if I’ve been the same ever since.

October 2024

My birthday month! I had my staged reading of my play “You don’t even speak Spanish!” with Playwrights Arena and that whole experience was fun and exciting. But October, was also one of the most difficult months of the year for my family and I.

November 2024

I finally got a full time job and I thought I was leaving the theatre for good. I started training to become a Bus Operator (driver) for L.A. Metro. I had no idea what to expect, and part of me was feeling pretty salty. I don’t know if it was my ego, but I was tripping out because I was just thinking the whole time, I went to get an MFA in Playwriting just to become a bus driver?

But what I came to learn, was that I kinda enjoyed it. Like it was actually really rewarding: financially, theatrically, and emotionally. Contrary to popular belief bus drivers can actually make bank with all the over time available, an easy 80-100k. For me, interacting with the public meant I get to interact with all kinds of characters and their circumstances, perfect for my nosey-evesdropping playwriting brain. I also really enjoyed driving around different parts of L.A. and discovering and rediscovering little pockets of culture and communities I would have never been exposed to otherwise.

My training to earn a Class B license started on November 11th. I was in a classroom at Metro’s headquarters in downtown Los Angeles with a whole bunch of other working class strangers. We all needed money and a second chance. Ex-football players, ex-convicts, and folks who needed a job or needed a better job came together and stressed out trying to study for the written test to get our permits. One guy in particular, shared that he lost his son three years ago and ended up on the streets, and how this job was his way of building back up his life again.

The class was intense and moved at an incredible pace. We not only had to learn about all the rules and regulations of Metro, but also the different components of the bus, and how to operate/drive the vehicle safely at all times. Then, one by one, folks started to disappear from the class and training program. One guy, because he didn’t have the right name on his Birth Certificate, another guy who’s second language was English, struggled with the written test. Two women, after they showed us the aftermath of bus collisions with other vehicles and pedestrians, never came back the following day. Then, out of no where, the guy who was trying to rebuild his life, and who was doing the best in the class, never showed up again. It was a lot for everybody. But this training was one of the most rewarding and humbling experiences of my life. I successfully earned my Class B license, but with just one week left to go in the training program I got offered another job.

December 2024

I started working for Center Theatre Group as a Membership Engagement Supervisor. It’s been relentless ever since. My last day at Metro was Friday December 13th, and my first day at CTG was Monday, December 16th. That same day was CTG’s holiday party at a fancy ass restaurant in downtown L.A. and I realized I am not in Kansas anymore. My third day on the job, there was an All-company meeting, where Kristina freaken Wong was the judge for the holiday sweater competition. The work culture/environment of CTG is completely different that that of Metro, but ultimately my decision to work for CTG rather than Metro came down to the flexibility this career was going to give me and my family. At Metro, I would’ve made a lot of money with overtime, a lot of money, but I knew that working that much would’ve driven my family away from me eventually over time, and that was something I couldn’t compromise.

Thank you again for participating in this crazy ass experiment this year. Just five more years and ten more months left to see if my hypothesis comes true!

Wishing you all the best, and here are some numbers:

• 48 Free subscribers

• 19 Paid subscribers

• 5 Co-researchers

• 72 total subscribers

• Revenue generated $1,500

Playwriting wins:

• KCACTF Region 8 National Playwriting Finalist

• Playground-LA Writers Pool participant

• Playwrights Arena staged reading of “You don’t even speak Spanish!”

• Announcement of CSUSB’s production of “You don’t even speak Spanish!”

Playwriting L’s (Inspired by Diana Burbano’s substack)

• Berkley Rep’s Ground Floor

  • “You don’t even speak Spanish!”

• Boston Court’s New Play Reading Series

  • “Cry Now, Laugh Later”

• Shakespeare and Performing Arts Regional Company Science at Play

  • “Scorched Oleanders”

• Geffen Playhouse’s Writers Room

  • “The Knightmare/When you go down”

• Lo Jolla Playhouse: Latinx New Play Festival

  • “You don’t even speak Spanish!”

• Jewish Play Project

  • “South Hope St.”

• Broadway Musical Theatre Workshop

  • “I’m Bossy” Parody

• Eight Ball Theatre

  • “Wipes”

• DCA Los Angeles Festival of New Works: Environmental Justice

  • “The Biohazardous Waste Land”

• Playground Solo Fest

  • The “Biohazardous Waste Land”

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I still can’t believe it’s happening.

“You don’t even speak Spanish!” will have its world premiere at California State University San Bernardino in the spring of 2025.

From the bottom of my heart, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone whom I’ve crossed paths with that has helped me get this play from the page to the stage.

1. Thank you Josefina Lopez and all the artist and community members at CASA 0101 who inspired, encouraged, and nurtured me and my voice.

2. Thank you East Los Angeles College Theatre Arts Department then (2012-2014) and now (2024 to present).

   1. This place gave me my foundation. I learned about theatre styles and theory, I learned about all the different elements of the theatre, and I was introduced to one of my favorite playwrights Dario Fo and his play “They won’t pay, We won’t Pay” Thank you to Rodney Lloyed Scott for letting me sit in on a rehearsal, Lisa “Hashi” Stone for giving me a chance to teach there, Cristina Frias for her mentorship, and the rest of the amazing faculty and students at ELAC.

3. Thank you University of California Riverside Theatre Film and Digital Production department then (2014-2017) and now (2021-2023).

   1. If ELAC gave me my foundation, then UCR is where I began to build myself up as a student, as a playwright, and as human being. The family housing and the free child care allowed me to pursue my dreams. Thank you to the TFDP department for having a “writing the performing arts” track/emphasis. Thank you to all the amazing students and professors at UCR this is where I began to build my network. Thank you Dr. Erith Jaffe-Berg, Dr. Donatella Galella, Kimberly Guerrero, Stu Krieger, Dr. Annika Speer, Robin Russin, Rickerby Hinds, Dr. Ricardo Rocha, Michael Jayme, Melanie Queponds, Esther Banegas Gatica, Ava Fojtik, Karly Thomas, Gerald May, Kali Veach, Sergio Solis, Aedan Ferrara, Amanda Alfonso, Lily Hart, Lillyanna Lopez, Paige Goodwin, Melizza Minger, Brittany Turner and everyone else I crossed paths with while at UCR.

4. Thank you to the Bay Area theatre scene and community: American Conservatory Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Shotgun Players, Playground-SF, El Teatro Campesino, and TBA.

   1. The Bay is where I learned the business side of theatre, it’s where I learned my voice mattered, and where I began to believe that I could really make this a career. Thank you Syche Phillips and Simone Finney for your mentorship and encouragement at A.C.T. and over the years, thank you Emma Penny and all the other smart and incredibly talented A.C.T. fellows of 2018-2019. Thank you Berkeley Rep for showing me the front of house side of theatre and Kelly Kelley for looking out for me during the Pandemic. Thank you Shotgun Players for being you, and for welcoming one of the most diverse audiences I’ve ever been a part of. E.T.C. gave me one of my first breaks in selecting an early version of “Cry Now, Laugh Later” for their Palabra Community Showcase. Playground-SF kept me hungry as I competed with 35 other playwrights to get my short script selected every month. And thank you Brad Erickson, Michael Rice, and Art Quinones and the rest of the TBA community for giving me the data skills to decode the matrix of the theatre.

5. Thank you Los Angeles Theatre scene and community especially the Frida Kahlo Theatre and Playwrights’ Arena.

   1. Los Angeles Theatre is as confusing and vast as the freeway system, but once you know you get your bearings and have good sense of direction to where you want to go, you can never get lost. I’m still trying to navigate and map the Southern California theatre community, but in the meantime I want to specifically thank Ruben Amavizca-Murua, Abel Marquez, Nathan Cabrera, Victor Parra, Maya Elizabeth Garza, Jonathan Herrera, Mercy Floresislas, Jorge Aldaco, Yanira Loera, Abe Zapata Jr., Richard Soto, Sergio Solis, Karla Ojeda, Ernesto Ibarra, Gloria Ines Olivas, and Reese Shald.

6. Finally, thank you to Dr. Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez! Thank you for believing in me, in my voice, and this crazy ass play.

So this is how it all went down: I produced a staged reading of my children’s play Panquetzaliztli in the spring of 2023 for my GLUCK Fellowship. I posted flyers all over the campus, and as fate, luck, or destiny would have it, one of the flyers I posted near the UCR black box classroom theatre, room 411, never got taken down. Later that fall Dr. Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez was a visiting instructor and seen the flyer. He asked his T.A., the homie Milizza Minger, who and the hell would write a children’s play about one of the most bloodiest rituals of the Aztec tradition. So Milizza hit me up, letting me know that Dr. Aviles-Rodriguez was interested in reading the script. I reached out to him and sent Panquetzaliztli over, not thinking anything of it. Perhaps I might be able to get some feedback and potentially expand my network. (As a recent MFA grad, I was asking for informational interviews left and right.)

He read the script, told me I had a good ear for dialogue, and invited me to grab a coffee on campus. I was like hell yea, and asked if I can also drop in to his class. (Again I just graduated with my MFA so I trying to get some insights into what teaching would be like, plus I’m just a nerd who likes to learn about Chicano Theatre)

So I sat in on his lecture, and I thought he was hilarious, especially when he covered Born in East L.A. by Cheech Marin, but the class was not having it. I remember thinking I wished I would’ve taken his class as an undergrad. We then talked and walked to his office. We briefly went over the play and he shared and showed me a wealth of scholarly resources on the festival of Panquetzaliztli. I followed up with a customary thank you email and shared “You don’t even speak Spanish!” with him.

He read the play, and said he will recommend/forward it to the chair of CSUSB as a possibility for next year’s season. Again, not thinking anything of it, I said thank you, and followed up with another invitation to grab a coffee and talk about the play, theatre, and teaching some time in the near future.

We had coffee in January at a spot called Picaresca in East L.A. I told him about my play South Hope St. being selected for KCACTF Region. I met with him in February at the festival, but only briefly. He tried to introduce me to the Chair of CSUSB’s Theatre department there, but I just missed him. I remained in touch. I sent him some of my other plays and we had another coffee in March and talked about those. Then in mid May he sent me a graphic for the show, at the end of the August the play was uploaded on CSUSB’s theatre website, and tickets are on sale now!

In November I sat in on call backs, and it was all just so surreal: to hear these words and see these characters come to life, these characters who have been with me for so long.

Last but definitely not least I am thankful for my family. Thank you mom, dad, brothers and sister. Thank you great grandpa and great grandma, tias and aunty, uncles and tios, and cousins. They are the ones who inspired this play, and who encouraged and supported me along the way. I am thankful for my crazy ass wife, and our three crazy ass kids. Thank for believing in me and trusting me. Thank you for letting me follow my dreams and allowing me to pursue this crazy ass career.

And of course, I am thankful for all of you. Thank you for taking the time to read my words and for your continued support and participation in this experiment.

Wishing you all the best and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

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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.

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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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Hi everyone,

I hope all is well and that you are enjoying your Sunday so far. I just wanted to reach out and invite you all to a staged reading of my play “You don’t even speak Spanish!” presented by Playwrights’ Arena’s New Pages Lab.

Directed by Dr. Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez, and featuring three UCR Alums: Ernesto Ibarra, Sergio Solis, and Gloria Ines…

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You don’t even speak Spanish! will have a staged reading presented by Playwrights Arena on October 20th, 2024 as part of their New Pages Lab reading series!

Near the end of August, I met with Literary Manager Abe Zapata Jr. at the Tierra Mia Coffee shop near Cal State Los Angeles to talk about my play. Prior to that, Rosa Navarrete, who I met through the KCACTF Region 8 Festival, encouraged me to submit my script to them, and I got the email that they were interested in the play around the end of June.

So sitting at a wobbly table on the outside patio of Tierra Mia, sipping my small americano, I thought what more can I do with this play, it was a 2023 O'Neill National Playwright Conference semifinalist and a 2022 Latinx Theatre Commons Comedy Carnaval finalist. I listened to Abe’s feedback and notes and was inspired to go back through the script to make it as tight, funny, and dope as possible.

So I came up with this bright idea, that for the next twenty days, starting on September 1st I would revise You don’t even speak Spanish! for at least twenty minutes a day ending on September 20th, hence 20/20 revisions.1

9/1/24 - 10pm-ish

I was at the beach all day with my family for a swim team function. The whole day I couldn’t help but think about one of the first notes Abe gave me: “what would happen if we meet the family sooner?”. That note stuck out to me because during my MFA program in Stu Krieger’s T.V. Comedy class at UCR, I wrote a pilot episode of this play with an opening scene that involved watching home videos. I loved this frame/container/device and basically wrote this scene in my head before I fell asleep a couple of nights ago. So when I returned from the beach and bomb fire, I popped open my old ass lap top and created a new document and began to craft this new scene and create a new character GRANDPA V. Twenty minutes flew by.

9/2/24

Labor Day. I did a little drinking at a BBQ and used the holiday as an excuse not to write/revise/work.

9/3/24

Had an interview for a literary manager position, but didn’t do so well. I think I felt bad for myself and used that as an excuse not to write.

9/4/24

Had another quick interview with another L.A. theatre company. Used most of my brain power preparing for this, and used this as an excuse not to write.

9/5/24

Still no writing. At this point I started rationalizing that if I write for and hour then I could make up three twenty minute session.

9/6/24

Who writes on Fridays? Not this guy again. Drank a six pack and had self-aggrandized buzzed fantasies of writing for 8 hours and updating my LinkedIn profile.

9/7/24

It was a day like any other. I was doing house work and laundry and dishes. I jumped in the shower and noticed my right arm was feeling strange when I tried to reach around to wash the rest of my body. Then, I noticed my right arm was swelling up fast! I told my wife, I think I need to go to the hospital and we took off. They discovered I had a Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT/Blood Clot) I had to stay the night in the hospital. They put me on blood thinners and sadly, I didn’t get any writing done.

9/8/24

No writing or revising again. I was released from the hospital that evening and I just wanted to be with the family.

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9/9/24

I love Mondays. I was ready to get back into the script for reals this time, but a majority of the day was spent figuring out insurance stuff to get the $700 prescription I needed for free. By 3:30pm I started feeling light headed, and weak, and started freaking out because what if the blood clot moved to my heart or lungs, then I felt like I was going to faint. My wife took me to the hospital again. They did an EKG on me , X-rayed my chest, and I put me in a CT scan machine. Luckily, everything came back negative and I was released in a couple of hours. I think I had an anxiety attack or something, but again no writing.

9/10/24

I took it easy and tried to relax. No revising again, unfortunately.

9/11/24

I had an informational interview with the Artistic Coordinator at South Coast Repertory theatre, Rob Salas snd that was dope to speak with him about comedy, his career, and the L.A. Theatre Scene. Then I had a another interview with the Managing Director from the Actors Gang for an Audience Service Manager position. Still no writing.

9/12/24 - 8:00pm

I took my daughter to swim practice, and was starting to feel sorry for myself. I settled on just listening to KPFK’s Alan Watts and try to meditate and fall asleep. But for whatever reason I reached into my backpack and pulled out my laptop and saw I have 13% left on my battery. I got to work. I continued with this new opening scene from where I left off eleven days prior. I successfully introduced all the characters in the family and started to develop their dynamic a little bit more.

• Session two 8:25pm

  I was on a roll and still had time before my daughters practice ended, so the second 20 minute session I continued to work on developing a new character GRANDPA V. that will double with AGENT BLACKWATER. He is a nod to my great grandpa and hopefully better ties in the aspect of being recorded, as well as the connection to Dodger Stadium. I get him on stage and try to continue foreshadowing and thinking on the fly how the hell am I going to transition to the original opening scene of the Aztec fire dance in a UCLA dance studio 15 years in the future.

9/13/24 - 6:20am

I woke up early, went for a walk I think, and felt pretty good and excited to get back to writing and finishing this new opening scene. I got everyone on stage and even had them showing this all American family moment tableau, with high fives and home runs. 

• Session two 6:40am

  I kept going and focused on transitioning out of this moment. I remembered what Dr. Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez mentioned to me about introducing this projection/image/video element earlier and with some historical context. So as this family holds this tableau, the lights begin to fade and an Aztec drum beat begins to fade in. A projection of what I’m calling an “L.A. Chicano Timeline” pops up. Images and videos from the Zoot Suit Riots of the 40s, the evictions of the Chavez Ravine in the 50s, the Delano Grape Strike of the 60s, the Chicano Moratorium of the 70s, the Dodgers of the 80s, the L.A. riots of the 90s, America's Funniest Home Videos of the 2000s and 9/11… Then my computer crashed. 

9/14/24

No writing. I focused on recharging my laptop and getting it, and me, back up and running again.

9/15/24

I am feeling the pressure now. My goal was to have a complete revised draft by the 20th, and that means I am only five days away and technically only have 100 minutes of revision left to go.

• Session one 6:30am

  I deleted some stage direction from my original opening scene so that the new opening now blends in hopefully seamlessly. My intent was to do a quick pass of the script for little things and formatting issues, and make notes of major things that I might want to remove or enhance later, and I even created a word doc titled “Darling Killers”. I got to page eleven and then got stuck at a random piece of dialogue that the main character brings up for no reason other than as a plot point. I went for a walk.

• Session two 7:30am

  Back from my walk. I addressed this dialogue issue by using the logic of close association of the words “Great Grandpa” and “pictures” that leads the main character to bring up his own great grandpa and picture of his house at Dodger Stadium. I discovered I spelled Cesar Chavez wrong a couple of times, but then got distracted because I started looking up the youtube video for “Ain’t nobody got time for that” by Sweet Brown, and then added it into to script because I thought it would be funny. I also approximated that this play takes place in 2013 and this was peak 2013.

• Session three 8:00am

  My kids are still asleep so I kept going. I spent some time reviewing the notes Abe, the Literary Manager, gave me before I jumped into the next scene so I have an idea of what I’m looking for or trying to address in this revision. I discovered in scene two that I have a lot of explaining/definition chunky paragraph dialogue. I also realize the two characters in the scene are not really doing anything like in terms of action. I have this framework of a waltzing and dancing as these two characters enter, so I used that set up to have them dance a little longer while they also explain/define the surveillance terms they bring up. Then I got stuck because there was a music shift, and I had to make a choice.

9/16/24 - 7:20am

Okay so I read through the scene and think the change from a waltz type of music to a patriotic type of music will set the satirical tone and set up a framework for this farce. I tightened some holes in the dialogue to emphasize the comedic nature of this section and added an ORANGE FOG element too. Finished the scene and got to page 20. Was a little interrupted here and there because of all the morning school routine business.

9/17/24 - 7:05am

Slow morning, didn’t go for a walk. Sipped coffee and watched youtube for an hour or so. I think I needed to cut the next scene down. It’s nine pages, and if I can whittle it down to four that would be cool. Cut 10 lines of dialogue from the top, and tried to start in the middle more. Slashed another 10 lines of dialogue around trust and what is your favorite ice cream. They weren’t really doing anything to push the story forward. Fighting urges to not add dialogue.

9/18/24 - 6:16am

Jumped right in where I left off. Messing with this dance sequence and setting up this psychophysiological device that I’m using. So I only ended up cutting out one page out of the five I was trying to cut. But I think what I have in there is essential, funny, character driven, and moves the plot forward. 

• Session two 6:46am

  I’m at the family scene page 29, and I forgot I introduced this family before, and now it colors the scene so much more, because it makes my brain work to remember that opening scene. I also realized with two days left of this revision process, that I’m essentially going through the script and filling plot holes, or trying to be one step ahead of the audience so they don’t get lost in thinking about something in the script. 

  For example, this play uses an “America's Funniest Home Videos” reference, and my thought process behind that was to use this iconic show as commentary on surveillance, and also to wonder what if America’s actions of war and imperialism were captured on video would we the audience, be laughing?  However, the symbolism, metaphor, or whatever you want to call it gets lost because most of the audience either doesn’t know that show ever existed, or the ones who know about that show understand that it is irrelevant now with the advent of social media. I guess I am also commenting on the fact that for some families, watching this show was a past time, like it was an image of the American Dream or something: exploiting your family for monetary gain. Kinda like this play?

• Session three 7:10am

  I kept plowing through the family scene, rereading every line. Thinking about a full production, and also how working back of house for nearly a year now, has me thinking about lights, and sound, and rigging and sets. Also after hearing Tim Robbins from Shawshank Redemption and the Artistic Director of the Actors Gang refer to their theatre style as characters at emotional extremes, I felt satisfied with the pictures of the characters I’ve created. This play is inspired by Dario Fo’s political farce style and other chicano comedic traditions, and I don’t necessarily need to justify the way the characters act or behave because it’s not realism if that makes any sense.

• Session four 1:20pm 

  I finished the first family scene, and dove right into the next section where the father character loses his job. I am curious to see what happens if I cut this section completely, but then it sets up a pivotal moment in the next family dinner scene which escalates the tension. I simply copied and pasted that section into my darling killer document, but even that hurt. I’m scared to pull the trigger. I’m going back and forth. I read on to see how it might affect or not affect the story. I ended up cuttting it. It had two Lazzi’s in there and a monologue, but let’s see what happens if it is not in there for this reading. It still hurt to cut that scene and I guess they don’t call it “killing your darlings” for nothing.

• Session five 2:00pm

  Another note Abe made about the script was that there was a lot of penis jokes. So I was glad to cut out a lot of dick pic talk, which was kinda unnecessary. I added some lines to break up a long paragraph that the main characters was using to explain about mass surveillance and got to the end of Act 1. Because this is a farce and right at the 90ish page sweet spot I know I have to get rid of the act break. But then I started getting worried that I am trimming too much and “developing the play to death”. I’ve been going hard all day I’m on page 58 and I’m going to take a little break.

9/19/24 - 7:45pm

I’m working out this act break right now, and the reason why I put it in was to give folks who work concession some extra time to make tips and get those hours. But in a farce I don’t think there should be intermissions. I got lost on Galen Hooks choreography and that shit is so dope when done right.

• Session two 8:10pm

  I played with bringing this villain character in a spotlight through the aisles of the house, and reused this orange smoke effect to help get my point across, and as a visual representation of the point I am trying to make about Agent Orange. I feel satisfied with this dance sequence thing. But I think will have to see it in action to decide if it works or not. I don’t know if a reading can do that.

• Session three 8:30pm

  Went straight into the next scene. A car scene. It’s about nine pages. And I feel like in general this is the second act and I was plowing through this shit, and covering a lot of story. I ain’t mad at this little car scene. It’s kinda cute and funny. Cleaned some stuff up and clarified some things. Took out a dance number. Got to page 66, thirty more to go.

9/20/24 - 8:00pm

Listening to the best youtube has to offer on hip hop violin. And I am all in. Earlier today I joined ATHE’s Latinx, Indigenous, and the Americas focus group theatre symposium. It was dope to see Esther Banegas Gatica, Melanie Queponds, Dr. Daphanie Sicre, and Dr. Guillermo Aviles-Rodriquez. They actually read an excerpt of my play during this symposium and it was crazy because I was just revising this section and I knew exactly where they were at, and I reread that scene again just for fun.

This twenty minute session bleed through until 9:00pm. I had two tall cans and was just vibing; cleaning up dialogue, fixing spacing/formatting. Then as I got deeper into the play, and into my buzz, I realized I haven’t revisited this play in awhile. These characters mean a lot to me and I was just tripping out how long I’ve been working on this piece and how long I’ve been trying to make sense of this world. Got to page 73.

9/21 - 9/25/24

So after twenty days I didn’t reach my goal of writing/revising twenty minutes a day for twenty days nor did I finish my revisions by the September 20th self imposed deadline. But I think thats okay. I think setting the goal was what was most important. Because I set that goal, and because I had to answer to myself, and the fact that I also knew I wanted to document my revision process to share here with you all, I knew I had to be accountable no matter what. So thank you to my readers, subscribers, and friends.

I also think having that little health scare in the middle of this 20/20 bullshit was a reminder that I really do love this shit. That even if I’m in the hospital I want to/need to write.

I ended up finishing my revisions today 9/25/24 at 7:30am. But I struggled for whatever reason to get there. I think what You don’t even speak Spanish! is trying to say is that this system is fucked up: the system that denied Chicano’s and Spanish speakers their native language in schools, the system that allows this country to participate in imperialism around the world, and the system that encourages domestic surveillance programs and FBI terrorist sting operations. This system is all fucked up and backwards, and we as a society can do better and deserve better, and perhaps that process starts with the self, then the family, and finally with the community.

Thank you all again for your continued support and encouragement, and thank you as always for taking the time to read my words. I would love to know what your revision process looks like. Feel free to leave a comment.

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Wishing you all the best, and hope you have a great rest of your day!

More info soon on the staged reading presented by Playwrights Arena on October 20th, 2024.

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For the last day of class I brought in some pan dulce, and some of my plays. I had this idea that we would all sit around eating and have a table reading of my short plays and maybe even read the first act of “You don’t even speak Spanish!”. 

But these high schoolers were checked out. They were done-done. 

The few folks who did not perform their “final” had their last chance to earn some points before the semester ended. Every student except for one, took the opportunity to do so. 

The only one who didn’t perform her final was a student who had to get a progress report signed every week from all of her teachers. She was also the student who ended up hooking up with the baseball player in class. Okay, so it was a trip watching these two teenagers get closer over the course of the semester. First they would flirt with one another during class, then I would catch them staring at each other during assignments, and by the last class, they were sitting next to each other all hugged up, holding hands, an official couple now. I had to pretend like I didn’t know what was happening. 

Oh, and then, there was this other student, who had her boyfriend drop her off at class, and then she would be all touchy feely with this other student in class! 

I completely forgot about this aspect of high school. And here I thought they gave a shit about theatre. For example, I thought the class would be thrilled to read my plays, as like some type of reward for getting through the end of the semester together, but I basically had to beg them to participate. “Can I get extra credit if I read?” a student asked. 

The final class was fairly anti-climactic. I tried my best to give them an inspiring speech about how important theatre is, and how important their lives are, and how important they are to the theatre. I provided my professional email and told them not to hesitate to hit me up if they need a letter of recommendation, or if they have questions about college or getting involved in theatre. Some students wrote my email down or took a picture, most didn't. 

So what did I learn from all of this?1

• On a practical/pedagogical level:

  • Icebreakers worked wonders for me and the class to create a sense of trust.

    • I even asked them Drake or Kendrick for one icebreaker.

  • Watching youtube videos for acting games and warm ups don’t necessarily translate to success in the classroom. In fact, I had to adapt a lot of the exercises to work for non-theatre students.

    • I rolled up a paper ball one class, and had them pass it to one another with out dropping it, and had them complete the alphabet to try and teach how to work together as a chorus.

  • Staying organized and being well prepared for class is a must, but even then, things don’t always go your way, and that’s okay.

• On a philosophical level:

  • Regular high schoolers don’t care about theatre, and why should they? What has theatre done for them? I feel as an adjunct theatre professor in this duel enrollment/early college program that it is my job, responsibility, and duty to show these students what theater can do for them, emotionally, intellectually, and financially.

    • I have the opportunity to encourage and support a student to get over stage fright, to be vulnerable, to share and express how they feel.

    • I have the opportunity to challenge their ideas and introduce them to complex text, and to give them time to think about their values, morals, and ethics.

    • I have the opportunity to demonstrate how theatre can be a way to not only make some money, but also how it can lead to a life long career.

• On a personal level:

  • I learned I need to have more fun, to try and loosen up, and to keep it simple stupid.

Lastly, I learned I have the opportunity to teach this class again. This Fall, starting September 16th, I’ll be adjuncting Acting Fundamentals at a high school in Huntington Park.

Thank you all again for your continued support and encouragement, and thank you as always for taking the time to read my words.

Wishing you all the best, and hope you have a great rest of your day!

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P.S. More exciting news regarding my play “You don’t even speak Spanish!” coming soon.

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