 Hi, um, who has just gotten off of the plane and came straight here for this interview, so you should count yourself lucky. Um, I, um, I first of all just want to get to know you a little bit better. Just your work and your background, where you come from and what you're doing now. Well, um, my parents are from Mexico and they moved to El Paso before I was born. So I became the first American in both their families to be born in this country. I have a couple of brothers and sisters, but we were all born and raised in El Paso. So, uh, I got texts deep in my roots. Deep in my, I have like four or five pairs of cowboy boots in my head closet. Um, and, uh, I fell in love with theater in high school when I got cast for a play and, and then, uh, I thought that's what I was going to be. I knew, well, I knew it was going to be a theater. I thought I was going to be an actor. And all through my undergraduate and graduate careers and college and all that, I, I studied to be an actor until, uh, I graduated. And then, um, someone recommended me, my playwriting instructor, who I took in the playwriting classes, recommended me for this position at the Archmagnet High School. And I taught, but it was for playwriting, for playwriting courses. So I started teaching some playwriting courses and I said, this is strange, I'm not good. Uh, I mean, I fell in love with it even more, especially when I was teaching them. I started learning a lot about the craft. And I had a lot of things I wanted to sort out in my life about my writing and that's when, that's what got me going. Sooner, sooner than later, someone, uh, uh, at, uh, at a small Latina theater in Dallas called Theater Dallas. Uh, Cora Cardona called me and she says, we'd like to commission you to write a play for us and set it during Day of the Dead and make it about Don't Walk. So I said, okay, well, that sounds interesting, but nobody had ever asked me to write about my culture, my background as a Latino before, ever. So this was a new development for me. Um, and not only that, but I was surprised. She had a Latino company with Latino actors who were good and were ready and wanted, were hungry for material. So I wrote that and it was intensely satisfying, especially when I saw Latino audiences actually come to my plays. I felt like this is my mission. This is not my mission. I have to write plays that, uh, address the Latino condition, Latino American condition in this country. Uh, and, uh, and since then, almost every work that I've done has dealt with, uh, with the experience with the Latino experience in America. Um, but I don't limit myself to that. I've, uh, also done adaptations and works that, uh, that don't deal with issues that have to do with Latinos. Uh, one was, uh, Don Quixoteas, which had been working at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And the other one, which was also very satisfying to do was, uh, adapting John Steinbeck's The Pastors of Paddy, which is an early novel of his that he did, oh, some time before Great Sir Wrath, before he became a big man. So it was, um, it was fun working with John Musconi in the California Shakespeare Theater and the actors, the company, or work for work on this project. That's great. Um, we're actually going to be seeing Pastors of Paddy tomorrow. Uh, and I was going to say that for the end, but I was wondering since you brought it up, can we talk with him more about how you got into writing that? I mean, how did John Steinbeck come into the picture? Well, um, he came into the picture between the people who worked for Word and John Musconi before I ever entered into it. They were looking for, uh, something to collaborate on, and I was thinking first big novels that would be like, uh, you know, Anna Karenina, Russian novels, like that. And then they started thinking, well, let's stay with America for a while. Let's look at America. And they were looking at East of Eden, possibly, something like that, and to bring the work for work style into that work. And they just seemed big, big, big, big. So, um, they said, how about this one? They pulled up this little jam, um, The Pastors of Heaven, which I hadn't heard of before, really. And John read it and fell in love with these stories. It's a short story cycle, um, that he wrote early in his career as a fiction writer. He's a novelist. And, um, and they're into connected short stories. After they just determined that that's what they were going to do, then they came to me. They wanted, you know, who's the person for this job to, to help adapt this story. And, uh, my name was the first on both your lips. And, um, when they offered it to me, I, I said, I'm really kind of busy. I don't know if I could love it. Really, really busy. But send me the book. And I read it and I loved it, but I said no. I can't do it. I'm too busy. And John wouldn't take no for an answer. And John is really just insisting. He says, you got to do this. We'll make it work. Tell me what your schedule is. Well, I'm booked for the next two years. All right, we'll do it after you're done with those projects that in three years we'll do it. We'll work on it. We'll set a workshop every six months so you can, so we can ease you into it. And I'm just curious when you're free. Well, all right. And so we started to do that. And the more we started working on it, the quicker the process went. But for our first few meetings, we didn't even, we didn't even bring in any of my writing at all. We were still dealing with stories. Yeah. We have a question from the Twitter world. This is from Trev Allen. He says, Hey, Octavio, glad to see you representing the San Francisco Bay Area Playwrights in DC. When is your new musical going up? Oh, well, I am reading the musical. I'm very excited about it. I come rather late to the idea of working on musicals. I've done plays with music before. But Trevor's right. I am working on something with South Coast Repertory. And my composer, my partner, and this is Adam E. Wong, who is a marvelous young man with a big heart of gold. And he is brilliant, brilliant composer. I brought his name up to the people at the SEI when they asked me about this project, about commissioning me for something. And I said, I think I want to do a musical. Who do you want to deal with? That was Montoya out there. And I said, I said Adam Wong and they never heard of him. So they said, OK, OK, but they went to New York to meet him. They liked him a lot. And they asked him for advice on other chamber musicals. They could look at him because they wanted something for their second stage. And he says, well, you should mention that. And he gave him Ordinary Days. And they loved it and they produced it also in their season. So I essentially got out of two gigs. Actually, he got the second gig of all on his own. Abundance. Abundance, exactly. Ordinary Days. So really, really, really good. I saw that. So anyway, we hope to do a workshop. We are going to do a workshop at the Pan Pacific Festival of the work, which right now is called Cloudlands, but it's going to change the title to Still in the Flux. And then after that, we'll see. The Pan Pacific Festival is in April. Thank you for that question. Thank you. Thank you. We've been kind of, we've been ending most of these interviews with a question of what do you see for the new play field, the new play sector in the future in the next, I don't know, 10 years, 5? Well, what I see is that there's going to be a lot of playwrights. I think that there's a lot of young people out there who are excited with the idea of writing plays for live audiences. And a lot of them are opting to do that instead of going into film, which is now also more democratized and more accessible to people who have no money. So I think there's going to be a lot more writers out there and not enough theaters doing new work. So I think a lot of the smaller theaters are going to, I'm going to challenge them to do more new work. Those theaters that are traditionally only include a season of something from Broadway, something traditional, something musical, I don't necessarily ever think of producing new works. I'm going to challenge them to try to open up the field so that all these writers get their voices heard. Because it can't die with, it can't just be my generation. I actually appreciate the competition. I appreciate the next generation coming in and bringing in strong voices. They challenge what I bring to the table as well. Because they raise the bar in the game. I think it's very important. Thank you, thank you. Alright, so Octavius Lease has challenged you. So thank you so very, very much for coming. My pleasure. This is really enjoyable. Thank you. Thank you so much.