 I'm just gonna, we already started talking a little bit before the recording started, but I will introduce the man who needs no introduction, except he's the Pride of Puerto Rico, the fabulous playwright and screenwriter, José Rivera. He's here, he's joining us from New York. Welcome, José. It's good to see you again. Thanks. Good to see you too. Actually, we were just talking about you're working on the intelligent adaptation of 100 years of solitude. The one and only question I had is something that actually is in your biography. And I've never even thought, I've known you for a while and or pass across a couple times, but I've never really asked you this really specific question about being mentored by Gabriel García Marquez. What was that experience like to work under, with him at Sundance? And if you could share maybe a story or something he shared with you that has been some kind of like a guiding force for you as a writer? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it happened in 1989. And the reason it happened is that during the Havana Film Festival the year before, Robert Redford had gone to the festival and Gabo had gone to the festival and they met there for the first time. And Redford was like, I would love for you to come to Sundance and teach a class in a workshop. And Gabo said, well, I'm banished from the United States. The State Department will not allow me into the United States because of his relationship to Fidel and all that stuff. So Redford went to Congress and he lobbied his friends and they got Gabo a two week visa to come to Sundance in the summer of 89 and to teach a two week workshop. So that's how he arrived. And then in the meantime, they were selecting different writers to come and take his workshop. And the group was very diverse. So there was a couple of novelists. There was a poet, filmmakers. I believe that was the only playwright in the group, screenwriters from all over the country. And so we had we had two weeks with him. And yeah, he would meet at nine in the morning. And he would talk till about one in the afternoon. And then we would break for lunch and then kind of the rest of the day was our own. And yeah, he was, you know, he's he's kind of a it was kind of a rascal. He he loved to tell impossible stories. It was always hard to tell when he was really telling the truth. And, you know, I'll give you an example of this didn't happen to me. But when I was walking walking with Walter Salas, the director of the motorcycle diaries, he told the story of a time when he was directing documentaries in South America. And he's interviewing great people from all over the continent. And he interviewed Gabo. And when he was interviewing Gabo, Gabo said, so who's your next person? And Walter said, it's gonna be the president of Chile. And Gabo said, oh, my God, he has an incredible story. You know, he was one of 11 children, and all 10 of his siblings died. And that gave him the drive to become important and eventually become the president of Chile. And Walter says, that's amazing. I can't I can't wait to ask him about that. He meets the president of Chile. Walter says, what does it feel like to have all 10 of your siblings die? And President Chile said, what the fuck did you hear that from? And he said, well, Gabo told me, you know, Gabo just loves to make shit up. He loves to, you know, mess with your head. And so he was very playful with us. He was very, very, he might have been my grandfather, you know, down to earth, loved the dirty jokes, told wonderful stories. And yeah, I mean, one of the funniest things he said was, he was once in Bogota, and he was picked up by a taxi driver. And the taxi driver said, you're Garcia Marquez, aren't you? And Gabo said, yes, I am. And the taxi driver pulled over and he turned around and started yelling at him. He said, why do you make your novel so tame? You know life is crazier than your books. Tell us how it really is, how crazy it really is. You know, and I've always, I've always loved that story. You know, the thing he told us, which I found amazing, he said, there's not a single metaphoric word in any of my books. Everything in the books happened because I'm really a journalist, not an novelist. And so he would say, well, someone said, well, how about when Remedios, you know, the beauty gets blown into the sky, you know, by the wind. And he said, well, I heard that story. And like a good journalist, I wrote it down and I put it in my book. So for him, everything he writes is reality and not metaphor, not, you know, you can't read his books sort of like, you know, with a Marxist slant or postmodern slant or anything like that. So that was his emphasis on realism in quote unquote, magic realism is what stayed with me the most. Cool. You know, these are, speaking of like, complicated times, I can't imagine what he would think of what is happening now or maybe he predicted it, but Yeah, well, in, in, what in Sienaños, they have an amnesia plague. Right. So, you know, at first people are forgetful of little things and then eventually entire town loses its memory. And Jose Acadio Buendía goes around writing the names of all the things like he'll write a piece of paper horse and put it on a horse. And, you know, people remember what things were called, but he was very interested in that idea of, of plagues and, you know, how, how a society becomes overcome by something beyond its control. And then later on in the book, it's the war. It's the civil war that becomes out of control, you know. So anyway, I think he really had a sensitivity to, to that, to that feeling. And of course, you know, his title, Love in the Time of Cholera, you know, points out another, another plague. Yeah, I just want to just point out to, I just want to share with some of the folks that, that are joining us. And I want to open up questions in a second that you and I had this conversation with students at Carnegie Mellon about the re, the re, the re, the renaissance of, of Marisol and the number of productions that were happening on colleges and university campuses. And just that, and why, and why people were gravitating toward that play again. I was wondering if you could share some of what we talked about a little bit about, about what you said and, and why do you think that we're, we're revisiting that play again, or why people are really, you know, I don't know, they're, they're using that play to speak to the now and, and what that means. Yeah, I mean, I think the play articulates a vision of anarchy, chaos, a feeling that the comfortable rules of normal life no longer apply. And I think that's, that's the feeling we feel now, you know, the play has gone through a cycle of being very popular, and then sort of being disappearing for a while, and coming back, and it kind of was very popular in the 90s, disappeared, you know, sort of late 90s, and then researched when 9-11 happened, and then kind of went down, and then during like Occupy Wall Street, it was very popular again. And then down, and now under Trump, it's come back, probably stronger than ever. Because, you know, the play articulates a vision of anarchy that we are struggling with daily, and the thing about any play is that it provides a structure for understanding. This play hopefully will help you understand what this anarchy feels like and how to sort of control it. And I think it, we turn to these, you know, kind of works, whether it's like The Children of Men, you know, the great film, or the films of Bunwell, you know, we turn to them because we want to see how others have interpreted turbulence and interpreted, you know, darkness, so that perhaps we can live through our darkness with more courage and energy and insight than we've had before. So I think that is probably the main reason. Yeah, I get, yeah, there were a lot of productions in the works before, you know, coronavirus came in and then a lot of them had to disappear. But yeah, I think that's the main reason, you know. And in the play, you know, Marisol has a guardian angel, and the guardian angel says, I'm now going to stop guarding you. And you are at the mercy of whatever violence, whatever male, you know, malevolence is out there, and that's becomes her life for the play. And I think people feel that, I think, you know, people feel not that they have, that they abandoned religion in any way, but I think people feel the sense of, you know, whatever logic or rational thought was, was protecting us, you know, from the forces of chaos, that it's gone, it's disappeared. And every day, you know, we get confirmation of that in the White House, you know. So I think that's why, I think that's why the play speaks to people. Cool, thank you, Jose. Now I just want to let folks say hello and talk to you and ask you questions. Are you ready? I guess, okay. I see one hand up. I'm going to go ahead and unmute you as we go. Denise Mendoza, you are unmuted. Thank you. Hi, a big fan of your plays. Thank you so much for your work. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I was just wondering, what's your process when you go about creating characters? Yeah, I mean, the process is partly detective work, you know, partly being a spy, spying on your friends. I have children, I used to spy on them all the time. I stole mercilessly from my own children. But yeah, I mean, it is a process of sort of like asking, you have to be a detective, you have to be a psychologist, you have to be able to sort of like understand the motivations behind people and understand why they choose certain words to say and choose not to say other things. So you begin to interrogate the characters in your life for their motives, for their fears, for their desires, and you try to structure your characters along the things that you learn about those people. And then eventually, sort of like a circle, so you start the circle, the tightest circle is the people closest to you and then that circle expands to people that you know, sort of, and then it expands to quote unquote, society at large. And the forces that you may not have direct contact with, I don't have direct contact with Trump say, but you know, he is a force in my life. So I feel free to write about him if I want. And ironically, like, when you get to the largest circle, you actually go back to the smallest circle, which is you. You know, you interrogate yourself, and you apply to each of your characters a different aspect of yourself. So in one play, you could have, what's your name, Denise? No. Yes, Denise. Denise. So yes, in a play, you could have evil Denise, who, you know, wants to kill her sister or something. You know, you have, you have generous Denise, who gives the homeless people, you know, so all the different aspects of your personality that you know better than anyone else are the things that you can apply to each of your characters. You know, you kind of do this in broad strokes, and then later on, as you refine your work, you get more and more subtle and more nuanced. And it's not quite so schematic, you know, it's not quite so like a formula. But you know, that's sort of the bedrock of the characters you're creating. And, you know, you have to be a great listener. You know, I spent a lot, well, before the lockdown, spent a lot of time in New York listening to people's conversations and, you know, wondering where this stuff comes from. Like long ago, I was walking through Brooklyn, and I saw an old lady with a little kid, a little kid had a bag of groceries, and he was showing it to the old lady. The old lady looked in the bag and she says, English muffins, you sick fuck. And I spent weeks trying to figure out that, that one comment, like, why did she say that? You know, why? What brought him to that point? Who is the kid? What's their relationship, you know? So yeah, that that's part of that. To me, that's part of the fun of being a writer is having, in a way, it's like everyone's, everyone's diaries are in your library for you to read. You know, everyone's journal and deepest thoughts and worst nightmares are there for you. You know, a really good friend of mine who's a novelist once said to me, you have to write as if everyone you know is dead. Because a lot of writers think, oh, I can't write this, upset my mom. I can't write this. My spouse will be mad. And my friend, the novelist, she was very insistent that no, you have to write as if everyone's dead. You can't censor yourself in order to not transgress against someone you love. That's a tough one. You know, that's a moral choice on the part of the writer. You know, I tend to be, I tend to write whatever. You know, whatever I find interesting about someone I love, I write about it. Okay, this was so helpful. Thank you so much. You're very welcome. Lovely. Next up, we have Sean Lesher or Lesher. Lesher. We are unmuted. Okay, just want to make sure I was on one. Yes. Virtually meet you and thank you so much for doing this. Like so, I mean, obviously, like most of the people in this call, I mean, I'm a huge fan of Marisol. And I loved hearing you talk about how it comes back in waves, depending on the times and everything. And it does make sense to hear that people were interested in working on it. And I remember a couple of years ago, I saw a college short play festival and one of them did 187. Oh, and I remember just falling in love with that play and thinking like, why aren't more people doing this in scene side classes? And so that made me want to ask you, like, what are the plays that when you look at right now and you think, okay, why aren't more people doing this of your own work? Yeah, that's a great, I'm so glad someone finally asked me that. You know, I've written 26 full length plays and about 31X. And every time someone says, oh, we're doing Marisol, I say to them, God damn it, I have 25 other plays you could do, you know, and you know, Marisol is the most popular one. So people do that, or they'll do cloud tectonics or something. So yeah, there's so many plays of mine that don't get produced because, you know, no one knows about them or they're more obscure. 187, I wrote for a theater company in LA, and we would make it angels. And we were doing plays that had a kind of political side to it. And I was really interested in Prop 187, which was, you know, one of the props that they were putting up in California for the voters to vote on, you know, and so, and it would have deported a lot of people if it had passed. So it was really interesting, like, how do you interrogate that particular conflict between two people, you know, two regular people? But yeah, yeah, no, no, I always try to lobby people to just do the more obscure plays or, you know, to do sonnets for an old century or to do adoration of the old woman or bulleteros for the disenchanted or sueño or any number of plays. But, you know, that's the way it goes. I can't control it. So thank you for asking, no one's ever asked me that. All right, next up we have Alexandra Hernandez. You are unmuted. Hi. This is really exciting for me. I'm so nervous right now. Well, one of the things that I wanted to ask is a little bit, is to expand a little bit on more adaptations. I'm working on an adaptation right now. It's my first time working on one. So I'm just kind of interested, like, on pointers or like, what are important things to keep in mind when you're doing adaptation? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, the thing you have to sort of tell yourself is that what you're creating is a brand new work of art. You're not interpreting the piece that you're adapting. You're not shining it up and making it relevant for today. You are creating a brand new work of art. And so you, as the adapter, have as much agency as the creator of the original work. You should exercise that agency and change the things that you feel are necessary in order to make a better story. You know, a lot of the adaptations I've done, so for instance, when I adapted On the Road for film. On the Road is a great book, but it's not a flawless book. It has problems. And some of the problems have to do with the female characters. The women in that book are either pregnant or left behind to raise children alone or they're constantly being cheated on and that kind of stuff. And, you know, it's a very 1950s, 1940s, 1950s lens through which to observe women. But it's not how we do that, you know, today. So I did a lot of work in trying my best to give the female characters in On the Road more agency, more of their own inner lives, life not dependent on the lives of the men around them. I don't know if I totally succeeded, but that was, as the adapter of that book, that's where I felt my mission was, you know, to somehow take this archaic, misogynist novel and bring it to a more enlightened age. And I think that's probably true of almost any, any adaptation, you know, you adapt something because you love it. But in your adaptation, you, I think, would go about fixing what you might consider the flaws and problems in that work to make it even better. You know, I mean, I mean, you look at it like Shakespeare was probably the world's greatest adapter. He rarely wrote anything that was original, almost everything was something preexisting, and he took it and just transformed things. You know, the thing that's trickiest about adapting is that you're working with something that's written in someone else's voice. And what you need to do is apply your voice to that. And make sure that every line of that play or that story or film is in your voice. Not so when I'm writing, you know, 100 years of solitude, I have to balance when it's Gabo's voice and when it's my voice. And sometimes the two don't agree, so you have to work it out. But that's to me, one of the challenges of adaptation is finding where your voice lives in that work of art. You know, so for it to be a great example. So I adapted Life as a Dream, Calderón classic. And the long passages where Seguez Mundo talks about how miserable he is, you know, and it's beautiful. And it's the metaphors that he uses are the metaphors that Calderón had access to in his time. And they're amazing. But I didn't want to use his metaphors. I wanted to update them so that they were the metaphors that I would use in my language. So Seguez Mundo calls himself, he says, I am the soul of polio and anthrax, to describe how miserable he is. And obviously neither polio nor anthrax were concepts in Calderón's time. But I really felt that those two words really captured the terrible degradation that that character was living through. I hope that's helpful. Yeah. Yeah, that is. Yeah. So I guess I'm working, I'm adapting like bilingual, telenovelas, the original style. So I think yeah, this is helpful because there's been a lot of, I'm working with a lot of back and forth between translating my word of word on the cross and kind of like trying to figure out word for word, especially with the translation of Shakespeare. Unfortunately, I can't, your audio is really not working well. So I missed almost everything you just said. Alexandra, do you want to type up your follow up in the chat? Yeah, your mic settings might be, we're getting a little garbled. So I'm going to go ahead and take another question. We can come back to this. We actually had an anonymous question in the chat. Alexandra, I'm so sorry. We're completely garbled. We're not getting any of this. So I'm going to go ahead and mute you. And we'll come back, right? Great. The question that we had in the chat was, what writing prompts do you give your students? Yeah, I have several. One of them involves pictures. So I've got this enormous stack of postcards of artwork from all over the world. And what I would do often as a prompt is, I'll use two illustrations. Here's a picture of my niece. And this is the cover of 100 years of solitude. So what I would do as a prompt is I would take two random images, this one and this one say, and say that this one is the world before your story begins, the Marquez one. And this one, my niece, is the world after your story ends. And what you have to write is the middle postcard. You have to write what is in the middle, what connects the beginning and the end of the story. And so these two would be hard to do. But usually I pick easier ones. But that would be a major prompt is write the middle card, the missing piece that is the bridge between the beginning and the end. Another one I like to use a lot is based on two theories of mine. One theory is that the more you restrict the work of art, the greater your freedom is. So if you think of Shakespeare sonnets that are very restricted in terms of the rules that govern the writing of Shakespeare sonnets. And then within those rules, he was amazingly creative because I think the rules provided a paradoxical sense of freedom for him. So that's the idea number one. Idea number two is that good writing is essential. So good writing comes from your smells, your taste, your hearing, what you feel in your hands, what you see in your eyes, sounds and things like that. So I always urge writers to write from their senses. So these prompts, this exercise involves both of those ideas. A lot of rules, a lot of sensuality. So what I do is I give the writers a series of prompts. For example, it's New Year's Eve. You're on a boat. Someone is playing the guitar. Someone is passing around a bottle of rum. Someone tells a secret. Someone cracks Sid Kami joke at the expense of Mike Pence. Someone throws a baby overboard. Usually 10 different prompts. And each prompt tightens the rules of this story. And each prompt is involved with a different sense. So some of the prompts are like, you taste an orange. Someone discusses the nature of flight. So that all of your senses are engaged. And then I say, go and I give them 20 minutes to write. And so they take all these things and you'd think because everyone's working with the same 10 prompts that you get the same thing. No, it's amazing. Like the absolute incredible variety of writing I've gotten over the, because I use this exercise all the time, the variety I've gotten over the years has been astonishing. And no two pieces are the same. And so those are the kinds of prompts. I like to give a lot of prompts and I like to make them super, super specific so that people have a foundation to work from. Wonderful. Not seeing Alexandra's follow up yet. So we're going to go to Erlina Ortiz. You are unmuted. Thank you. So I wrote my question down because I'm a little nerd. And also just helps me to not have to be nervous when I'm asking it. So whatever it was, how do you balance being a Latinx playwright with other topics you're interested in exploring? I'm known for writing social political dramas, highlighting Latinx communities, but my plays are also really funny. I can't market my play about Latina revolutionaries as a comedy, but it is funny. And I want to explore other things that aren't just Latino, like science fiction, or just I have like so many other ideas and so many other genres that I want to explore. So how do you explain what your voice is or develop what your voice is when I feel like every single one of my plays has a totally different voice? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I'm a horror for comedy. I'll do anything for a laugh, honestly. So I'm so glad that you're writing comedy, too. Yeah. I mean, I think the Latinx experience is not divorced from the world. I mean, we don't live, I mean, some of us do live in segregated communities, but as a culture, we're not apart from the rest of the world. So, you know, my feeling is that the world is ours. You know, you want to write about politics, it's yours. You know, this is your time. This is your life. This is your energy and your creativity and you own it all. There's nothing off limits to you. You want to write about lawyers in Harvard? You want to write about, you know, guerrilla soldiers in Bolivia? You want to write any, you know, that that shit is yours because you're human being, you know, and all of human history has come down to this moment. And so it belongs to all of us, you know. If you wanted to adapt, you know, the Iliad, it's yours. You want to adapt Gilgamesh, it's yours, you know, or Lorca's poetry, it's yours. So I've always believed in maximum artistic freedom for artists. I don't think anything is off limits. I don't believe in you can't or you won't or you shouldn't. That's bullshit. I do not believe that at all. And I think, you know, you want to write about, you know, you're a woman, you want to write about guys. I bet you would write great stuff about guys. You know, it's all kinds of things that are yours because you're creative and you're, you've got curiosity and you're intelligent and you absorb things. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't put a label on it. I wouldn't, I wouldn't put a label on, all right, I'm a Latinx writer, so therefore this is my domain. It's like, no, I'm a human being in the 21st century. It's all my domain. There's nothing I can't figure out. There's nothing that is beyond my abilities. So that's how I would. So yeah, go. Alexandra, what she was trying to say was that she's working with some friends on a telenovela bilingual adaptation of Twelfth Night so that there's a lot of back and forth on how they translate prose and jokes. How important is it to stay close to the exact translation? Oh, wow. That's a tough one. I mean, I've never done anything remotely like that. So I don't, I don't know how to advise her. I think, you know, as I said before, you have to make it your own. And the thing with like Shakespeare's humor, a lot of it is, is dead to us. We just don't know why it might have been funny in his time. You know, I mean, he's lucky because he's a lot of physical humor, which transcends time. So we get it. But I think a lot of specific quote unquote jokes in his work, I think just don't don't work for us anymore. So yeah, I mean, I think you just have to substitute, you know, those Shakespearean, that Shakespearean humor for your own, you know, particular humor that comes from your life and your culture. Beautiful. So next up, we have Nora Montes. You are unmuted. Hi, Jose. Pleasure to zoom meet you. Yes, likewise. I like your picture back there. Thanks. Anytime I record anything, I have to make sure that it's on the level of Frida's. Yeah. So you're a parent. And can you tell me how being a father has inspired your writing and how you find time to work? That's a great question. You know, before I became a parent, I didn't care about the future much. Like I cared about, all right, I've got to like, you know, pay the rent and I've got to write this play and, you know, go on a date or whatever these mundane things are. And then I got married and I want it to be a good husband. But I wasn't oriented towards the future. And then when my daughter was born, I realized, holy shit, the kid's going to be 16 someday. She's going to come across my writing and it better be good. You know, and for the first time I thought about the future as a writer. Like I was always writing for the present. I was already writing for like contests or writing for, you know, producer or whatever. But the first time I really thought, oh, shit, I've got to write work that lasts. And I've got to like, improve my artistry to the point where my work can live through years and decades and still be interesting and relevant and, you know, personal and all that stuff. So that was probably the biggest change is that having kids made me oriented towards the future in a way I hadn't been before. You know, it was hard when they were younger, because, you know, I worked at home, worked at home. I was, you know, a parent, my ex was a parent. And so we shared the kids and all the work that involved as much as we could. So I have to say, it slowed me down. You know, having kids slowed down. It's just, you know, I remember when I first took my daughter home from the hospital, I put her in a little car seat, put her in the office where I was and I worked for six hours and she slept for six hours. Oh my gosh, this is so easy. What are people bitching about? This is the easiest thing in the world. So last time that ever happened. In my son, honestly, for two years, he never slept through the night. So, you know, I would do like, you know, the midnight feeding, the 2am feeding and that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's hard. It's hard. And also, there's this stress about shit, I can't, how am I going to provide for them? They need school, they need shoes that, you know, and I grew up really poor on Long Island. You know, we were nine kids and, you know, we were, my dad was a gender and my mom had a third grade education. So we were very poor. So I was determined my kids are not going to be poor. You know, there's that stress. It's hard. It's the hardest work you'll ever do. I mean, I think it's, you know, people who do child care for a living. I mean, God bless them because it's, it's a really difficult job. You know, I mean, the good thing, the rewards are great. So, you know, when you see them evolving as human beings and they start asking funny questions and then they sass you, you know, you kind of love that, you know, so it pays back. Well, have a six-year-old. So that, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absorbing as much. I mean, the biggest cliche is that it goes fast and it does, you know, I mean, my kids are in there, my son is 27 and my daughter is 32, you know, and it's like, what? When did that happen? You know, I went by so fast. But yeah, I mean, I, you know, I also was inspired by them. That's the other thing is that they are, you know, I think it was Tolstoy who once said, you know, I didn't understand human nature until I had my own children. And it's true. Once you watch these things evolve, you know, from crawling to walking to, you understand human nature on a level that can't be described, you know, and if you're sensitive to that and observant and can write that down, it will enrich your writing in an amazing way, you know. And then I just totally plagiarized them. So for instance, you know, one day when my daughter was about six, it was like 11 o'clock at night and she comes into the living room to watch TV or something. And I say, honey, it's past your bedtime. You need to be in bed. And she like thinks about it and she says, well, I know, but my brain people tell me I can stay up late if I want. And I said, tell your brain people that your daddy said. But I thought of that word brain people, you know, it's like all the voices in a person's head. And I wrote a play with that title, you know, so constantly, you know, inspired by them. Thank you. Yeah. You're welcome. Good luck. Beautiful. Alec Andres-Squares, you are unmuted. Hi, Jose. Pleasure to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Alec, when they stated before. But so I saw Love Song Imperfect a few a couple of months back. It actually was my first date with my now girlfriend. But one of the things that really struck me about that play was the and a lot of your work is how like deeply poetic things can be stated without feeling like you're trying too hard to find a new way of saying things. Like finding these new nuanced ways of describing phenomena that are like, so no one would think to phrase it that way, yet it resonates in a way that is so deep. And I was wondering how you come to that if you just kind of have these little like, do you have phrases pop into your head? How like, do you sit and toil to try and find how to phrase the thing? Like, what is that like for you? Yeah. Well, I mean, to back up a tiny bit, I have a couple of theories. One is that every play has its own language. And you, the writer, create the world of that play. And so the world of that play has very specific rules and they're your rules. They're not, you know, John Patrick Shanley's rules or Stephen Geer-Gess's rules are your rules. And so you are totally in control of the physics and chemistry and biology of the world you create. So if you decide that in this world, people speak as if they have an IQ of 200, you know, or if they speak in metaphors or if they speak like gangsters or if they, whatever it is, then those are the rules of your world. And then you stick to that rule and you make that consistent for yourself. So I don't worry about like people say, oh, you know what, Latinos don't speak that way. I'm like, fuck you, man, you're doing my place, you know. And so that to me is like the license you have. You have the license to create your own world with its own sound. And so that to me, I start off with that premise. So with Love Song and Perfect, you know, Love Song is a heightened world. You know, they've outlawed death. The United States has had war with the entire world. Things are, the stakes are high in this world. So I felt that the language needed to be consistent with with the drama of the play. And so the language is very heightened. And, you know, I don't, I mean, you know, I've been writing for 40 plus years. So I just can do it without thinking about it very much. After all this practice, you know, 40,000 hours or whatever it was. And so I don't really think about it. I let I let the characters talk to me, basically. And a lot of times, this is a cliche novelists use all the time, they feel that all they're doing is taking dictation and writing the voices in your head that are speaking to you at that moment. However, there is a good deal of craft that goes into it. So once, say, a first draft is written, and you've kind of like just vomited your poetic guts on a piece of paper, you know, then you refine the work, you refine the poetry, you find the metaphor so that, you know, it's not just a subjective like energy on the page, it's actually something in the audience who isn't you would be able to access, you know. So that to me is part of the process. But I, you know, I've, I let my characters go, I just turn them loose and see where they take me. And sometimes they surprise you, you know, hopefully. But yeah, and I love but the thing is, I love poetry. So I'm feeding the poetic library in me all the time. So I'm reading Lorca, I'm reading Pablo Neruda, you know, I'm even reading like great poetic novelists like Gunta Grass and Thomas Mann and Thomas Pynchon and, you know, Toni Morrison and people like that so that, so that the machinery is constantly being fueled, you know, by by those great writers. Great, thank you so much. Sure, you're very welcome. And you are unmuted. Hi Jose, how you doing? What's up? Good, how you doing? How you doing? I'm Juan. I think I got a great sort of next question to that. I tend to struggle with imagination, you know, and one thing that I always sort of ask myself is that when you're creating a world and they and, you know, you always get that question, well, do you know everything about your world? How much do you know about your world? How much is there too much to know about your world? Is there a line? Is there like this, you know, like trying to find that balance of knowing enough but not, you know, enough so the audience could come into it? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, a lot of the worlds that you create are not that different from the world you live in. So for instance, you know, I sometimes think of writing as like you're in front of a big, you know, like a big DJ's console with all kinds of levers and buttons, right? That's the world. So here's one lever. It's the time lever. You say, oh, I'm just going to fuck with the time lever now. And say, okay, what is it if time is half the speed it is in the real world? What does that do to the rest of the characters? You know, and everything else stays the same. People in this world get up in the morning, they eat breakfast, they have jobs or whatever, but time is half as fast, you know, or this other lever, like, you know, the violence lever. Oh, I'm going to turn this lever tiny bit. And in this world, people are assassinating people whose name is Juan, you know, everything else is the same. But you've tweaked one part of reality, and that tweak affects everything. So to me, that's how I would go about doing it. And that way you won't overload it. You won't, you know, you're not creating an impossible world where not only are they assassinating Juan, but Martians have landed and there are dinosaurs, and Jesus is the mayor, you know, you're not doing that. Yeah, so you take, that's what I mean, like, when when Gabos talks about magic realism and the realism has to be real, you know, in 100 years of solitude, people have to eat, people have to shit, people have to, you know, make money, just like our world, but he's chosen to tweak certain things in that world to make them more heightened and magical. I like that. Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you very well. Very helpful. And we don't want to kill wands. I appreciate that. Although that's a good, that's a good writing prompt. I like that. You should do it. You should do it. Next up, we have Emilio Instructor. You are unmuted. Oh, thank you. Sorry, it's my name for when I teach classes. I forgot to change it back. But I just want to say, first of all, I'm so honored to be in the Zoom where it happened with, let's say, Rivera and I directed Marisol. So I'm sorry, I added to that list of people who directed Marisol, but I enjoyed working on it so much and hope to get to do more of your plays in the future. But I'm actually, oh, it was at UC Irvine. It was my last project before I graduated. Oh, cool. How'd it go? I love the play and I'm grateful that you didn't see it because I can never do your work justice. But everyone enjoyed working on it. Everyone was like, beautiful play, maybe get a real director next time. So you live and you learn. But I'm learning from you as a playwright and I'm really interested in, I was reading about Marisol Adelus, and I had read that you were inspired by your daughter to sort of come up with that. And I'm also just interested in TY in general because I feel like sometimes, even though I teach young people, I kind of don't have interest in it because of what I've seen. It's always like so kiddy and I'm like, yeah, but there's an adult with like an adult has to take a kid to the theater. So how do you find that balance of it being appealing to kids, but the adults can still get a story out of it? Well, I mean, I think with the way Marisol Adelus began, began with bedtime stories that I would tell my daughter. And because you want to sort of like give your kids a sense of confidence or whatever, she was always the hero of every story. And in every story, she would save the world. And so the play Marisela basically was like the combination of all the different stories I told her over the years. And because she was really interested in mythology and stuff, you know, there's so many mythic characters in Marisol. It was Loki and Hercules and Jason, all those characters. So, you know, and for me, the fun is, you know, sort of like I grew up watching, you know, Looney Tunes cartoons, you know, there was always that layer that was like not for kids. It was always that layer that was for the grown-ups, you know, Rocky and Bowling always had these incredible puns that were clearly for the grown-ups and not for the kids. That, you know, when I was writing Marisela, I was very aware that I'm allowed to write in two levels at the same time. I'm allowed to make it colorful and bright. And, you know, I have like, you know, crazy snowmen and stuff like that. But I also have, you know, a seven-headed hydra that's trying to, you know, eat the kids. And, you know, it's like the personification of evil. You know, so for me, it's sort of like, it's part of the challenge and the joy of writing for kids is having that extra layer that is sort of like, all right, someday you'll get it. You know, you don't have to get it today. But when you get it later, you're going to love it. So that's how I approach it. Awesome. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Fernanda Cabello, you are unmuted. Hi. Fernanda! Oh my gosh. How are you? It's been a long time. I know. I've been stalking Jose for years. She has, yes. We did catch up with each other in Brooklyn once. Yes, we did. We did. It's really good to see you. And hi to T. I haven't seen you in a long time either. What's up? I wanted to ask you about the evolution of your playwriting process. As off of like Nora's question about having financial obligations, I think we all start writing plays from a certain place of passion and need to tell a story and desire and anger and all of the great things of youth. And I'd love to know how you know now at this point in your career and your life that it's time for you to sit down and write a play. Like, has that changed for you or how, what is it about some idea or thought that inspires you to sit down and be like, this is my new play? Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, I think, you know, because as you know, I've done a lot of TV and I've done a lot of film. I've always been highly paranoid of my theatrical chops eroding by doing too much of other things. You know, because once you start writing films and like the money's good and so seductive and you're going to this film festival or whatever, you know, it becomes an entire lifestyle. That's hard to give up. It's hard to give up the money. I, for whatever reason, never trusted that life, never invested in that life. I participated in it, you know, and wrote a written probably 20 movies. But I never really got seduced by the lifestyle. You know, I never like had, you know, I never played tennis with Julianne Moore, for instance, you know, never did shit like that. And so to me, writing film was like, I was told people, I write film for money, and I write plays for love. And I never stopped loving plays. So even as I was very busy writing films, and very busy doing TV, whatever, I always found time to sneak in a play, to finish a draft. Even if it took me eight, nine months to finish, you know, I was always in the back burner. When I stopped writing a film for the day, I would then go pick up my play and see what I could do. And so I always had, I've never gone without writing a play. And even now I'm writing a new play. So that's how I've done it mostly. It's really, it's not like, Oh, I know it's time to write a play. In my mind, it's always time to write a play. And the trick is finding the moments. You know, I used to say that I was actually a guerrilla playwright, because I always like road plays like undercover and when someone's looking and, you know, when I should be doing something else. Yeah. So here's, here's an example. So let's say I get a film, right? Someone lets me to write a film. It takes a month for the deal to be completed. And so, and then you're supposed to start. Well, I always start while they're trying to do the deal. And for the first two weeks, when I'm supposed to be writing a film, I'm writing a play. And it happens every time they don't know. They'll never know, you know, and I've never turned in a film on time. I've always, I always missed deadlines. You know, I mean, I wrote Marisol when I was working in television, when I was working on Erie, Indiana, you know. And so you just have to do what you have to do. Yay for Erie, Indiana. Yeah, Erie, Indiana. Thank you. Next up we have, oh, thank you. So we have, we have like five-ish minutes. Maybe we could do like a speed round. Sure. Wonderful. Next up, we have Patricia Miller. No pressure there. I love your work. Alec and Juan already talked about the poetic, the metaphor. You've already talked a little bit about how worlds are created. So you've got this massive creativity going on. At what point do you structure it? And how do you know what the audience's ride is going to be? How do you kill the babies, as they say? How do you do that? Yeah. These are all important questions. I mean, I think I, you know, when I write film, I, the film is highly structured, you know, because the way film, film screenwriting is done, it's a very specific three-act structure, and certain things happen at a certain time. I never used that kind of template for a play. For me, a play is always, there's no, there's no precedent for the play I'm writing, you know, and it could be structured any way I want. So some of my plays are four acts. Some of our, you know, one acts 90 minutes long. It really, I let the play tell me what the structure is going to be. And so, as far as audiences go, I never, it's probably to my detriment, never, never, never think about them. Never give a fuck or care what the audience thinks, you know. And, you know, Peter Sellers once said, you know, if half the audience isn't walking out, you're not doing your job. So I, you know, and I tell you, when I used to do more plays in regional theaters, like Hartford stage or whatever, I can sit in the audience and predict who's going to walk out. Like, oh yeah, that guy, he's gonna leave. And I was, I was right a lot. So, you know, I don't, I don't, as I said before, I used to write for my children's future, you know, and I care about what they think of me, but I don't really care about merely what other people think as much. You know, I write for myself, I write for my family, and I don't write for audiences. I certainly don't write for critics. And, you know, and the critics have hated me. I mean, most of the time. Time for about one more from Denise Mendoza. You are unmuted. Hey, just one more question. You talked earlier about where brain people came from. I'm dying to know, where did you get the idea for each day's, each day's dice with leaf? Oh, yeah. Well, that was several things. One of them was my, my divorce. So I wanted to write a play about a marriage in trouble without actually talking about myself and my own particular issues. So, so that like emotional underpinning was really sort of about what is it, what does it feel like when a marriage is severely in crisis? So, but the specifics of the play really came from the life of my brother, Tony, and Tony was a sergeant in the army and he was in Persian Gulf War. He was what they call a forward observer and he did some very dangerous stuff and came back from the war with all these stories. And one of the stories he told was that he once authorized the bombing of a village and basically erased the village from the map. And so to me, like one of the emotional currents in the play is like, how do you love somebody who has killed other people? My brother who I love killed people, killed innocent men, women and children in the course of his war. And so I had the, I had the internal moral dilemma of like, how do I love him and condemn what he did? So a lot of, a lot of the play with the issues between Gabby and Benito are about what he did in the war and how she's supposed to respond to it. He says at one point, I said, look at my hands. These are the same hands that used to love you. You know, you look at my hands and you see blood, but that's not what I see. So, you know, these are, two people love each other were two very different points of view that are almost irreconcilable. So that was part of it. Another part of it, and this is like the silly part is that when my son was about four years old, we were walking down streets in LA and he heard a cat crying. And we were looking around. We couldn't find it. And they found it sitting on the tire of the Volkswagen Beetle. This little kitten was under the fender sitting on the thing. And he said, Daddy, can we take it home? And I'm like, I'm allergic to cats, but I said, okay, fine, we'll take the cat home. Take the cat home. He names the cat climber because client cat like to climb on things. And then one day we had Santa Anna wins. And they blew down our backyard. Sorry, blew down the fence of our backyard. And all night long, we were up here in Coyote's howling in the backyard because the Coyotes could roam anywhere they wanted to now. And then we lost sight of the cat. Like my son was like, Daddy, I can't find climber. I don't know where climber is. So my ex and I went out to the backyard and we found climbers collar and some hair and some blood. And I realize a climber had been taken by the Coyotes. So I kept thinking like a, I don't know. I kept wondering what was their conversation like? If the cat in the Coyote could talk, what would that conversation be like? So that was really the beginning of the play. The first scene I wrote was the cat Coyote dialogue. And so the Coyotes like, Hey, come, come to the wild side, come into the desert. The cat's like, no, I like it where I am, you know, all you're going to do is eat me, you know. And so that became the start of the play. And then as I developed the play further, I realized, well, that cat Coyote relationship was actually very convenient and important metaphor for the marriage between Benito and Gabby. So that's how it was. Wow. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. And I'm so sorry about the cat. Yeah. You know, to this day, he doesn't know. Oh, you just said it. I know, he's probably not watching. He has his own life now. I'm sure he's heard the story from somebody though. I'm sure. I never told him. I hope he doesn't find out. Right. Thea, where are we at? Do we have to wrap it up? We have a little bit of time if we want to get through a couple more questions. I'll say you have time. Do you have the ring for this? Yeah, yeah, we're good. We're good. Okay. All right, Shelley Fort, you are unmuted. Hi. It's so great to see you virtually. Can you hear? Yes. Here you just write. Thank you. Okay. Awesome. I am struggling these days to be inspired and stay curious when the state of theater is so precarious and the future of theater, what it will look like. How do you stay inspired? Yeah, I guess, I mean, for me, I thrive on absurdity. And it's all absurd right now. It is out of control how crazy things are. And so I don't think I can write about this time period probably for many, many years because it's still too raw. But I'm definitely taking notes for the future. And when you get all kinds of, especially now with misinformation and things on Twitter and things on YouTube, so many competing points of view about what's happening in the world. I find the conflict between those points of view really fascinating and inspiring because conflict is a soul of drama. So there's a lot there. And it's just, yeah, I mean, I just think it's, I think my play is nothing compared to what's going on now. I mean, I just think that the entire world is doing one thing right now. That's never happened in my lifetime. I've never known that to be the case. So for that reason, and many others, I find the current times to be really fascinating. And I keep track of how my friends are doing and my family and what their preoccupations are and what their stories are. And I find inspiration on how they're coping and adapting to what's happening. So to me, it's really, it's sort of like, this time can't be any different than any other time. If the life of a writer is the life of observation and sensitivity and trying to gain insight, then this time is no different. I mean, it's harder because you can't go outside and like spy on people. That's harder to do that. But, you know, there's a lot of shit going on just under the surface, you know, and I think that's really interesting. Marcia Aguilar, you are unmuted. Thank you. So you talked a lot about, you know, the world is ours. It's yours. And you talk about really wanting to inspire confidence and confidence in your daughter. And I think confidence even in writers. And so my question is, as a mentor, you know, what advice, I guess, do you give to your mentors? And is that something that you feel like, how did you come to that? Was it from a mentor of yours as well? So that's kind of my question. Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, I've been very lucky. Like at certain very pivotal points in my life, I intersected somebody really wonderful. You know, so early on, this wonderful director directed my first play, New York, his name was Jack Gelber. And Jack was, you know, really an important playwright in the 50s, American absurdist playwright. He taught me so much. And then later on, you know, when I started working television, I met Norman Lear. And Norman, you know, was an amazing, you know, taught me so much about comedy and stuff. And then later, Walter Salas taught me so much. So I've been very lucky to, like, have the benefit of those encounters. And of course, Gabo himself in 89. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think, you know, as part of it, it's like, no one can teach you things, really. Like, I don't think writing can be taught, actually. But I think what mentors can do is model a kind of life and behavior that is admirable to other people. So what I got from Gabo was like his tremendous mischievous intellect. You know, what I got from Walter was his sense of, like, detail and realism. You know, but beyond that, it was like they're what they modeled us as human beings, you know, honesty, compassion, curiosity. You know, all these people that I've admired and have been pivotal for me, you know, have demonstrated how to be in the world in an honorable and loving way. You know, and to me, that's important. You know, how do you treat other people? How do you treat a mate? How do you treat your children? You know, and, you know, I don't know what it's perfect, but, you know, what I've gathered from these mentors was, you know, their sense of honor and humility and humor. Thank you. You're welcome. All right. Shall we take one more? This one is from Monica. Hi. Thank you. Thanks for hanging out a few extra minutes. Monica Sanchez. I wanted to, since you brought up Swinio earlier, I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of the video. So anyway, I know it's terrible. But anyway, so be it. I guess the question I have has to do with following up on the idea of craft and would you share any of your pedagogical strategies, especially with young writers in terms of revision and how we stay excited and excite our students about sticking with the rewriting process? Yeah. That's so important. I mean, I think, you know, if I were teaching, what I would say is the most important thing to do is finish the damn thing. Don't rewrite the first 10 pages until you're 60 years old, because they, you know, finish it, get to the end, even if it's terrible. You know, it's like David Mamet says it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be done. So I would say go and, you know, I write very quickly. I write my first drafts very, very quickly. And, but I make sure I get to the end and I never stop to rewrite anything. And so now I've finished the first draft. I've gotten the first draft. I've written the words that end at the end. And so after that, however, to me is a real fun part of writing. After that is the part of writing where it's like every word counts and you can spend, you know, it's like the French, the cliche about the French, they spend all afternoon putting in one word and all evening taking the same word out, you know. And so you really then you sweat the structure and the sound of your piece in the second draft. And to me, that's where your competence as a craftsman comes in. You know, that's what I would do. So like, so you divide the work into two parts. Part A is emotional and intuitive and involuntary and it's vomit, vomit, vomit on the page till you get to the end. Step B is, okay, now I am a craftsman building the perfect cabinet and every word is important and every word has a certain meaning. And so I will now craft this piece, you know, as delicately precisely as I can. Absolutely. Thank you, Jose. Thank you guys. I really appreciate you joining us this afternoon in the midst of another, you know, a different kind of pandemic than Gabo wrote about. You know, for the record, I want you to know that I directed the House of Ramon Iglesia. All right, thank you. In grad school and I think that was the first time I ever wrote to you because I said I was asking you which version I should use. And you said use the one that's like, that has the most cuss words in it or whatever it was. I forgot or something like that. But Jose, thanks so much. Please stay safe. Yes. Let's stay in touch. And you know, if we have to do this again, we'll do it again and we'll bring you back. I hope you can do that. Yeah, that'd be lovely. Thanks to everyone who came. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much, everyone. We'll see you on Friday. Wait, Saturday. Saturday. Saturday. We'll see you on Saturday. So Saturday, we have Sharice Castro Smith joining us. So we'll send out, I know, so we'll send out, we'll send out a thing. I'll email you. I was in the reading of one of her plays. Which one? Feathers and Teeth? No, it was about, geez, maybe three years ago. I forget the name of the play. Okay. I had fun. All right. All right. Well, come back if you want to watch. Okay. Thank you, guys.