Connective Tissue

I love it when I get to share good news.

Especially on days like today, where our country suffers through a leadership crisis of such extraordinary proportion.

I made the big mistake this week of getting on good old Twitter/X, which I had not been on in ages.

Yikes, it’s a cesspool celebration of greed, corruption, and the normalization of inhumanity for the app community. Even the AI fights are comically cruel.

Although, I do have to admit there was a 10-part tweet about how to curb one’s ‘doomscrolling’ impulses that I read all the way through. Which, of course, I read while… ‘doomscrolling’.

It’s been a moment.

On Tuesday, November 8, 2016, the first time this mess was elected, I got rid of my television and my stereo.

I know. It was impulsive. I had gone to dinner with some of my friends at Bloom on Pico, and the election results were giving everyone very intense reactions.

I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to listen to this man, and all these soundbites, for the next four years’, so I yanked the cords from the wall, and the next day gave everything to my family.

Oddly, I also took everything off the walls, put the art in storage, and I got rid of most of my clothes and furniture.

Without thinking about it too much, I stripped my space into a bare minimalist expression. An infinite nothing space where I could create what I needed.

My living room consists of one long white IKEA bookcase that takes up a whole wall, and an equally as long white IKEA table that becomes part dining table, office, and convertible Zoom studio.

The withdrawal phase was intense.

I yearned to hear Atlanta Housewife Nene Leakes go off on someone just one more time. Was veteran newscaster Pat Harvey still anchoring the channel 2 news? What were the Jeopardy clues?

I went from constant noise in my Koreatown apartment to an intense quiet that disturbed even me at times.

Silence, I discovered, is also a language.

Eventually, every time I yearned to get lost in a television show, there was something to read, or some writing to get done.

And sometimes, there was just me, alone with myself, learning how to meditate, take a walk through the neighborhood, or sit in a coffeehouse full of foreign language and read a book.

When I was very young, I read a life changing biography (for me, at least) by Dorothy Day, former heiress who took a vow of poverty and founded the Catholic Worker soup kitchens during the Depression, called ‘The Long Loneliness’. Don’t say it, I was that kid. It kind of prepped me for being alone with myself and enjoying me.

I also don’t have much of a formal education, so reading books on the daily started to help with expanding my own language and writing skill. I ended up using my USC.edu to subscribe to the NYTimes, LATimes, Chicago Tribune, SF Chronicle and Washington Post.

Even in the last few years, I can feel an expansion of my vocabulary, and an approach to form in playwriting that I never had a grasp of before.

Eventually I thought I would buy a television, but now, it’s seems too late.

I listen to a ton of music on my earphones, and I have been married to writing for so long, it’s my primary relationship. Writing will get everything in the will.

This year, I have four plays in various states of becoming that will have some sort of presentation soon. It’s terrifying to consider, but also exciting to make happen. One is a quiet character driven ensemble piece, one is epic in approach, one is adaptation, and the other is a musical.

I wouldn’t have gotten this much work done without being in a consistent monk like space where I over emote, talk to myself, perform my text nightly in my underwear, create unique and original modern dances in site specific places like the bathroom, and yes, even feel an intense sort of lonely that only words seem to cure.

My comfort comes from a belief (or a mindfuck) that I live on an ancient line.

I am part of a thread that connects me to the 22 generations that got me here, and the thousands of years of expression that I make my living in.

Somehow, it takes away all the pressure.

I exist for just this moment in a long line of artists that were and are yet to become.

What this also does is allow me to sit with all the spirits at the table.

I have eight chairs, and they are all full. Both my grandma Martina from Delano, my grandma Socorro from Tijuana have regular spots. Morgan Jenness and Maria Irene Fornes are over there at the end whispering to me about my writing as if we were watching a scene from my play. C. Bernard Jackson and Scott Kelman are doing the drills. Sometimes Horton Foote will show up with his friend, Strindberg, who in turn will bring Edward Albee. My dad and brother appear often, but never to talk about writing, of course. Just futbol soccer.

I am never alone.

The first of the four plays, Aztlan, finally opened in San Francisco.

I wrote until the very last minute the actors would let me give them rewrites, which was basically until 5:30 on our opening night. They are a brave group of urban art warriors.

We have received some wonderful reviews. Even when they are critical, they are still kind and affirmative, and today we got another one from the local San Francisco PBS radio station, KQED.

I like this one because he caught my attempt at the layers of writing, language, history and environment that I was trying to do in a very short time.

A three act play in 80 minutes.

It’s not all successful, but my ambition was to go out on the wire like a Wallenda.

Where do we come from?

In 1967, John Lion helped found the Magic Theater.

He had the wisdom to invite a poet, Michael McClure, to be in residence for 11 years.

He invited many others, like the very great John O’Keefe, and made an aesthetic based on place, people, culture and the times.

The most famous resident there next to the water was Sam Shepard, who stayed for 10 years, and wrote some of his most enduring work at the Magic, including True West, Fool for Love, and his Pulitzer-prize winning, Buried Child.

Other stewards of this funky on the edge space, like Mame Hunt, Loretta Greco, and the current leader, the saintly and restless, Sean San Jose, have brought folks into the theater, like Paula Vogel, Jessica Hagedorn, Taylor Mac, Margo Hall, Lloyd Suh, Richard Montoya, Campo Santo and so many others.

It’s an incredibly humbling privileged joy to feel no pressure.

My only job is to tell the story of today in the time that I am given on this planet.

I came to the Magic because I was in search of two of my playwriting heroes, Octavio Solis and Nilo Cruz. They had both been produced here, beautifully and I yearned to be as expressive as they were.

I was following them on the great Latino playwright migration. Along with folks like Jose Rivera, Migdalia Cruz, Caridad Svich, Karen Zacarias, Roy Conboy, Lynne Alvarez and so many others.

Wherever they were working was a place I wanted to try my hand at as well.

It took me about twenty something years to get in the door at the Magic. That seems about right. No worries. I was cutting my teeth at the Mission Cultural Center, Josie’s Juice Joint, The Lab, Theatre Artaud, Different Light and Modern Times Bookstores every time I came up to work in the Bay.

And that’s how we make a life.

We find our place in the great ancient thread, and we just tell our stories.

Poetry always follows along.

Honesty, inquiry, urgency.

And lots of writing.

It’s as easy as that.

And so damn hard.

https://kpfa.org/area941/episode/review-aztlan-at-the-magic-theatre/

Photo by Jay Yamada.