Live art. Who says what?
Lima, early 1990s. A car bomb seven floors away. Hostages. A curfew. Three writers who keep meeting to write. Lucas hasn't written anything since his only novel; Marla writes about a wife who stabs her husband and doesn't know why; Juan is obsessed with a man who draws on the walls of public restrooms and on a prostitute's skin. Dramatis Personae is a play about what writers do with other people's pain — and their own.
A playwright who spent ten years caring for her father and made decisions she doesn't apologize for. A man who lost fifty kilos looking for something that wasn't in his body. They don't know each other. They share the same restaurant, different tables, each trying to reach someone who never listens — until they find each other in the impossible reality of theatre.
Written with Julia Thays. Amanda Luna, a television actress, will always be Sofi: the little girl with blue ribbons the whole country remembers and she needs to forget. She returns from Madrid without work, without a clear identity, and with Fernando, the man who always takes care of things. One day she crosses the street without looking. Or perhaps looking too hard. From a hospital bed, between sleep and waking, Amanda Luna begins to devise the only plan no one can carry out for her.
A crumbling family mansion barely holds under the weight of those who live in it: an old man clinging to it as if it could still hold everything together, a son lost in his obsessions, and a granddaughter trying to keep what's left standing. Then three strangers arrive, determined to buy it, and what was already broken finally gives way. Then it starts to rain.
Written with Josué Méndez. A friendless man, locked inside himself, is convinced of his own lucidity: he thinks too much and acts too little. One night he crashes the farewell party of a man he despises; he tries to humiliate him and ends up exposed. Based on Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the play is about the one enemy no one escapes: oneself. And the dark pleasure of knowing it.
A theatre. Any theatre. Tonight. Onstage, a company has been performing Les Champs du Péché for months — a nineteenth-century French melodrama: lovers, inheritances, ghosts, swords. Then the lead actor starts to forget his lines. Is it the clown's fault?
Didi Coquette is a drag queen with an impeccable show and a heart that won't quite let go. Reynaldo, her best friend, is the one who knows her best. This weekend, in the borrowed apartment of a mysterious banker, they'll drink too much, they'll dance, and Reynaldo will confess something that will change everything. Gay Play is a comedy about identity, loyalty, and the moment intimacy becomes uncomfortable.
Three ways of loving that begin as a game and end where no one wanted to go. A woman who refuses to choose, a man who loves someone who may not exist, and a bond that crosses a line impossible to undo. Here desire is not clean, love is not enough, and the truth always arrives too late. Threesome is a play about what happens when two is no longer enough. And when three isn't either.
A visual art. Who looks where?
The daily life of Adriana, her husband, and their two children unfolds with military precision, but the delicate family balance is disrupted by her pregnancy. In Adriana's mind, there is only room for four. The five family members fight each other to secure one of the four spots.
Mercedes, a young orphan, falls into the clutches of Silvia, a widow obsessed with motherhood who manipulates her into seducing a young man and getting pregnant. Silvia will do everything in her power to keep the baby, including murder.
Claudia and Felipe couldn't be more different. As the world is ravaged by a zombie outbreak that began in Peru, they'll discover that social differences matter little when a drunk and a security guard are your only hope for survival. A romantic comedy, zombie movie, road movie, and musical, all in one.
The art of words. Who thinks what?
Only when Franco Giraldo discovers a notebook written by his late father does he begin to understand the true nature of the bonds that have held his family together. Or torn it apart. As he unravels his father's sinister character, his manipulations and lies, Franco, about to be married, also discovers who he is. And what he is capable of.
Pedro and Álex are separated by the pandemic. As Pedro writes a diary that becomes the chronicle of a world on hold, fear for his partner and the threat of the virus lead him to discover a way of telling a life: his own, another's, or that of any man who desires men. A contemporary love novel combining dramatic, narrative and intimate diary forms.
As a child, I never imagined I would end up writing for people who don't speak my language. That a play of mine would open in New York, another in Rio de Janeiro, another in Buenos Aires. That I would walk through London while writing a piece for the BBC, and travel to Switzerland for my first film festival. ← We won!
I also never imagined that in my mid-fifties I would discover I was a novelist (late, some will say; on time, I say). Nor that, after thirty years in theatre, I would also have written for screen, for radio, and two novels (so far).
Three decades. Three mediums. And I still don't know how to do anything else.
Yale School of Drama · MFA in Dramatic Writing · 2009