15 Jul Noelle Viñas Artist Talk

What made you want to become a writer?

I grew up constantly writing in journals and reading. My family members used to make fun of me because of how focused I could be while reading a book – they labeled my singular ability to focus on a story and nothing else, despite having a loud & large family around me, as being on “planeta Libro.” It wasn’t just that stories pulled me in, but my upbringing: it was clear to me (both of my parents met as English language teachers in Uruguay) that language was a path to agency and power. Not just in the way that it allowed people to conduct business on an international scale, which was the purpose of the project my parents were on when they first met, but also in the way stories have power. It was obvious when on playgrounds my first year in the States, I had no friends and mostly confusion because I didn’t have agency in English. In some ways, I think my becoming a writer is an overcompensation for those times in early elementary school when I struggled to be understood and despised it. As I got older and began my undergrad in acting, and I struggled to find plays that passed the Bechdel test or had a Latina character that wasn’t simply a plot device, it became even clearer that writing equaled agency. All these other writers were responsible for monologues and characters that didn’t sketch in my existence at all. And by the end of my freshman year, when I really got a sense of how hard it was going to be to be Latina actor in the American theater, I was talking constantly about how I was going to write a play — not just poetry that I would slam. And once I did it a few times and realized just how much more agency I felt as a writer than as an actor, and how perhaps I’d been leading to that my whole life, that was that.

What does the day-to-day process of playwriting look like for you personally?

Most regularly, my writing practice is that of reading constantly and voraciously in the mornings, paired with journaling and some aspect of getting in my body (either running or yoga on the days I need to take a break from running). I think the vast majority of my writing actually exists in ideation and what looks like passive problem solving or writing out potential ideas or scenes in a journal. Most mornings, I find some sort of text to meditate on – which is usually one of six books I’m writing at once because ADHD – and then write longhand. I’ve found that if I’m not rewriting or editing, usually longhand works best for new material because it gets me further away from my inner critic. As a result, it’s usually a rhythm of writing in journals and then eventually getting to a “oh man, now I have to type all this up” but actually becomes a beautiful discovery of how things shift and change when I bring them to the computer.

What was it about the environment of the play that inspired you to have the story take place there in particular?

I grew up there and felt that the sort of pregnancy of humid east coast summers in Northern Virginia contain a space to think on the history and current potential conflicts. There’s also something about the visceral memory of that 2012 derecho storm leading no AC during the week of 4th of July — it made what was at first seemed very exciting break from my internship at Arena Stage into suddenly wishing I didn’t have the days off at all since at least Arena Stage had air conditioning & power… while my home did not. Because I was more mobile then than I’d ever been growing up (that summer I was regularly moving between very different parts of DC, Falls Church, Springfield, and other towns in Northern Virginia), those inequities became really obvious. I thought I had a sense of class differences growing up, but then noticed some neighborhoods had power back almost immediately and others had to suffer for a week without Dominion turning their power back on, which as a 20-year-old was a distinctive a-ha moment.  

When writing your play did you imagine a certain audience that you were writing for? If so, how do you think this affected your writing process and the writing itself? 

I think I was writing for two audiences, one being the many Latinx communities I grew up with and among (uruguayos, salvadoreños, puertorriqueños, colombianos, bolivianos) and the folks I was encountering professionally and at school who seemed to think Latinidad was this strange sort of monolith. In some ways, Derecho in its first iteration was built to specifically serve a purpose:  a play that could potentially educate a regional theater audience that we’re all very different in our politics, our languages, our nationalities and therefore will never be predictable or something that can get put in a box and also give voice to what it is to be bicultural and feel pulled by all these different communities that make you feel at home. I think that also lives in the oscillation of the barrio reality and the more linear “plotty” reality — without necessarily being a fully bilingual play, the style of the play itself sort of has two tongues that it speaks with.

Despite most, if not all of the plays being reflections of or inspired by larger events and issues in today’s society, much of the central conflicts revolve around the interpersonal relationships of the characters. What do you think this reflects about your storytelling goal?

The biggest takeaway I’ve had as I’ve matured as a writer is that the personal is political. A lot of folks try to label “political” as if it is a separate conversation, or a conversation focused on one thing — this happens even in my own family unit, which is doubly confusing for me. It is clear to me that current events and politics literally affects us, and anyone that thinks otherwise is not present with the way politics has affected their personal relationships and the course of them. The geopolitical events of the Cold War and the U.S.’s military involvement in supporting oppressive Latin American regimes affects how and in what condition my family unit arrived in the U.S. and how we feel about the U.S. overall. The policies/laws around marijuana use affect who in my family is arrested or put on a school-to-prison pipeline and who isn’t. The very way public schools are funded by property taxes means that having the generational wealth to land in the right neighborhood affords us certain privileges and not having that wealth deprives us of the right to a safe, healthy, and supportive education. And because often these ideas feel removed to folks, I think it’s most helpful to literally point at how they change an individual’s life and their relationships in order to get the point across to the people we love and the communities we support. Derecho literally does this — one sister is put on a path the other is not because some of the forces I just listed. But it’s in being specific and honoring that relationship between the sisters that we start being able to look at just how damaging the “bigger picture” can be.

As a resident playwright at the Playwrights Foundation, how do you think your experience here has shaped you as a writer and the stories you tell?

Being a resident playwright allowed me two things: sustained institutional support over the course of four years, something rare for most playwrights in the U.S, and a cohort of older and accomplished playwrights off of whom I could simultaneously emulate and be in dialogue with about practices and how to talk to theaters, pitch plays, say no, and build my own ethics around my career. The sustained institutional support is especially important because a writer changes a lot over the course of four years, and so to have someone who sort of loves you unconditionally despite whether you’ve written a hit thing lately allows you to grow some fortitude when you need to go through difficult situations: whether it’s grief about something personal or grief about a bad collaboration. When it comes to having a cohort, a playwriting path is so unclear and therefore having a community confirmed for me that community is the only way writers move forward. It also allowed me to keep thinking on and believing in the idea that hyperlocal theater is the most effective — it is when our theaters support local writers that they invite more of their community in, because those are the folks that can write about what’s happening in the community and bring their people with them to the theater. I think a lot of theaters nationally can get distracted or want to attract donors by producing what’s hot in NYC, but the Resident Playwrights Initiative works directly against that impulse: it supports and uplifts writers who are right here in the Bay Area, doing the work, and frankly brilliantly enmeshed in their home community and have carved out artistic homes and partnerships in collaboration with that community. 

Derecho jumps between reality and the surreal “barrio” moments of the two sisters. What inspired you to make the story jump between these two very different worlds? What effect do you think this adds to the message you send in your play?

Two things: first that there’s a sense of double consciousness that people of color generally experience – they experience reality as they’re perceiving it and also all the possible interpretations and ways their reactions could be received by a white dominant culture. For the very self-conscious minority, this adds a layer of… performance to things you naturally do that I don’t believe white folk experience as much. So that’s part of the reason for these barrio moments that instead of them being performative for an audience and behind a fourth wall, are an actual reckoning with the audience, a direct sharing of what the relationships are and why they got there. Secondly, I think we are all the ages we’ve been all at once – the person typing this right now is nearly 29 but is also the selves she was at 4, 7, 14 and 21 and all those selves show up in every interaction we have. And while there’s a layer connecting all those people, it’s easy to permeate through that layer and experience life as that other person, live those other life-changing moments you lived.

Being both from Springfield, Virginia, and Montevideo, Uruguay, how do you think these two largely unique places influence your writing and the stories you wish to tell?

I immigrated to the States from Montevideo when I was four years old, and for most of my life up until high school, my parents constantly told me we’d move back to Uruguay “once the economy was better” or once one thing or another happened. I remember distinctly in elementary school going up to my teachers and telling them that I wouldn’t see them the next year because I’d be going back to Uruguay, only to embarrassingly see them the following year. My parents continued talking about moving back even when I was in college and potentially having my younger siblings do high school in Uruguay. This never came to pass for a myriad of reasons, but it led to a clear understanding that I was not American and had a place I better belonged, interrupted by the very real sense when I went back to Montevideo that I definitively was not Uruguayan either, as I was Americanized in comparison to my cousins and abuelos, etc. This is such a common phenomenon for folks who are bicultural and especially an helpful experience for writers because we need to be able to know what it’s like to be part of a group and also be able to observe it from the outside in order to write about it. Separately, Montevideo is the capital city of Uruguay, and Springfield is 15 miles from Washington, DC —  so I’ve never had a sense of not being close to the capital of a country. The impact of this proximity is that I’ve always felt my relationship with writing is that of a public act, one that should comment and influence politics since everyone in my family has always had a commentary on politics or was working in or impacted by the industries serving government. Montevideo itself also is a city of letters, from Eduardo Galeano’s writing (which has seriously informed my own global perspective, especially Open Veins of Latin America) to my abuelo constantly writing letters to the editor and articles in El Pais. As a result of these legacies, I don’t think I’m really capable of writing something that doesn’t comment on or directly respond to what’s happening in the political sphere.

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Noelle Viñas is a playwright, educator, and theater-artist from Springfield, Virginia and Montevideo, Uruguay. She is a resident playwright at Playwrights Foundation, was a 2019 Djerassi Resident Artist, and is an Emerson College alumna. Her play Derecho won the John Gassner Playwriting Award, was a 2019 Jane Chambers Award Honorable Mention, along with being a Semi-Finalist for both the Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship and the 2019 Primary Stages Staged Reading Series. La Profesora, her one-woman show starring Virginia Blanco, was commissioned & produced by TheatreFirst and is currently in development for a podcast called Abuelito with We Rise Production. Past favorite jobs include being HowlRound’s first student staff assistant at Emerson College, running Annandale High School’s theater program alongside Theatre Without Borders in Virginia, and self-producing her play Apocalypse, Please in with Kevin Vincenti in San Francisco. She currently resides in Brooklyn, where she is an MFA Playwriting candidate at Brooklyn College under Erin Courtney and is a proud member of the NYC Latinx Playwrights Circle.

About Derecho: Hoping to join the wave of women of color elected for public office, Eugenia Silva fights for an endorsement from an old friend for her primary campaign in the Virginia General Assembly. As a storm brews, tensions between her ambitions and her sister Mercedes begin overshadowing the need to reconnect with her roots and family. As the past manifests and interrupts the present, the sisters must confront how traditional Latino values conflict with an American definition of success that is always changing. How can they swim back to each other when fragmented identity threatens to tear them apart?