ARTISTIC STATEMENT

My aim is to take uncertainty seriously and render it vividly; to write plays that grapple with ideas too big to bring to heel in a single evening of theatre. Ideally, you’ll flip on the play’s big question at least once per act, and then again while you’re brushing your teeth that night. I want you to have the erotic thrill of changing your mind. To leave the theatre better informed, but knowing less than when you came in. Amidst boisterous, competing claims to certainty, my work is a call to epistemic humility.

My sniff test for whether an idea is worth tackling: can I articulate my perspective on it succinctly and confidently? If the answer is “yes,” the play is a “no.” Moral clarity is for essays; the engine of my plays is moral liminality. Lucky for me (though maybe less so for us), the special difficulty of being human is that goopy moral thickets are everywhere. And thanks to the unprecedented pace of technological and cultural change we’re all living through, hot new goops drop from the sky every day for me to roll around in.

I do this rolling around on a stage, in particular, because live theatre is where our earnest human desire for transcendence is still unmistakably embodied. This is the desire at the core of all my plays, in which characters pursue stardom and the stars, justice and agency, their abstract aspirations always colliding with their concrete frailty. To live in the shit and reach for the sky is the human condition, at once beautiful, grotesque, and often — thank God — hilarious.

RUBEN GRIJALVA
2024–2025 RESIDENT PLAYWRIGHT

Ruben Grijalva (he/him) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based playwright exploring moral questions to which he has no good answer. This approach leads to plays that you might describe as comedies about tragedies, featuring protagonists that you might describe as seemingly good people doing seemingly bad things. His short plays include “Anna Considers a Cocktail” and the PianoFight ShortLived winning “All The Worlds Are Stages.” His full-length plays include “Anna Considers Mars,” the Edgerton New Play Award winning “Value Over Replacement,” and “Shoot Me When…,” winner of the 2022 Will Glickman Award for Best New Play in the Bay Area. He lives in San Rafael, California with his wife and daughter.