She introduced herself as anti-disciplinary at a panel discussion, and I found it oddly compelling. It was my first exposure to that concept, and my curiosity was palpable. While I never had a chance to ask more about the meaning of that phrase, I filled in the blanks myself. In my bio, I describe myself as an "interdisciplinary artist and transmedia storyteller," which is far too many syllables for a networking event. What this means for me is that much of my own practice has been about rejecting the goal of becoming a "master" of your craft. Perhaps it was because being a master cost money and amateurism was free. Spending money on workshops, expert opinions, or grad school while turning down a day job can feel like a privilege, making the literary world feel exclusionary towards writers of a certain income background.
My dyslexia also created a lot of baggage on this subject, since it seemed like mastery was never within my reach. I hated reading other writers' work and had no reference for what mastery even looked like. Later I would learn that quite a few writers suffered from dyslexia (Octavia E. Butler, Ernest Hemmingway, and Agatha Christie to name a few), which gave me permission to create in a way that made sense for me.
Thus, I want to frame this as an "anti-craft" essay, which is essentially a primer on how to resist the confines of a specific medium or genre, how to communicate with writers from other disciplines, and transforming amateurism into a strength. The only way I know how to do this is to present some of my own playwriting projects as case studies—some of which could barely be considered a play. I come from the perspective of a writer interested in creating unique formats for my narratives that are difficult to define.
But what do we do if language fails us, and words can't do a narrative justice?
Before I begin, I want to give a tribute to all the dancers I've met in my life. I love you all. Every time I write a play with "unstageable" stage directions, I imagine the work of dancers. Sometimes I get asked about my stage directions: "How are we supposed to stage this? This should be a film." I smugly respond: "Clearly you don't spend enough time with postmodern dancers." Dancers are the ultimate problem-solvers when it comes to impossible staging, and they were the ones who made me realize that there's no true binary between writing for theatre versus film. Dancers use gestural language that turn impractical onstage events like volcanic eruptions or political violence into abstraction. Thank you for your existence. Thank you for teaching me how to resist form.
Pase Lo Que Pase was a bilingual horror play in English and Spanish that I finished writing while I was living in Colombia. I'll be talking more about the writing process than the content of the play, but here's an abbreviated summary: two teenagers named Fátima (from Honduras) and Guillermo (from Colombia) find two halves of a sentient map that compels them to meet each other halfway between their respective countries.
For a long time, I wanted to write a horror play that depicted my experiences engaging with Latiné culture as a transplant from the United States who felt disconnected from their diaspora. But I wasn't sure how. Three-act structure and Aristotelian logic felt too limiting to me. Around this time, I developed an obsession with finding "backdoor entrances" into my play. I wanted to use the logic of another medium to discover the structure of my play. There was something about the word structure that reminded me of a similar word: sculpture.
As an exercise, I bought some Play-Doh (because Real Professionals use Play-Doh) and created three shapes that made me think about my play:
Shape #1 was a map that I made. Maps have always fascinated me, and my apartment features a pretty extensive map collection. They're these messy colonial documents that depict the way humans have tried to control the land and the people who were buried underneath it. Since I was a child, I would have dreams about maps decaying or withering—a reflection of the fear of "having no country" to call one's own.
Shape #2 was an attempt to re-create the face from my nightmares: a visage representing the collective trauma and colonial anguish of Latin America. If this face were a character, what would it look like onstage? This became the basis for an actual character I wrote into the script called El Mapa, who torments the two teenagers at every turn. El Mapa was a living metaphor representing the force in Latin American culture that sought to trap people in borders.
Finally, here's what Shape #3, a combination of Shape #1 and #2, looked like:
Shape #3 became the structure for my play. I challenged myself to find the beginning, middle, and end of the structure I made above. It became a sort of map for my two main characters to traverse, and each landmark was a new scene from the play. In order for Fátima and Guillermo to find each other, they had to traverse a forest (lower-right side), witness the collective trauma of their ancestors (SANGRE), and then confront El Mapa at its source (the "mouth" on the left side). It felt satisfying to have created this exercise, and to finally land somewhere with this play that I spent years thinking about.
I would later teach this exercise to my students at UCLA in a course titled Interdisciplinary Playwriting. My students brought their own crafting materials, but the most important stipulation of the exercise was that they had to use their hands to make the sculpture. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I have this secret belief that activating a different part of your brain—by way of touch—allows us to access another part of our creativity that's been repressed by our usual way of working.
This project would receive a second life at the 2024 Sewanee Writers Conference, where I was hungry to push the play into a more visual territory. So many new play development workshops have a fixation on the text, and as a visual-tactile learner, I was eager to play with new tools to explore the goals of my play. I used Adobe After Effects for the first time to create a short video and asked conference staff if it was okay for me to share media in association with my reading—something I had never done before.
There's another lesson in here: don't be afraid to ask for what you need. I asked assuming the answer was no, and while they stated they had never done that before, I was so happy to hear them say yes. What ended up happening was mutual learning for both parties, and I was very pleased with the results. Feel free to check out the video below if you'd like to see the outcome.
[cod] ]catfish[ is a web-theatre project I'm currently developing that has two parts. The first is a website depicting the lives of four teenagers who all have one thing in common: they're all secretly catfishing each other, and only website visitors are aware of the truth. The second part culminates in a live performance where audiences watch the catfishers reunite after a 10-year time skip, who are forced to confront their true offline identities. As someone who catfished people when I was a teenager, it was only as a 32-year-old trans person that I realized just how important that time was for me.
I wanted to pursue this project because I was excited by the prospect of building my own code and writing for a completely new medium: web design. At UCLA's Design Media Arts department, I took a course on creative coding with Lauren McCarthy, who also has a writing practice of her own. Using p5.js - a programming resource for artists and designers - I created several webpages using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I even designed this landing page to help promote the project, which was a lot of fun to create. Animated QR codes were also an interest of mine, and audiences were able to scan a few that I made for the reading. The one below is still fully functional.
I present this as a case study because it taught me a lot about how to translate my ideas for practitioners from a different medium. Some theatre artists resist the use of technology in their work and see it as a crutch in what is meant to be a live performance. Creative coders, on the other hand, have limited experience in theatre and were usually only able to offer technical feedback on my work. It felt as though I was a part of two separate worlds with their own sets of jargon, and I yearned to find a marriage between the two worlds. It's a challenge to explain an idea that needs to exist in a hybrid format without alienating both sides of the project.
I also learned a lot about the scale of what I was trying to build. What was meant to be a five-hour web experience was reduced to an hour, because I learned very quickly that creating five hours of web content alone is a TON of work. One of the interesting side-effects of this project was the way other artists viewed me throughout the process. As an experimental playwright and performance artist I have never felt cool in my entire life. But for some reason, my classmates in the coding course were excited by my presence. Theatre artists, on the other hand, felt like my idea was a pie-in-the-sky that had no business being as ambitious as it was.
I ignored both energies and just focused on creating the best web-theatre project I possibly could. It received a workshop production and I was grateful to work with an amazing director named Diana Wyenn who was comfortable in embracing the structural weirdness that [cod] ]catfish[ was asking for. There's another lesson in here about finding the right collaborators. Does your collaborator constantly want your idea to be something else? This is probably a sign that they're not a good fit for you.
But what do we do if language fails us, and words can't do a narrative justice? In this case study, format came first. I wanted to create a script that played with typography and graphic design, and the result was Rhondalon. Often, I'm frustrated by the grind of having to convince institutions and artistic directors to give my work a chance. This felt like an opportunity to write something that exists regardless of whether a gatekeeper says yes or no.
The initial idea came from a writing workshop led by Dominic Taylor where he brought in two objects: a clay mask and a piggy bank. He asked us to write a play inspired by one of the two objects. I was the only one who chose the clay mask, and I noticed that it looked like a plateau when viewed from a side angle. The clay mask became a landscape in my mind, and I ended up pulling an all-nighter to write 10 pages of graphic-designed script. Then, more pages came, and I learned the struggle of being both a writer and graphic designer at the same time.
There is a reason why graphic designers hate working without copy; many of their initial ideas are disrupted when you suddenly add text. Sometimes the entire meaning of a composition can be erased when you add words. In my case, I tried to create the composition first and then come up with the narrative later. This turned out to be a mistake, as it made my process way more time-consuming than I intended. Eventually, I realized that to finish the project, I had to be a writer first and a designer later.
I was fascinated by the ways that Playwright Brain and Designer Brain interfered with each other. There were moments where I purposefully made the text illegible to make a point, and other moments where the text was illegible because I didn't have enough skill in graphic design. Strangely, making these mistakes never bothered me, whereas this could be seen as a rookie move from a more seasoned graphic designer. But I was always interested in the way that my own Playwright Brain broke graphic design rules in a way that made sense for my narrative. Here's an example:
In the image above, there's two colored fonts on top of each other, representing two separate voices played by actors. Red is having a monologue, and Yellow interjects by reminding Red of their status. It's not the Royal Academy of Health—it's the Royal Health Academy, thank you very much. In a narrative that was largely about pushing back against the medical industrial complex, it felt important to present the script in a similar format. This was not a script that obeyed the rules of standard playscript formatting or screenwriting conventions. A graphic designer might wince at the overlapping text, but a playwright would understand the rhythmic importance of voices interrupting each other.
It turned out to be one of the most liberating writing experiences I had. I could spend hours writing pages of dialogue and then turning those into graphic design compositions. It was also the first project I ever made where the goal was not production (a landmark event for playwrights), but publication. Rhondalon was also a script that I wrote so that it could exist in any medium a director saw fit. In the opening pages, I encourage directors to produce Rhondalon as a radio play, a podcast, a film, or even an art installation. My fulfillment comes from publication—the rest is up to you.
Oh no, a big scary AI play! a Turner Prize was a stage play I wrote about the experience of being an artist under late-stage capitalism which was co-written by ChatGPT. There were a lot of self-imposed constraints I put on the writing process. I wrote the dialogue for two human characters: a queer couple named &rade (no, that's not a typo) and Randie. There is a third character named Zephyr, whose dialogue was entirely generated by ChatGPT. Zephyr also embodies multiple roles throughout the story, such as a white gallery owner or the main character's mother. As a writer, I wanted to force myself to improvise with the choices that the algorithm made in response to my writing.
The results were...tedious. I do not recommend using ChatGPT as a creative writing tool without a strong thematic reasoning behind it. In this case, I was interested in building an emotional relationship with the AI in the hopes that it would tell me the magic words I need to hear so I could have hope for my artistic future. At the time, I was feeling rather nihilist about the pursuit of writing plays, and for many years it felt like I was working in a medium that had very little potential for social impact.
This was the first time I ever had a word processor and a code editor open in the same window. ChatGPT has a hard time remembering large amounts of text data, and it often forgets the context I'm writing in. In order to manage this, I used a programming language called Python as a way of reminding the AI of what happened ten pages ago. The tedious part came with just how long it took for ChatGPT to process all this code. I would often spend 20-30 minutes waiting for my writing process to begin, just so I could help the AI catch up with what happened during our last writing session.
Some might wonder: why couldn't you just write the damn play and forget about the AI tools? My response is that for this particular project, writing a compelling story was never the point. It was all about my frustration and the collective frustration of artists everywhere. The collective anxiety of our artistic labor being replaced by machines felt deeper than what sci-fi could portray. What we were really worried about were the humans behind the machine, who seemed disinterested in our pushback against their goals. The psychology of placing all our hopes and fears into technology to solve all our problems was the real narrative—it just so happens that the artist's life was a microscopic look at that tension.
There's also something in here about approaching a new tool or medium with all your hopes and desires. I secretly want this play to win a Pulitzer Prize, even though the prospect of winning one disgusts me. It remains to be seen if that will ever happen, but the main takeaway is that whenever we approach a new form—whether it be dance, digital media, or theatre—it must be with a yearning to transcend the artform to reach a higher power. I've heard some people describe artists and writers as scientists. I do not agree with this metaphor. I believe a better analog is the work of brujas and healers and priests—those who tap into the divine for a purpose greater than themselves.
If it's not evident from the case studies above, I don't fear failure or amateurism. My work has received mixed reactions from various professionals. Some have a hard time understanding what I'm trying to do and find my work too ambitious for its own good. Some are invigorated or inspired by my work and cheer me on from the sidelines. Some think I'm trying to do too much, and that I should let visual artists be visual artists so that I can remain a playwright. I respectfully ignore all these perspectives so that I can stay in the present with my immediate artistic practice. To bring us back to theatre, I'm reminded of a quote by one of my favorite theatre artists—Anne Bogart. "To be a director, you need to have a huge ego and no ego at the same time." I would add that this is true of all writers and artists as a whole.
There is a possibility that none of these projects will ever be produced. There is a possibility that I will die before any of that happens. But to truly challenge the notion of craft is to have the work exist despite what others say about it. This is not a hill for me to die on—it's where I've lived my entire life. If you're reading this and see yourself in my work, congratulations, you've found a kindred spirit. If there is anything I have to offer you, it is this: do not write to survive. Write to resist. Write to piss off a tenured professor. Write to defy your working-class immigrant parents who want you to have a real job. Write to introduce strange new ideas to people who are unfamiliar with them. Write to kill your own fear. Write to become bored with writing and become a creator instead.
Then, from creation, you exist in a new shape. People will not know what to do with this shape. You will enter rooms and the oblong shape of your head will require you to enter sideways. But you will be noticed. And when you finally sit at the table, with your body in the shape of an octopus, the seat will need to be rebuilt so it can fit your unique form. You will feel like you're being unreasonable. That's okay. Keep sitting. Or if sitting starts to feel uncomfortable, leave the room and go outside to lay on the grass. The ants crawling on your body have never seen a creature like you before, and your very existence will motivate them to question what's possible and where you came from. You will reply that you came from the rooms they haven't entered. The rooms that are forbidden. The rooms they don't even know exist. And this will be the true impact of your work. You will then disappear into the atmosphere to find another container worthy of your shape.
