←Recommendations of Fabulous Monsters

Hell yeah. As both a music geek and a lover of great playwriting, this play checked all the boxes for me. I loved how the past and present are always in dialogue, as we are always communicating with who we used to be and who we hope to be. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.

The characters in this play, in every sense of the word, rock. They're as mesmerizingly flawed, intriguing, appalling in their actions, and yet overall so cool that Burbano's writing, with all the poetically gritty style contained within, lands and hits hard. Paints wonderful images of both the spectacularly mythic quality of fame, and the less idealized truth of what goes into it. Hard and thoughtful.

The Workshop Theater is pleased to recognize Diana Burbano as a playwright selected out of a competitive pool of applicants for our Fall 2020 Writer’s Intensive. The Writer’s Intensive is an eight-week long, playwright-driven process geared towards revising an existing play. Fabulous Monsters is a visceral exploration of the overlooked legacy of Latinas in punk rock; the play moves in bursts of energy as the scenes take on the form of punk music, while giving space to women who thrived in a male-dominated world and are now questioning their part in that movement. Our congratulations and thanks to Diana.

I had the pleasure of seeing a reading of this play as part of Occupy the Stage 2020 (Women's Theatre Festival). The play crackles with energy and is a moving meditation on feminism, friendship, ambition and aging. I'd love to see a full production!

Such an exciting and fabulous female-forward feminist fun play with the best characters ever! I love them! I want to see this play live onstage. I am a Fabulous Monsters Groupie! The love and the hurting is given such theatrical treatment by Burbano with wonderfully dramatic roles and language for actors to wrap their tongues around!

A sexy, feminist, punk rock play about love that hurts, self-worth and artistic integrity filled with complex characters. I leaned in from the start and would love to see this story come to life with the music screaming from the stage. I kind of felt like Burbano shot this story into our veins because I felt it in my blood. "You love having your heart broken" is a line I'll be thinking about for a long time.

A raw, punk story with riot grrrl shout-outs thrown-in about the messiness of life told with a surety the characters struggle for. And the music rocks!

MonologueBank is proud to recommend the writing of Diana Burbano. In FABULOUS MONSTERS, there are multiple monologues that speak to the punk lifestyle, and the rockers who did or didn't survive it. Character Slade, a rocker who survived, shares many insights about the people she knew to her AA Group. She speaks for the people who lived hard and fast, and now are struggling to survive since they're old, poor, and dying. With humor and grit, Burbano deftly shows the cost of living each day like it's your last.

A whirlwind of times and loves and drugs and punk rock, this play is a trip that is definitely worth taking. Somehow Burbano made me love her characters in spite of the terrible things in the name of punk rock. They are deep and specific roles that Latinx women and non-binary folx will be thrilled to sink their teeth into.

Fabulous Monsters is everything it should be -- gritty and angry and messed up and drugged up and full of punk music and life. Punk always finds the edge where life and death meet, where it cuts and the people there bleed. So, too, this play about punks from the early LA scene and how they live (and die) now. Punk is brave and fearless, just like the characters in this play. Do yourself a favor -- put on some Black Flag or XTC and read this play.