MONICA SANCHEZ

THE GENTRY is the story of Nico, a bright young man born, reared, and murdered by police in his once working class, inner city neighborhood. It is an homage to Alex Nieto, another victim of police violence in San Francisco.

THE GENTRY is written to be staged in a presentational Brechtian mode: a nod to the "acto" style of Luís Valdez and El Teatro Campesino.

Scoobi is an undocumented-law-student-love-child of the Zapatista rebellion of 1994. Petra, her mother, a former revolutionary is also undocumented. Dylan O'Reilly, is Scoobi’s ticket to citizenship. This odd trio navigates personal and political borders on the heels of Scoobie’s marriage of inconvenience to Dylan. Oh yes, Roko, the soldier-ghost of Scoobi’s soulmate is hanging out too.

Its nineteen seventy-funk. Rubi, is fifteen and precocious beyond her years. Everything her mother told her she couldn’t do “under my roof,” she does “on the roof.” Rubi strives to maintain a precarious balance between her integrity and her delinquency, amidst a naïve best friend, negligent parents, a transient boyfriend and a predatory employer. Her journey reaches back, toward the possibility of innocence.

Crosstown 88, a play set during an urban crosstown bus ride in the middle of the night. The driver character serves as a guide who calls out each stop along the way, and is also musician/Foley artist creating the ambient sounds of the night ride. Two lone passengers travel this nocturnal route, “Young Man” and “Woman.” What begins as a threatening, unwanted advance by “Young Man” evolves into an unlikely and surprisingly intimate friendship between the two by the time the bus ride is over. These two, despite disparities in gender, age, education and class, each expose the common challenges presented by gentrification, substance abuse, familial and romantic relationships.

An existential journey cloaked as a road trip. “Belle” (Isabel) has coerced her empathetically deficient, adult son, “Samuel” to drive her from her home in Baltimore, across the United States to Oregon, passing through her native New Mexico along the way. Unbeknownst to Samuel, his mother is dying of cancer and has chosen Oregon, a “right to die” state, as her final destination. Along for the ride, (in the self-driving rental car) is “Maya," the ghost of Samuel’s last live-in lover, dead by suicide.

A mythological-autobiography, contemporary odyssey, through latitudes of heart and mind. Odisia (the accidental existentialist) arrives at a seaside village where a meeting with Lázaro, a shark fisherman, encapsulates the contradictions of an unlikely love affair that culminates in a moment of life and death in a village by the sharkful sea.

A bilingual one-act journey for the young and young at heart.