Elaine Romero

April dreams of singing on a stage, but life and love are in the way. Her little sister can’t let her go, and her friend Trudy worries about her eternal soul. Enter a mysterious stranger who unwittingly provides a path to escape. Filled with heart and humor, Like Heaven is a new comedy that affectionately skewers our nostalgia for green lawns and white picket fences while asking, “Is this what heaven looks like?”…and “Where the hell is the Windex?”

WETBACK
(1st installment of Arizona/Mexican Border Trilogy)

Tensions arise on the Arizona/Mexican border as the Minuteman Militia hold rallies in the park and lobby to deny citizenship to the American-born children of undocumented workers. The play charts the intertwined fates of a privileged Latina high school principal, Amalia Ortiz, and the Mexican undocumented worker, César, she fires to protect her job. When César is murdered in a hate crime in a public park, the irrevocable consequences of Amalia’s choice force her to question her position in the community and herself, getting to the core of what does it mean to be a Mexican-American and what is the responsibility of the Mexican-American to the Mexican immigrant.

A chance meeting in Hiroshima, Japan, between the Mexican-American granddaughter of an IwoJima veteran and the son of an atomic bomb survivor, brings forth layers of a world forever at war, Whose history is real? If war is always seen through the eyes of the victor, what gets lost? And what do we have to know of the past not to repeat it? The final play of Romero's War Pentalogy.

“A drama that chronicles the tragic and complicated interconnection between a Chinese family scrambling in the new economy and the American family who lost their only child because of a defective Chinese toy.”

Tells the vertical history of the U.S./Mexico through the mouths of two women forever changed by border crimes and politics.

Karl is a molecular biologist who believes that viruses may be responsible for evolutionary leaps. When his son is born with autism, Karl dives deeper into his work and his wife Virginia finds fundamentalism. As Karl and Virginia navigate their fates, an unexpected event pulls them toward an unavoidable collision.

An heiress takes a naïve young woman under her wing with her eye on landing the young woman’s husband. But the striving couple has their own agenda.

The third play of Elaine Romero’s U.S./Mexican border trilogy, Title IX follows a border family of Latina educators from 1972 to the present. Has sexism in the U.S. been eradicated or has it just found new forms? Does the right to equal treatment lead to that equal treatment or is it an insidious path to something else?

When Andrea finds a hand-scrawled note from a Chinese sweatshop worker in the pocket of her designer coat, she sets off on a passionate journey to free him. Little does she know that this journey to freedom will take her down a rabbit hole of globalization and the complicated world of modern slavery as she struggles to keep up with the world (and workers) around her.

Sabrina lost her brother Kirk to the war in Vietnam and the course of her life was changed forever. Now, at a crossroads, she must do battle with her past and the ghosts that continue to haunt her. This new work about the burden that families are asked to carry is the second installment in the trilogy, The U.S. at War. Commissioned by the Goodman Theatre.

Software Engineer Drew Snider has a mind that remembers every moment of his life. Maybe that’s why he can’t let go of his ex-wife, Shanti, and why he still remembers the software he developed for unmanned flying vehicles for the U.S. military. Their son Nathan grew up feeling inferior to his dad and volunteered to go to war. He once met Ramiro Enriquez, a pilot who never gets to fly, but fires weapons in the Middle East from a desert in Nevada. Ramiro is held responsible for the death of Nathan and his platoon in a predator-drone friendly fire incident. Will the survivors piece together a future while absorbing a wounded past?

A Princeton-educated Latina returns to her home in a border state to teach the next generation of theatre students only to have her good intentions hijacked by the politics of fear.