Cristina Luzárraga

Cristina Luzárraga

Cristina Luzárraga is a playwright and educator from New Jersey whose dark comedies tend to feature unruly women and an exploration of the grotesque and uncanny. She is a 2021-2022 McKnight Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis where she currently resides; previously, she was a Jerome Fellow. Her full-length plays include Havana Syndrome, Critical Distance, Millennialville, Havana Syndrome, and La...
Cristina Luzárraga is a playwright and educator from New Jersey whose dark comedies tend to feature unruly women and an exploration of the grotesque and uncanny. She is a 2021-2022 McKnight Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis where she currently resides; previously, she was a Jerome Fellow. Her full-length plays include Havana Syndrome, Critical Distance, Millennialville, Havana Syndrome, and La Mujer Barbuda (2019 Screencraft Stage Play Winner, produced at Blank Theatre in LA). An alum of The Second City Conservatory in Chicago and Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood collective, she is a member of Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers’ Group. Her full-lengths have been developed with Playmakers Repertory Company, Teatro LATEA, and IATI Theater; her short plays have been featured in the 2020 Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival and published in anthologies by Smith and Kraus. She is working on a commissioned musical about Betty Crocker for History Theatre in St. Paul. BA: Princeton; MFA: Ohio University: MA in Educational Theatre: NYU.

Plays

  • First Born by Cristina Luzárraga
    Recommendations: 4
    ·
    Cast: 
    4
    ·
    Genre: comedy
    Genre: comedy
    20 min play: Miriam and JJ are broke millennial artist types. They’re married and in love but wary of having kids. Enter Miriam’s parents with a strange but intriguing offer: they'll PAY HER to have a baby. But of course...there are strings attached.
  • La Mujer Barbuda by Cristina Luzárraga
    Recommendations: 10
    ·
    Cast: 
    6
    ·
    Genre: commedia dell'arte, dark comedy
    ·
    Keyword: having it all, motherhood + 7 more
    Genre: commedia dell'arte, dark comedy
    Keyword: having it all, motherhood, Female Pilot, breastfeeding, bearded lady, art history, women in the workplace, renaissance, Italy
    2 women. 4 breasts. 1 beard.
    Maggie is an American airline pilot and new mother. When she tries to pump breast milk in the cockpit, she almost perishes in a plane crash––and that’s not even the worst of it.
    Magdalena is a 17th century Italian weaver and new mother. When she suddenly grows a beard and nurses a baby at age fifty-two, she sets off a domestic and civil crisis––and that, too, is not...
    2 women. 4 breasts. 1 beard.
    Maggie is an American airline pilot and new mother. When she tries to pump breast milk in the cockpit, she almost perishes in a plane crash––and that’s not even the worst of it.
    Magdalena is a 17th century Italian weaver and new mother. When she suddenly grows a beard and nurses a baby at age fifty-two, she sets off a domestic and civil crisis––and that, too, is not even the worst of it.
    La Mujer Barbuda is a dark comedy that explores the intersecting lives of two women, separated by time and space, and united in the struggle to thrive as a mother in a man’s world.
  • Critical Distance by Cristina Luzárraga
    Recommendations: 1
    ·
    Cast: 
    5
    ·
    Genre: dark comedy
    ·
    Keyword: art history, Museums + 6 more
    Genre: dark comedy
    Keyword: art history, Museums, visual art, class, Race, Academia, Pygmalion, Ivy League
    Critical Distance is a satire that pits two women against each other: Inez, a white/Latina art history graduate student at Columbia University, and Felicia, a black security guard at the Guggenheim Museum. Inez is attempting to navigate the highfalutin waters of academia and write her dissertation on outsider art, but her scholarship is turned on its head when she encounters Felicia, a no-nonsense autodidact...
    Critical Distance is a satire that pits two women against each other: Inez, a white/Latina art history graduate student at Columbia University, and Felicia, a black security guard at the Guggenheim Museum. Inez is attempting to navigate the highfalutin waters of academia and write her dissertation on outsider art, but her scholarship is turned on its head when she encounters Felicia, a no-nonsense autodidact who calls it like she sees it. When Inez grants Felicia a platform to voice her unorthodox opinions, she unwittingly creates a competitor in the world of art criticism, and the two women fight it out for the sake of relative fame and fortune. The play examines the intersection of art and class, and the extent to which art is subjectively defined.
  • Egg Timer by Cristina Luzárraga
    Recommendations: 7
    ·
    Cast: 
    6
    ·
    Genre: comedy, farce
    ·
    Keyword: biological clock, baby fever + 2 more
    Genre: comedy, farce
    Keyword: biological clock, baby fever, Facebook, egg freezing
    10 min play: Looking at baby pictures on Facebook, a woman is haunted by her ova, which want her to procreate pronto.
  • Pantyhose Play by Cristina Luzárraga
    Recommendations: 4
    ·
    Cast: 
    2
    ·
    Genre: dark comedy
    ·
    Keyword: hook-up culture, rape culture + 1 more
    Genre: dark comedy
    Keyword: hook-up culture, rape culture, neurosis
    5 min play: A man and woman hook up, and she immediately puts on pantyhose, leaving him confused.
  • Faked by Cristina Luzárraga
    Recommendations: 5
    ·
    Cast: 
    1
    ·
    Genre: dark comedy
    ·
    Keyword: miscarriage, unplanned pregnancy
    Genre: dark comedy
    Keyword: miscarriage, unplanned pregnancy
    Monologue: A woman recounts how she fakes miscarriages. A dark, and, depending on how you perform it, darkly funny piece that has served actors well in auditions. Best for women in their mid-to-late 30s.