My first commissioned play possible via an AFCN award. This is my first play to be fully staged and it’s also my first play with an almost exclusive cast of teenagers. With the exception of the janitor, all the eleven characters are in high school. They meet and talk about topics that concern every adolescent, from falling in love, to looking for their future, to discovering who they are.

1-Act play, about a D.A.C.A. boy of Mexican ancestry who, after witnessing the brutal deportation of his parents, looks into our eyes to see how low can humanity succumb before admitting our collective guilt, i.e., that deporting one human relies on our hypocritical complicity that perpetuates injustice and intolerance of those “other”…like us. The piece was written for Paula Vogel’s National Ubu-Roi Bake-Off.

A play about how history needs to be told from the perspective of the one whose voice is either silenced or marginalized. In this case, on the one hand, Laika’s voice, the first (female) creature to be sent and die in space “in the name of science” and, on the other hand, Dog’s, an immigrant from the Middle East who thought starting a new life in “the new world” would be the adventure of his lifetime.

Script history:
During the U.S. Presidential election of 2016, an episode from my adolescence resurfaced. It was the summer of 1989. I went on my first trip abroad. The lights blinded my eyes. The morning buffet made me feel like a queen. Mind you, both were ordinary: street lights at night and ordinary food in the morning, but they were not part of my routine in communist Romania. When we were about to leave, a girl escaped. She had staged her exit flawlessly. But that was bad news for me. The girl was in my classroom and since I was her only classmate, then and there it was decided I was an accomplice. I was slapped and grilled in an abusive, intimidating interview, and I was harassed that I would be kicked out of school and my parents would lose their jobs. I lived with that induced terror and terrifying looks for a few more months. The Iron Curtain would come down soon. Harsh as those moments were, I started to realize that political regimes and doctrines could harm people badly, like a contagious disease. I promised myself to refuse to be mistreated and make sure I speak up, especially since the abuse typically concerns the marginalized and weak people. That’s how I felt during the last U.S. Presidential election. I knew that the best way for me to keep my sanity while voicing out my opinions would come therapeutically via writing.

In 2018, the play had a staged reading directed by Marcy Arlin at TheaterLab in New York. In 2019 Olga Levina of Jersey City Theater Center has staged it twice, one time at JCTC and a second time at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York. With the same play I was invited to give a talk, “Playing a Game Called History” in Berlin.