Hope Villanueva

In a future where a pandemic ravaged the world, the wealthy built themselves safety in a sterile bubble called The Atrium. After a few generations, those on the inside live an existence where marriages are literal contracts, children are assigned to you, and even families don’t touch each other. When a sculptor, Prism, is told by her sister, Jade, that their mother is finally arranging a marriage contract to one of her wealthy benefactors, Prism drags Jade to The Outside. They encounter Atraer, a touch worker at a club, who provides human physical contact to those starved for it. Jade is terrified of the feelings she experiences, but Prism and Atraer find a connection. When the disease outside spikes, The Atrium announces that it will seal for an unknown amount of time. While Jade works against Prism to force through her marriage contract, Prism fails to convince Atraer to stay inside The Atrium with her. Atraer asks Prism to join them on The Outside, but fearful of the illness and the intensity of their feelings, Prism turns Atraer down and they leave. As the entryways of The Atrium are about to lockdown, Prism makes a final dash for the exit past her sister, rejecting the sterile safety she knows for an uncertain love on The Outside.

Alicia is at the forefront of her industry as a entomologist, studying insect communities in the field, but age is catching up with her in a young person's game. After a series of small injuries and now getting older, she is pressured to work harder than ever to keep from becoming irrelevant. When murder hornets invade the United States, Alicia gathers Eden, an old co-worker and friend, and Eden's young graduate student, Lizzie, to hunt the hornets and protect her career. Mixing science, dreams, and magical realism, BUZZ, explores the pressures on women and the struggle to hold on to your dreams.

***O'Neill National Play Conference Finalist Play 2021
In a near future, Elena works for a lobbyist, pushing for mandatory vasectomies for teen boys. Quietly, she has kept her teen son from having the procedure himself. When it comes to a head, Elena risks jail and her son, Sebastian, considers joining his estranged father in Mexico, where he has never been and doesn't speak the language.

Book by Hope VIllanueva
Music and Lyrics by William Yanesh

Bright college student Luciana has always felt overwhelmed and unseen. She keenly feels the weight of expectations from her family and society. She leans too much on her best friend, crushes on the girl at the comic shop silently, and toils at writing alone, and struggled to complete a scholarship application video that she needs to pay for college. Suddenly, Luciana acquires electricity-related superpowers and finds that, like a battery, she's slowly fading out. Can she figure out how to be seen before it's too late? Vanishing Girl is a musical about feeling invisible and learning you're not.

Sang Dao and his grown daughters own a restaurant in Galveston, TX, and are thinking the time has come to sell. When they gather for an important anniversary, the re-assess the meaning of home in the light of a racist act and the appearances of spectres from the past.

A female Marine returns home from deployment in Afghanistan to begin planning her wedding. While being tormented by her controlling sister and mother, she fights against the ghosts she's returned with from her experience overseas.

An American woman on an escape from reality in Bangkok befriends a novice Buddhist monk. As they work through their wounds together, their lost loved ones journey on in the spirit world, all trying to achieve some level of peace and maybe even enlightenment. Told thru movement in a magical realism frame, this play explores the journey from grief to the start of healing.

Told in a fast-moving, untraditional narrative, the world of a trio of high school girls is upset by the arrival of a likable new girl. When a revenge prank meant to embarrass her goes terribly wrong , the consequences will follow all of them into adulthood. It turns out, the perpetrators are the ones who will never recover. (In development)

In the spring of 2011, an 8.6 earthquake rattled the coastline of Northern Japan. The earthquake triggered a tsunami that managed to span the Pacific Ocean, soaking the coastal towns of Hawaii and pulling on the moorings of boats in California, and damaged the Fukushima Power Plant in Japan. The owners of the power plant issued a plea to their employees to come to work if they were willing – an attempt to keep this potential disaster at bay – and expose themselves to radiation in the process.

In each of the three locations, characters follow the news report about the events in Japan, as well as do their best to keep contact with one another. In turn, they call, text and video-conference with each other, with technologies reflected onstage via projections and live video feeds. Through their various interactions in the aftermath of the tsunami, each character confronts questions of responsibility to country and humanity, self-identity, and how we define home. In the end, each tries in their own way to contribute something that makes their post-tsunami world a little bit better. Will achieves this most directly in his animation project, which goes “viral”, spreading hope for the future of Japan, and indeed the world.

A pair of hermit crabs live at the seashore with a sea anemone. As is typical, one of the hermit crabs has a few things stuck to his shell, but the other has an obscene amount. The tide is rising and the first crab and the anemone must convince the second crab to give up those hoarded objects to save them from the quickly rising seas.

*Publication via YouthPlays

A one-man play following the life and tribulations of Booker T. Washington.

An average American works hard, but is held down by the system... until they have only one thing to grasp onto.

Two children on the playground stand together against the judgement of the world.

Two mothers from different economic backgrounds encounter each other as the circus walks their elephants into town, as their children act like children.

Finding herself suddenly sick, 40-something Kelly asks Samantha to move into her house, but this is just the beginning… or the end. Told in reverse chronology, STEPS TO HOME tells the story of Kelly and Samantha’s decades old friendship and – despite hardships and relationships - how two people so vastly different could come to be the most important person in each other’s lives.

***Please contact the writer if you would like to include this in any readings for violence awareness or support for gun safety laws. License fees will likely be waived

Written in response to a call for scripts about gun violence in schools following the Parkland School shooting in Florida.

Paul and his mother, Reina, worry about Paul's sister, who may have been on campus during the UCSB shooting in 2014. In the aftermath, Paul is left to care for their younger sister, who is autistic.

As the COVID-19 quarantine restrictions are officially lifted, Cricket goes to their frightened sibling's apartment to convince her to rejoin the world.