Virginia Grise

Virginia Grise

Virginia Grise writes plays set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops, and lesbian bedrooms. She is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press), The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of...
Virginia Grise writes plays set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops, and lesbian bedrooms. She is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press), The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press) and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Durito (Autonomedia Press). Her interdisciplinary body of work includes plays, multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site specific interventions, and community gatherings.

She is a founding member of a todo dar productions, an alumnae of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women's Project Theatre Lab & the NALAC Leadership Institute. Grise has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Matakyev Research Fellow for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, a Jerome Fellow at the Playwright’s Center, and a Herberger Institute Projecting All Voices Fellow at Arizona State University. Currently, she is the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mia Theatre.

Virginia has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women’s prisons and in the juvenile correction system. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.

Plays

  • Your Healing is Killing Me
    Your Healing is Killing Me is a performance manifesto that seeks to replace individual self-care with collective self-defense. One artist’s reflections on living with post-traumatic stress disorder, ansia, and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings, the master cleanse, and kickstarter funded self-care. Based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools and from the...
    Your Healing is Killing Me is a performance manifesto that seeks to replace individual self-care with collective self-defense. One artist’s reflections on living with post-traumatic stress disorder, ansia, and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings, the master cleanse, and kickstarter funded self-care. Based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools and from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers, and bourgie dermatologists.
  • Their Dogs Came With Them
    What happens to a community, and the people that live there, when four intersecting freeways are built right through the heart of their neighborhood? Adapted from the novel by Helena Maria Viramontes, Their Dogs Came with Them is about the destruction and displacement of a Mexican-American community, roaming dogs, quarantines, earthmovers and ancient voladores. The play ascribes new meanings to gang life dramas...
    What happens to a community, and the people that live there, when four intersecting freeways are built right through the heart of their neighborhood? Adapted from the novel by Helena Maria Viramontes, Their Dogs Came with Them is about the destruction and displacement of a Mexican-American community, roaming dogs, quarantines, earthmovers and ancient voladores. The play ascribes new meanings to gang life dramas, gender queer identities, and Chicana/o/x coming of age barrio tales. Much like the structure of a freeway, the lives of four Mexican-American youth intersect and intertwine, unearthing stories about the effects and aftereffects of the Vietnam War, displacement, mental illness, and state violence.
  • a farm for meme
    A butterfly sits in a walnut tree on a 14-acre farm in the middle of South Central Los Angeles; a mother and her three boys live in a tent in an encampment trying to save the farm from police and bulldozers; an artist norteada plants tomato plants in potholes hoping they will break open the concrete. a farm for meme is a story about semilleros and a 14 acre farm, built in a vacant lot after the 1992 LA...
    A butterfly sits in a walnut tree on a 14-acre farm in the middle of South Central Los Angeles; a mother and her three boys live in a tent in an encampment trying to save the farm from police and bulldozers; an artist norteada plants tomato plants in potholes hoping they will break open the concrete. a farm for meme is a story about semilleros and a 14 acre farm, built in a vacant lot after the 1992 LA rebellion.

    Two version of the script one in English and one in Spanish.
  • rasgos asiaticos
    An intimate story about the fluidity of borders and time, rasgos asiáticos is a site-responsive performance installation that examines migration and displacement, unearthing hidden histories in the confluence of China, Mexico, and the United States revealed through a series of inherited stories, fragmented memories, historical re-imaginings, and recurring dreams. Large-scale cargo crates designed by Tanya...
    An intimate story about the fluidity of borders and time, rasgos asiáticos is a site-responsive performance installation that examines migration and displacement, unearthing hidden histories in the confluence of China, Mexico, and the United States revealed through a series of inherited stories, fragmented memories, historical re-imaginings, and recurring dreams. Large-scale cargo crates designed by Tanya Orellena offer audiences a series of vivid environments for personal and political excavation using sound, light, and objects to conjure narratives of immigration and migration in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.
  • blu
    An epic poem for the stage, blu traces the explosive after-effects of prison and hunger, desire and war. The play follows a queer Chicana/o family as they try to envision an earth and sky without police and their helicopters.

    Selected as the winner of the 2010 Yale Drama competition from more than 950 submissions, Virginia Grise's play blu takes place in the present but looks back on the...
    An epic poem for the stage, blu traces the explosive after-effects of prison and hunger, desire and war. The play follows a queer Chicana/o family as they try to envision an earth and sky without police and their helicopters.

    Selected as the winner of the 2010 Yale Drama competition from more than 950 submissions, Virginia Grise's play blu takes place in the present but looks back on the not too distant past through a series of prayers, rituals, and dreams. Contest judge David Hare commented, "Virginia Grise is a blazingly talented writer, and her play blu stays with you a long time after you've read it." Noting that 2010 was a banner year for women playwrights, he added, "Women's writing for the theatre is stronger and more eloquent than it has ever been."
  • The Panza Monologues
    A one-woman tour de force as told through the words of women speaking with heart stopping frankness, these stories create a quilt of poignancy, humor, and revelation. The Panza Monologues boldly places the panza front and center as a symbol that reveals the lurking truths about women's thoughts, lives, loves, abuses, and lived conditions. Co-written with Irma Mayorga. Additional stories also contributed by...
    A one-woman tour de force as told through the words of women speaking with heart stopping frankness, these stories create a quilt of poignancy, humor, and revelation. The Panza Monologues boldly places the panza front and center as a symbol that reveals the lurking truths about women's thoughts, lives, loves, abuses, and lived conditions. Co-written with Irma Mayorga. Additional stories also contributed by Petra A. Mata, Bárbara Renaud-González and María R. Salazar.