Virginia Grise

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.

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 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.

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.

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."

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.