Music Credit: “New Life” from the CD New Life, written and performed by Antonio Sanchez. Daughter: I want to talk to you about this dress and the ball. Father: Let me look at you. Turn around. Daughter: I do not want to wear this dress. Father: Pilar is right. This dress will not do. Daughter: Thank you, papi! Father: The color makes you skin seem too dark. Mother: Ay, me! Father: Stay out of the sun, mija. Mother: It is high time we lightened her hair.  Father: Strands of gold would certainly better illuminate her class and upbringing Mother: We should also shorten her dress. Father: Class, Fabiola, class. This is the Castillo Charity Ball, not some Donald Trump beauty pageant.  That was a scene from the play Destiny of Desire, which is wowing audiences at Arena Stage here in Washington, DC. Destiny of Desire is one of five world premieres this season by playwright Karen Zacarias. And this is Art Works the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Karen Zacarias is a playwright to be reckoned with. One of the most produced Latina playwrights in the nation, she casts a wide net, both in terms of subject and style. Her award winning plays range from light and humorous, like The Book Club Group, to the historically inspired Legacy of Light, to the adaptation of Just Like Us—a contemporary story about immigration and its impact on four young girls. Karen Zacarias writes musicals and she writes plays for children. She’s also written plays with children. She is the founder of Young Playwrights’ Theater, an award winning theater company that teaches playwriting in local public schools in Washington, DC. Karen Zacarias likes to push theatrical boundaries, and this risky creative bent is on view at Arena Stage with Karen’s play Destiny of Desire. Destiny of Desire takes the telenovela as its model. It’s not a send-up or spoof of the popular genre— Karen and her play embrace the telenovela and give it fresh life on an American stage with an all-Latino cast. It’s moving, funny, and completely unexpected. Destiny of Desire is a work of many moving parts. Did I mention it’s a play within a play? Summing up Destiny of Desire is beyond my skill, so I left that to Karen Zacarias. Karen Zacarias: Destiny of Desire is a group of a serious acting troupe that gets together to put on a play that is a telenovela every night, and it starts in a hospital on a rainy and stormy night. And so there's two plays going on simultaneously. There's the plot of the telenovela, and there's the plot of the actors putting on the serious drama that they're doing that night. Jo Reed: Tell me what inspired this. Karen Zacarias: I was inspired to write this on a number of different levels. Number one is because I'm a founder of the Latino Theatre Commons, which is a national network of Latino artists who are interested in updating the American narrative-- the American theater narrative-- to include our stories. And when we were all talking-- there's a number of us who are the founders-- and when we are talking at a big meeting we had in Boston, about 100 of us, how tired we were of having our serious dramas compared to telenovelas or actors getting tired of when they had a strong emotion onstage, Latina actors in particular, that someone describing it as a telenovela, because it's a dismissive way of dealing with our art, and it's incorrect. And so I was thinking, "Well, if people want to use the word telenovela I should teach them what a real telenovela is," and I set out to write the best telenovela I could in two hours, and not necessarily as a spoof but as an homage, but at the same time testing the genre, because telenovelas are this Aristotelian way of telling stories. In the beginning they just seem ridiculous, but by the end you really care about what's going to happen to the different characters. So that was a political instinct there. It was also the idea of writing a story that wasn't issue-based. I mean, right now a lot of theaters, they want a play about Latinos, they want it to be immigration or they want it to be something like that, and those are all part of our story, but it's not the only story. It was also the idea of sharing something that is the biggest cultural phenomena in Latin America, which is telenovelas-- it's our biggest entertainment export in the world-- and introducing it to an American audience and celebrating it and being unapologetically Latina and unapologetically have fun with it and unapologetically invite people to enjoy it with us. That was kind of the idea. Jo Reed: How is a telenovela different from American soap opera? Because I know here we tend to gloop them together, but that would be wrong. Karen Zacarias: That would be wrong. I've seen American soap operas, and they definitely have their fun-- Luke and Laura getting married back in the heyday-- but American soap operas last 30 years. You know, Erica Kane I think has been married 11 times in the last 25 years or something like that versus telenovelas last six months to a year, so they're very condensed stories, and they rigorously change. So I remember in American soap operas women weeping as they drink coffee and discussing their problems, versus the same scene in a Mexican telenovela would be like women trying to jump out the window. It's all action, it's all plot-oriented, and if you miss one day in a telenovela you could be lost, versus you can go away for a year and a half from American soap opera and still in five minutes catch up to the story. So the other thing is that American soap operas are geared towards, or were geared to, stay-at-home moms during the day. Telenovelas are family events. They're all in the evening. They're primetime shows, and it's something everyone gathers around. So they're a little bit more like Broadway Empire or Scandal than they are American soap operas. They're intense miniseries, and they vary a lot in storyline, and different countries are known for different kind of quality of telenovelas, but they get exported all over the world. They're seen in Korea and Russia and other places like that. The Latino telenovelas have a great kind of pull to them. Jo Reed: What do you think that pull is about? Karen Zacarias: What is that about? I think because the fearlessness about being emotional, about caring. They are not cynical. They're all about the Cinderella story. In my play I play with that idea, that idea that a poor girl can find love and riches somehow, some way despite all the odds, and because on a certain level anything can happen, and so... Jo Reed: And usually does. Karen Zacarias: And does. Anything can happen and usually does, but because you've been seeing these people every evening they start feeling like friends and family, and to such a point where the last episodes of a telenovela you do not call people after nine in Latin America, or the last episodes the streets will be deserted, because they all want to know what happens to the characters. And I think it's just they're not cynical. Everybody in telenovelas, they might be a bad person. There's really bad people in telenovelas, but there's an earnestness and an intention of trying to get the most out of life in every episode. These people are just trying to do the best they can, and I think hitting that emotional quotient is both cathartic for especially an audience that's been having maybe a really hard day... Jo Reed: I can verify that. <laughs> Karen Zacarias: Yes. And also it's the joy of storytelling, that you just get surprised, and some of those things, you know, they can be conservative, they can be... There's a lot of, there's a lot of things about the genre that we could critique, but there is something about them that pulls people in. I mean, they're like a populist Greek drama in a sense. Jo Reed: What about for you? Was it hard for you to write in that style of storytelling? Karen Zacarias: It was really difficult. That's where I really have to tip my hat to the form, because I've had this idea for many years, maybe three years now, and I must have started four or five versions of a story, and one was with a hotel and one was a US-Mexico thing, and one was a showgirl. There were all of these different stories, and none of them-- the stakes were not high enough, and so finding the story where the stakes were really high was a challenge, and trying to put a year worth of story into two hours while still keeping the balls up of, you know, of all the different storylines-- it's eleven... there's ten, ten actors. There's a lot of characters, there's a lot of subplots and etcetera. It was definitely fun and challenging, and then adding music on top of it and then adding a Brechtian frame on top of that that kind of helped me go into it. Jo Reed: Why the Brechtian frame? Karen Zacarias: If I was going to do a telenovela for the stage it needed to look and feel very different than a telenovela does on TV. It's about the theatricality of this televised form. That's what we're playing with. And the Brechtian frame was my way into it. I had trouble writing the play until I decided it was a group of actors, that there was a group of actors putting it on, because what I wanted to show was how the actors putting on the show become the audience for the show too, how even jaded actors can become sucked in from the story. So if you're watching the play here at Arena you watch the action, but you also are watching the actors watch the actors, and finally you're watching the audience is watching themselves watching, so it becomes kind of meta-theatrical. But I'm just as interested in the effect telenovelas have on the audience, both on TV and in theater, than I am just in writing the story. So that was my social experiment, is could I create in a diverse American audience that pull of the telenovela where you sit down and you're crossing your arms, you're like "I don't know," and by the end you're kind of cheering for people.  Jo Reed: How was it for the actors to embrace this really over the top in some-- no, not over the top but no holds barred... Karen Zacarias: No holds barred, right, because there's nuance. Jo Reed: There is, but it's going all the way. Karen Zacarias: All the way. First of all, our actors are great. I think all of them were really excited to be in something that was a comedy. They were all excited not to be gang members <laughs>. They were all excited. You know, I mean, let's... Jo Reed: That's so sad. Karen Zacarias: ...let's talk about the reality. This is an all-Latino cast of super-talented artists, and we have designers that are Latino, the director is Latino. It's not very often that we're given a chance on a major regional stage to have an all-Latino group doing this on this way. And so everybody knew that we had to get this right and getting the tone right, because we're not making fun of anybody. We're not overacting. It's not spoofing, but it is a heightened kind of reality all of the time, and Brecht used that a lot, you know, and that's also using the Brechtian thing that when they're in their scene they bring a heightened-ness to it. They always are reminding us that they're actors doing something until we forget, right, and so finding that tone and the humor and the pathos, because they have to break your heart-- you have to care about them at the same time-- is a really interesting, hard tone to do. And I really give credit to the actors and Jose Luis for creating an ensemble. And so when you're pushing furniture around, when you're showing that you can do theater without having everything being automated, that you can do theater by just being an actor offstage and coming onstage, it's also a little bit a political aesthetic we're talking about, that the regional theaters have gotten kind of far away from what it is, you know, the simplicity and elegance of a play and that something can be beautiful and simple and really funny without, you know, having a million other things going on. So we were playing with all of these ideas to build this piece. So there's a lot of thought that went into it. I mean, you think a drama is hard to write and put on? A comedy is 5,000 times harder, because most people cry about the same things. Not everybody laughs at the same things, and so that is also an interesting challenge. Jo Reed:  The cast was superb. Every character does have an arc and gets their moment. Karen Zacarias: Every character, and because that was really important to me and to Jose Luis that we're all an ensemble but there is no small player in this play. Jo Reed: You were born in Mexico, and you lived there for the first ten years of your life. Karen Zacarias: Yes, I did, yes. Jo Reed: And I heard you in an interview talk about one reason why you wanted to bring this play here is introduce telenovela to a different cultural sensibility, and I wanted you to talk about how the cultural sensibility in Mexico particularly but Latin America generally is different from El Norte and how it's similar. Karen Zacarias: Even in the United States the South is different from the North. There's different things of different tastes and different motivations. It was just a sense of being unapologetic of the things that sometimes we're criticized about like in the sense of are we more emotional, are we this, are we that. Overall I think sometimes we can be as a culture more expressive, but that doesn't mean that we don't have a totally rigorous intellectual understanding. There's a lot of Mexicans who go to the opera all the time, which people are flabbergasted by, that we have universities, we have Nobel Prize winners in our midst. So I was interested in the idea of talking about class and gender and story-making from a Latino point of view. And when I mean aesthetic is that if you look at the play and you just look at the tableaus, they're beautiful, you know, the color of the pink dress with the white behind it, the tone of the lights. The idea of honoring just the beauty of art is something that I think is very borne in our culture, and I think also the idea of humor and joie de vivre. The play is really, you know, it's about having joy. I think so many times theater-- it seems that for it to be important it needs to be punishing in some way, and I don't believe that. Theater that doesn't make you feel I'm not that interested in. I love theater that makes me think, but it also has to make me feel, and I think that's a lot of what the aesthetic is going for here. Jo Reed: You are-- and I'm not telling you something you don't know-- you are a prolific playwright, and you cover a wide range of subjects. There's The Book Club Group, Legacy of Light, Just Like Us, and Destiny of Desire. How do you choose projects to develop? Karen Zacarias: Oh, that's a really good question, and I also do a lot of children's theater. Jo Reed: And you do do children's theater. Karen Zacarias: Yeah, like musical theater. You know, I think it needs to speak to me. Like what makes a play good is that no matter what-- because I like realism, I like absurdism, I like... you know, as you see, my plays, they're not realistic plays. They all have this theatrical kind of magical element to them, and I like a lot of different types of play, but for a play to work for me when I'm seeing it, there has to be a moment that feels like the truth, that it feels like the writer and the actors are unveiling something that I didn't know. And all of these projects that I'm doing I think have the potential to do that. That's why I get attracted to them, and it's also as a woman and as a Latina playwright it's both trying to create opportunities for other women and other actors of color but at the same time not getting boxed in. So I'm really happy to write a comedy, I'm really happy to write a drama. It's also about trying to become better at my craft all the time, because this is a really, really difficult profession, and the only way to get better is to set a bar that's higher than you think you can grab and go for it, so I'm not interested in regurgitating the same thing, and that's why I like changing mediums and tones and all of that, because I think it will in the long run make me a stronger writer and develop a better play for the audience, because I care about audiences. Jo Reed: How do you move from ideas to stage? What is that process like for you? And does it change from work to work because the style of each can be so different? Karen Zacarias: Yes. I wish there was a method to the madness. I have three children, and so there's some people who are really great. They get up every morning, and from nine to blah-blah they write, and then they do this, and my world is not fit like that. I work in spits and starts. I rewrite quickly. I find that walking I can write in my head a lot, so when I sit down I throw things out there, and deadlines are vital. I'm a good Girl Scout. If you don't give me a deadline it could take forever. You give me a deadline, I will get it done, and I will get it to you, and I find that to be... I don't know if it's true, but I find that more of my women playwriting friends have more of an erratic schedule when it comes to their writing, versus my male friends are more able to protect that time, and I've been trying to do that myself, and I'm saying this as a generalization. It's not a statistical study, it's between my friends. Jo Reed: How many drafts do you tend to write? A lot? Karen Zacarias: Many, yes. Many. I mean, Destiny of Desire is-- it's one of my youngest plays to hit the stage so quickly, because I finished the first draft in September of last year, so that was a very, very new play. It only had two things of development, and then it was onstage, so that was kind of unusually fast, and I think the Women's Voices Theater Festival kind of helped make that process much quicker, but I'm known for rewriting after I get my world premieres and even after the second and third production. I really like to challenge myself to get something closer to what I want, and I learn something from each audience about what's working and what's not. Jo Reed: How do you know when the play is finally done? Karen Zacarias: Oh, I don't. I just, at some point I have to move on and move on, but I'll tell you when, when I can sit there and say "Yes, I don't feel a sense of shame anywhere." I just think "Okay, girl, you're ready to go out in the world." It doesn't mean that the play is perfect, but it's ready to go out there, and I think reaching perfection is not a good thing. I think the best plays in the world are those that are messy. Chekhov is messy, Shakespeare is messy. So that's okay too, at some point letting the play live after you've had your say. Jo Reed: You were a playwright in residence in this very Arena Stage. What did that give you? What did that allow you to do? Karen Zacarias: You know, I was the first playwright in residence here, part of that big national Mellon Arts Foundation, which I'm very grateful to. It's three years. You get your health benefits, you get a salary, and most importantly you get a budget to do what you need to for your art. So, you know, some people use it to do reading, some people use it to travel and do research. I used it to work with a dramaturg on certain rewrites of a play. Like I, I wanted to get certain plays to a certain place before I moved on to something else, and I really think this year I'm having with a lot of new work is thanks to what happened five years ago with the residency, that, you know, it's not always a direct correlation, but all of that work cleared the way. I didn't have to teach. I didn't have to do 500 other jobs to make ends meet, and I was able to really school myself into becoming a better playwright. Jo Reed: There are so many plays that are opening for you in 2016. I just said, "I'm just going to read them as opposed to retyping them." Here's Destiny of Desire at Arena, Native Gardens in Cincinnati, OLIVÉRio: A Brazilian Twist at the Kennedy Center, Ella Enchanted: The Musical at First Stage, and Into the Beautiful North at the Milagro Theatre. Karen Zacarias: Yeah, that's part of a rolling world premiere with the National New Play Network, so it actually has four productions, but the first one will be at Milagro. So, yes, it's a big, big year. Jo Reed: It is a huge year. I mean, that's a lot to manage. Karen Zacarias: It's a lot to manage, and I'm so grateful for it, so grateful. It is a little bit like having five weddings in one weekend and then, you know, who knows what will happen next year, but that's the animal we deal with in the arts-- that certain things happen, and work begets work, and the busier you are, the more output you do, and it was just I think a lot of things were in the air from the residency. Starting the Latino Theatre Commons really has put a lot of artists together, and what we've decided with the Commons is it's not a panel to say, "Oh, woe is us." We're here to create new work, so the Milagro Theatre initiative comes from that. This Destiny of Desire also came out of that, so this idea of a national dialogue that's going on in American theater actually provokes work, and I think that's an important thing to point out, that coming to the theater is an act of community, but when it really works it can be an act of communion, and getting theater artists together both virtually but in a room to do other things than talk about marketing and why I don't get my plays done but to actually talk about aesthetics or what they care about in theater or what they would like to see can prompt amazing things. It can make you just create new work. Jo Reed: And that's what Latino Theatre Commons does. That's the point of it. Karen Zacarias: That's the point of it, yes. Jo Reed: You studied international relations, and you actually worked in that field. Karen Zacarias: Yes, I did. Jo Reed: Tell me how you switched over to play writing. Karen Zacarias: The reason I went into international relations is because I was interested in making disenfranchised people feel more part of their government have a voice in that way, and now I'm just trying to do it in a different way. Jo Reed: You are the founder of Young Playwrights' Theater. Tell me about that organization and tell me about your thinking in creating that. Karen Zacarias: Young Playwrights' Theater is a theater company that teaches playwriting to kids. It has now been in existence for 20 years. Having worked in Latin American politics and with disenfranchised groups the biggest thing that everybody always wanted to start was a dialogue. That's what everybody said. "If we could just dialogue then we could solve this problem." And it seemed to me when I moved into the arts-- I said, "Well, dialogue is what plays are all about," and kids are natural storytellers. And so I thought if I went into the schools and I had kids tell me their story that maybe then they could see their role in the story, and if they wanted to change their world they could do it. And it was just a small experiment. I volunteered my time at Hardy Middle School at the Fillmore Arts Center like 20 years ago. I went in. I was like, "Hi! I've never taught a class, but I'll teach playwriting," and they gave me their most difficult students. And it was a transformative experience for the kids and for me to see what they had, and they were dealing with some tough things. They wrote plays, I brought in my actor friends to read the plays out loud back to the kids, and then I think they realized that they had some kind of power. And it wasn't about creating a bunch of new artists. It was just making kids realize the power of their voice and that they're not alone and that ideas in your head unfortunately don't count, that you have to find a way to express them on paper in a fashion to get your ideas across and that showing up to school will help you. So it was a lot of different things going on, and it started small, but now we're like in so many schools. I'm really, really proud of the organization, and I don't lead it anymore. I'm on the board, but the way it's grown and the books... Jo Reed: You have a curriculum now. Karen Zacarias: We have a curriculum. We have a book on Amazon that you can get a curriculum and do it everywhere. Texas is doing our curriculum. Detroit is doing our curriculum. Certain places in New Orleans are doing our curriculum because they're seeing that their kids are getting more engaged with school. People treat creativity and the arts as a cherry on top of the cake when it really is the flour that kind of helps hold everything together. An inspired child is a child who wants to learn. Jo Reed: Okay, we mentioned the Women's Voices Theater Festival, and we cannot just mention it. Karen Zacarias: No, we can't, because it's extraordinary. Jo Reed: It is extraordinary. Explain what it is. Karen Zacarias: It is the largest women's theater festival in the world to date as far as I know. It started with a small group of DC Washington theaters, one of them being Molly Smith at Arena Stage but also Ryan Rilette at Round House and Michael Kahn at Shakespeare and my beloved Howard Shalwitz at Woolly Mammoth. Hope I got everyone there. But they were just talking about what could they do to discuss gender parity, and they just decided, "Let's do a small women's theatre festival. Let's start all our seasons and just connect them in some ways with panels." This is also a testament to the power of the DC theater community. The rest of the DC community said, "Yes, us too," and so we have 50 world premieres going on... Jo Reed: Which is amazing. Karen Zacarias: ...simultaneously here in the city. Can I tell you how good they are and how different they are from one another? And we have comedies, we have musicals, we have absurdist plays. We have someone as young as 15... Jo Reed: That's right. Karen Zacarias: ...right, and then we have beyond 15 represented. And, you know, DC, the arts community is really supportive of each other, and I think when you come from a place of generosity great things can happen, and I think this festival has been like an Olympics of playwriting, and the work is superb. It's just really, really exciting, and it's been really fun to go and meet all these other wonderful writers. This is something that could be easily replicated in a lot of other cities. It just takes some cooperation and some belief, and I think it's been really well-curated, this festival. I think really each theater put their best play forward, and those plays happen to be written by some great women.  Jo Reed: Karen, what do you think is one of the biggest challenges theater is facing now? Karen Zacarias: Well, the biggest one I think is trusting their audience. I think the idea of putting on more interesting, riskier work to attract a younger audience is something that theaters should not fear. I think theater needs to realize that they need to be telling the community and telling the audience that we are a place for community. We're a place for your updated stories. I think having diversity onstage is really important, because as this country is changing, the American public is changing, your theatre companies need to reflect that, and you need to be brave that way. I think history favors the bold, and I think it's been shown with this theater festival everyone's doing not only work by women but there's new work, and world premieres are always scary, exciting moments. So it's being brave. It's trusting the future.  Jo Reed: Now, why-- and this is my final question, because I really wanted to ask you this earlier-- tell me why when you decided that you were going to write, why playwriting? Why not a novel or poetry? Karen Zacarias: Oh, I can tell you why. Because I'm an extrovert. I'm a writer that's an extrovert, and so that means the idea at the end of the writing process to get to work with actors and a director was joyful. I like people. Jo Reed: Karen, thank you. I'm not going to ask you about what's next, because we know what. We've already recited that. Karen Zacarias: Well, I want to thank the NEA. I think government sponsoring the arts is vital, and, I mean, I think really the NEA has helped change the life of so many artists and also their communities. My play Einstein Is a Dummy got NEA funds to go up in Nashville and it was a great production, and all these kids in Tennessee got to see something that they wouldn't have gotten to see if the NEA hadn't wanted to support a play about science and Einstein and kids. I'm so glad you exist <laughs>. Jo Reed: Thank you. Karen Zacarias: Thank you. That was playwright Karen Zacarias. Her play is called Destiny of Desire and you can see it at Arena Stage until October 18. To find out more about the play, go to arenastage.org. As you heard, Destiny of Desire is also part of the citywide Women’s Voices Theater Festival. For more information about the festival, go to womensvoicestheaterfestival.org.  You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us at @NEAarts on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.