Playwrights' Arena presents the world premiere of my play, WAITING

By Daniel A. Olivas

In the summer of 2018, I wrote a New York Times opinion piece about my fictional response to Donald Trump’s election in the form of my 2017 dystopian short story “The Great Wall” where the President has finally constructed his long-promised southern border wall, and used the adjoining detention center to separate undocumented parents from their children. I argued that a year after creating this fictional, horrific world, my dystopian tale had essentially become a reality. In other words, for many immigrants and their children, the dystopia was here.

But it got worse. Trump flailed and sputtered—usually in late-night or early-morning Tweets—attacking anyone who opposed his policies and laying blame on others for failing to fulfill his promise to build the wall. He eventually unilaterally highjacked billions of dollars of the military budget to fund his wall. Even some Republicans were aghast at such self-help from an increasingly volatile president.

A year later, I believed that “dystopia” no longer fully described what we were witnessing. In my mind, the irrational hatred aimed at immigrants by Trump and his followers amounted to absurdity in its purest form. Merriam-Webster defines “absurd” as “having no rational or orderly relationship to human life: MEANINGLESS.” Under the Trump administration, we were certainly living in absurd times.

For over two decades, I had used fiction and poetry to depict and honor my Mexican American culture and experience all the while taking aim at the systematic bigotry my community has suffered for over two centuries in this country. But Trump took it to a new level. Don’t get me wrong: his thuggish, ignorant bigotry was nothing new. But to witness such unabashed hatred of immigrants—and anyone who looked like an immigrant—proclaimed and implemented as policy at the highest levels of our government in this day and age was flabbergasting.

So, in the summer of 2019, I was inspired to write my first play, Waiting for Godínez. Looking to Samuel Beckett’s iconic Godot play as the framing of my tale, Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, and Lucky were now embodied in my characters Jesús, Isabel, Piso, and Afortunada. In my play, Jesús is kidnapped each night by ICE and put into a cage. But the immigration agents forget to lock the cage, so Jesús escapes and makes his way back to Isabel as they wait for Godínez in a city park. It is a wholly different play, of course, but Mr. Beckett’s absurdist spirit runs through my work.

I wrote it almost in a fever—it was the literary equivalent of a primal scream. I immersed myself in Beckett’s text and watched many filmed versions of the Godot play available online. According to my journal, I started writing my play on July 23, 2019, with a working title of Waiting for Gómez. On August 3, I changed the title to Waiting for Godínez because, as I explained in my journal, it “fits better than ‘Gómez.’” The next day, I proclaimed in my notes: “Finished Waiting for Godínez!” In other words, I wrote the play in 13 days.

I then went about the business of submitting it to theatres and play competitions. I had never written a play before, and I do not have an MFA. So, I had to teach myself how to write a play and then figure out how to get someone to read it. In my research, Playwrights’ Arena looked like a potential home for what I was trying to do, so I submitted my play on August 7, 2019. The odds were stacked against me. But then remarkably, ten months later, I received an email invitation for my play to be included in Playwrights’ Arena 2020 Summer Series. I was suddenly a playwright.

That acceptance resulted in Waiting for Godínez being read on July 5, 2020, via Zoom, by professional actors and directed by Dr. Daphnie Sicre, a drama professor at Loyola Marymount University. I was bitten by the playwriting bug, and there was no turning back. I was invited the next month to submit a new draft of my play that addressed several notes made by Playwrights’ Arena’s artistic director, Jon Lawrence Rivera, and literary managers, Jaisey Bates and Zharia O’Neal. I quickly turned around a new draft and submitted it. But as I had learned from my research, there was no assurance that Playwrights’ Arena would make the commitment to fully stage my play. I was fine with that. My experience was already beyond anything I could have imagined, and I felt deeply gratified that my artistic challenge to our country’s anti-immigrant policies reached an audience, albeit a small one.

I started on a second play as part of a playwriting group sponsored by another local theatre. Then in November 2020, I received an email from Playwrights’ Arena asking for a Zoom meeting to discuss Waiting for Godínez. We were, at that point, well into the pandemic without widely available vaccines. In-person theatre was almost non-existent except for a few pandemic-friendly productions such as Playwrights’ Arena’s Garage Theatre where a small audience could watch a live play from the safety of their cars.

At the meeting, Jon gave me the wonderful news that Playwrights’ Arena wanted to produce Waiting for Godínez but I might have to wait a year or two for that to happen. Alternatively, I could rewrite it into a shorter, pandemic version—essentially trimming it by half—for a Garage Theatre-style production for the summer of 2021. After consulting with my director, Dr. Sicre, and my wife (not in that order), I decided to take on the challenge and rewrite my play for an earlier production.

The result is Waiting, which I like to call my pandemic remix of Waiting for Godínez. It is about half as long as the original, and the pandemic is now part of the storyline. In fact, the pandemic theme served an important role in helping me to trim and rewrite it into a shorter play that maintained the spirit of the original but that stood on its own as a separate and new theatrical work.

And as Playwrights’ Arena’s production of Waiting moves forward, we are still witnessing the residual violence done to immigrant families by the Trump administration. And the current administration—though eons better than the last—is still grappling with the harsh realities of a broken immigration system and the cruel politicization of the border.

Through absurdist humor, I hope that my play shines a bright light on the human rights tragedy suffered by immigrants while also humanizing that suffering. My goal is to give a voice and face to those members of our community who deserve to be respected and appreciated for their humanity. In other words, though I looked to Beckett’s absurdist theatre for inspiration, I actually do believe that there is something to be done. The alternative is too much for me to accept.

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Waiting will have its world premiere on Saturday, July 24, and will run through August 15, 2021, at the Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90039. For show times and ticket information, visit Playwrights’ Arena’s page for this play. Tickets are now available.