Meet Playwright Sandra Delgado

Sponsored by Rita Lowndes

MEET THE PLAYFEST PLAYWRIGHT SANDRA DELGADO

“Hundreds and Hundreds of Stars“

By Sandra Delgado
Directed by Clare Lopez

Performance: October 29, 2023
Time: 4:30 p.m.

An interview with Caroline M. Hull

Please tell us, what is this particular play about?

At the core, it’s about a mother and daughter, and we’re following Clara, who is a recently divorced woman. She’s raising her child, and she’s having a really hard time with life and keeping it together and finding normal in this new world. And she is a cannabis user, using it for therapeutic purposes, and has been for a long time. She and her daughter have been planning a trip to Europe, and Clara is a legal permanent resident of the United States, and for whatever reason, she’s never actually gotten her citizenship. But once they start talking about this trip to Europe, she gets it into her head that she does want to become a citizen so she and her daughter can go through the same line in Customs, the citizen line. So, her applying for her citizenship sets off a series of events that threaten her right to stay in the United States.

What initially inspired you to tackle this concept?

A couple of things. For me, the play was born when I was listening to NPR one day, and I heard this story about this man from Guyana, South America who had come here as a child. I mean, I don’t think he was more than four years old. Came here with a visa, came here legally. Fast forward thirty years, he’s in his mid-thirties, and he is in a similar situation to Clara. And what got me about this story was that this man had a 10-year-old son, and he was married, too. And that thing is that in immigration courts, there are really no rules. It’s completely subjective. The judge decides just based on whatever they think. It’s very unregulated, I would say. So, this judge was like, “You know what? Whatever. This guy has to go back to his country,” where he has no one. He’s now leaving his son, so his son is a casualty of the system too. That’s what got me because I am a mother. And I was like, “In what world does it make sense to tear this family apart over a very low-level drug offense?”

Your script incorporates a lot of writing that feels as though it takes place within a liminal space, and to sort of “break the mold” of the narrative style is particularly interesting. Was there any particular outside inspiration for those out-of-the-box moments?

Oh, yes. With what I do for a living, I travel a lot. And there are feelings of guilt that I felt over the years about leaving my daughter. And so, as I started thinking about this play, yes, it was inspired by hearing this man’s story and thinking about this family. And then, also, my guilt over leaving my daughter and the conversations that we’ve had. And those liminal spaces kind of came out of those feelings of fear and guilt over leaving my child. And kind of blowing that out, like, what is the most extreme version of that? And the most extreme version is, I don’t ever get to see my daughter again. For me, artistically, this is the emotional side of where those spaces came from. My entry into the theater from a very young age was as a singer and a dancer, and later an actor, before I became a playwright. In the plays that I write, it’s always either music or movement, and visuals are always very strong elements in any play that I do. And so that’s the way that it manifested in this play. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the choreographer, Pina Bausch, she’s amazing. She passed away a while ago, but her work, the choreography that she does, is almost like dance theater. She does stuff with professional dancers, which is amazing, but she also does stuff with regular people. So it’s not dance, but it is heightened movement, which is telling a story. So that is really what I’m going for with those moments. They’re inspired by dance theater.

If you could guarantee that audiences could take away one thing from seeing this play, what would it be?

I would like for people to consider the gray areas of our immigration policies and immigrants, and that’s not black and white. There are so many different stories and circumstances that we aren’t seeing on the news. And that currently, our policies, like so many things, don’t accommodate for the actual human, and they don’t accommodate for the actual lives of people. So, I guess to get people more thoughtful about that, and opening their minds and hearts to that, and where that leads them. That’s up to them. But to actively realize and question what they may be seeing on the news.

What initially inspired you to become a writer?

I’ve been in the theater world for, gosh, it’s been over 25 years. And I would say for about half of that, I was an actor. I really found a home in new plays. I never really got into the classics. That just wasn’t the kind of stuff I was necessarily getting called in for. It was a different time. Twenty-five years ago, you didn’t see a lot of Latinos getting called in at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. To me, it’s a different thing. Things have changed. So, I found the new play world, and I love it. I love new plays. I love being in the room. I love being an actor, being in the service of a playwright, trying to find the story. I loved it so much, and was lucky enough, I mean, Chicago is a big play development hub. I got to work with some of the best Latine playwrights around right now. And about 12 years ago or so, actually, longer than that, because it really coincided with me becoming a mom, and feeling different, not in any way that I can actually describe. But all of a sudden, being like, “I want to create.” I have reached this new chapter in my life, and what’s next? I was just feeling like I wanted something more out of
acting.

You know, there are roles that I haven’t gotten a chance to play that I want to play. And if I’m not seeing them, that means I have to write them. The very first piece I created was a dance theater piece. It was like a ten-minute piece, and I gathered some theater friends who were into devising and movement and different kinds of stuff, and we created it together. And it was a 10-minute piece, and it was a meditation on death, actually, and it became the most artistically fulfilling thing that I had ever done, and I was like, “Oh my god, this is amazing.” And the next thing I did was a solo show, and then started building my way into writing full-length plays. The play that I’m probably the most known for is a play with music called La Havana Madrid, which is a re-creation of this club that used to exist in Chicago in the 1960s, and I wrote that also with the intention of playing the main character that was the singer in the nightclub, because I really miss singing and I wanted to sing and I wanted to sing with a salsa band, and so I did that. And I won’t get into that play, but that’s why I started writing. I started writing because I felt that there was something missing.

Even though I had up to that point I had a really fulfilling acting career. Something switched when I became a mom, and was in a different space in my life, asking, “What do I need to do to keep theater being fulfilling to me?” And taking that leap of faith in myself, that this was something I could do, and trusting that all that time that I spent in rooms where all we were doing was new play development, that I had learned something. I think that actors make great writers because you get enough stage time and rehearsal time, you just naturally feel the ebbs and flows of a piece. When it’s working, when it’s not working, and the rhythm of it. I think that actors can become very in tune with that, and that is a very valuable skill to have when you’re writing plays.

What are you most excited about PlayFest, about this particular workshop process and collaboration?

So, this play was supposed to get a similar kind of process a while back. A few days of workshop, working with actors, and a public reading as part of a play festival. And that was supposed to be at a local theater company in Boulder. And I flew out to Boulder five days before we all went on lockdown. It was like COVID was really becoming a thing. So, the play for me has been floating in that liminal space. It’s emotional for me, for the play to have abruptly ended under those circumstances a couple of years ago. To be able to pick that work back up again and dive back into this world – the themes of this play have only gotten more resonant with what’s going on with people coming here and people being deported. What does it mean to be an American? And everything that’s happened with the legalization of cannabis. The world is a different place than it was in 2020, but the themes are still so important, and in some ways have changed in alarming ways. So, I’m excited to get down there again and hear the play again with new actors. It’s always so exciting. You’re a writer too, so you know how it is. Actors are magic. It’s always such a valuable process to hear your words and have discussions and have other people’s experiences come into the room because it’s going to make the play better. I’m going to walk out of the room deepening and opening up in unexpected ways.

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