christopher oscar peña

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

christopher oscar peña is an accomplished playwright with a resume that includes productions, commissions and residencies at some of the country’s most forward-thinking theatrical institutions. Among his most recent productions are the world premieres of his plays “a cautionary tail” at the Flea Theater in New York and “The Strangers” at the Clarence Brown Theatre in Knoxville, TN.

chris is also amassing impressive credits as a TV writer, having written for the Emmy-nominated first season of “Jane the Virgin” on the CW and HBO’s highly lauded “Insecure” as well as the Starz series “Sweetbitter.” He is currently on the writing staff for “Promised Land,” a new series that will air this season on ABC.

Early in the pandemic, chris was approached by director James Darragh to join him and composer Ellen Reid, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for her opera “p r i s m,” on a new project: a brand-new operatic work to be created specifically for and presented in the digital space. Never an opera aficionado, chris nonetheless jumped at the novel opportunity, and with the addition of “p r i s m” librettist Roxie Perkins, the creators hired a team of writers and composers and then filmed and recorded “Desert In.” All eight episodes are available for viewing on the streaming platform, OperaBox.tv. “Desert In” was described by The Wall Street Journal as “lush and expansive … a highly original marriage of opera and series television,” and The New York Observer wrote that “this stylish film-opera hybrid … is a sun-drenched melodrama.”

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, chris describes how his enduring passion for breaking form and pushing artistic envelopes has allowed him to craft an eclectic career that amplifies his voice and core beliefs.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

Pier Carlo Talenti: What got you excited to join the creative team of “p r i s m” on a completely new project?

christopher oscar peña: What I loved about [“p r i s m”] is that all three of them — Ellen, Roxie and James — were really interested in what I was interested in, which is disrupting the form, or at least in a much more straightforward way creating pieces of art that weren’t for the audiences that we’ve usually catered to, meaning this piece was about sexual assault; they cast people who were getting naked onstage; the whole piece I want to say was three acts, but they were short acts so you actually got this whole narrative in like 80 minutes; the third act felt like you were dropping molly at a rave while being at an opera. It was crazy.

I remember feeling, “Oh, this is not meant for an 80-year-old audience who’s used to going to the opera. This is for a 22-year-old kid,” which to me has always been a thing that I talk about. Growing up in the theater, I felt like when you go to “Death of a Salesman,” who’s that play for? We teach it in high school, but no high schooler understands what that play is about. It’s not for them.

I really loved what they were doing. When they came to me, they said, “Let’s essentially take the opera form and create the first essentially TV series. Instead of building an opera traditionally where the composer really drives this and it’s one composer and one writer, let’s write it as if we were writing a TV show.” Neither James nor Ellen had worked in TV at that point, so I was spearheading that process. Something that Ellen says is that “It’s great if you’re going to disrupt the form to bring in somebody who’s not used to the form.” I was the outsider of the opera world. So that was the initial impulse.

Also at that time I think the Boston Lyric had commissioned them to write a show, and so they were like, “Instead of doing a traditional opera, let’s do this digital thing.” So that was the first impulse. I said, yes right away. I really didn’t know what that meant or what we were to do, but I said yes.

Then the next stage of the process was James and Ellen had read Genet’s “The Balcony” and were interested in maybe using that as a jumping-off point for us to create something together. At that point then I said, “OK, let’s drive the ship, and let’s make this as if this was a TV show.”

In a TV show, you hire a writers’ room; you have anywhere from eight to 22 episodes — obviously the size of the room changes based on your order — and those episodes are 30 minutes to an hour. We were talking about doing episodes that were really between eight to 12 minutes long. I’ll tell you what we started to do and what we ended up with.

So we said we’d do eight to 12. Our episodes that we produced really ended up being … I think the shortest one is 14 minutes and the longest is 25 minutes. We really actually built up fully produced TV episodes. We had also talked about how big the writers’ room was going to be, whether it was going to be three people, four people. We decided that we were going to do eight episodes. Once we landed on that number … . Part of the reason I love TV and part of the reason I said yes to this project is for me it’s about bringing my friends and collaborators and other artists that I love into the picture. So I was like, “As many artists as I can bring in, as many as I can get is what I want.” So we decided on eight episodes, and I had the opportunity to then bring in seven other writers.

Pier Carlo: And how did you pick them? Were they all outsiders to the form? Was that one of the criteria?

chris: We hired Roxie just because she was a common thread about all three of us that we all loved and we all believe in and we’re all friends with. So Roxie came onboard, and she’s really the only one who had any opera experience.

Really, I will be honest with you. They basically said to me, “Hire whoever you want.” I am a Latino immigrant queer kid from California, and one of the things, having been in many writers’ rooms, is there’s always only one Latino or one Black person. There’s only one of anything and 12 white writers. I had always said that if I had my own writers’ rooms, I wanted a really inclusive, diverse room. This is something that it’s important for me to say over and over: It was really, really, really easy to do that and really, really easy to get accomplished, interesting, brilliant, different writers of marginalized communities. So we’re out there.

Pier Carlo: Right. You’re countering the narrative that sometimes you hear powerful people say: “Sure, I’d like to diversify, but where do I find them?”

chris: They always say that, and every time I hear that, I’m like, “You are not good at your job.” I mean, truly I could have built five rooms this way. There were so many people that we couldn’t get who were busy and who we wanted. So the first thing I did is I basically reached out to my friends.

I also want to say that part of the reason the people ended up in the room, aside from that they were just brilliant and different, is that because this project was so new — meaning we were all truly making it up as we go in terms of, “Well, what does it mean to make an opera for TV? How much does that cost? How do you pay people? Who owns the rights?” — that it felt like I needed to work with people that I could trust to just say yes. Because we all were sort of figuring it out as we went along.

Pier Carlo: You said you loved shaking things up and this was a project in which you were planning to shake things up. Did you shake things up the way you thought you were going to?

chris: I think I did. I knew going in that I wanted to do something that had not been seen in opera, so I knew that that was part of my mission, but at the same time, it’s not like I try. I didn’t have to do anything to shake things up because in a way just hiring me was the thing that was going to shake things up because my interest and tastes already were going to be different.

One of the things, for instance, that we’ve heard from almost everybody is that this is the queerest opera they’ve ever seen. All the love stories are queer. There’s a lesbian love story. There is this bisexual and then queer love story of these boys. Really it wasn’t like we were like, “Let’s be as queer as possible.” It was that the room was really queer and we wanted to tell the stories we hadn’t seen. So that ended up happening.

So again the thing that was shaking things up was that the people who were actually at the center of the narrative were people that rarely are at the center.

And then of course you cast people of color in the lead roles. One of the leads was a Black woman; one of the leads was a Latino guy; one of the lead singers was Mexican. So again the thing that was shaking things up was that the people who were actually at the center of the narrative were people that rarely are at the center.

And I think now you say, “Well, you go to the opera; you cast a Black person or an Asian person.” But those narratives are still built by white writers and white creators. Our show is different just in the sheer fact that these episodes were written by mostly people of color and queer writers. So that really was different as well.

Pier Carlo: Now that you’ve worked in theater, in television and in opera, what do you think each of these worlds could stand to learn from the other, in terms of shaking things up, in terms of taking their artform to the next level?

chris: That’s a great question. I think that I will answer that more generally and answer to why I think I’ve been sort of doing all these things. When I was 20 years old, I was a fellow at the New York Theater Workshop, a great, exciting place. I had the great fortune of becoming friends — first he was my mentor and then now we’re just great friends — with Geoffrey Jackson Scott. He was a wonderful dramaturg/literary person back at the Workshop. He back then, I think, was also ahead of the game in that he worked in theater but his thinking was always like, “How do we do things that haven’t been done yet? How do we redefine theater? How do we redefine dramaturgy? How do we collaborate in different ways?”

One of the things that he said to me when I was a really impressionable young writer was, “Are you a playwright or are you a writer? Or are you something else?” And that really, really, really stuck with me. I always had thought I was a playwright. I always sort of wore that title as something that really meant something to me. But as I kept working … it’s just a word, but I suddenly realized how limiting that word was.

Then I started doing TV, and then I started doing movies. I keep saying yes to things that I thought I’d never do. I never thought I’d work in the world of opera; I never thought I’d work in the world of musical theater; I never really thought I’d write for TV. And yet every one of those things is fundamentally what is important to me, which is it’s storytelling and it allows me to broaden my point of view or reinvent how I need to tell stories at a certain moment in time. That feels very old-school to a TV writer who does theater, but to me — being a director and an actor and a writer — all these things are just more opportunities.

... the thing that all the artforms, whether it’s opera or theater, can learn from each other: that we are at a really exciting time where there are many, many, many ways to tell stories. How can we take the thing that we love, whether it’s a stage or whether it’s an instrument, and tell a story with it in a way that we haven’t before?

I think that’s what I would say is the thing that all the artforms, whether it’s opera or theater, can learn from each other: that we are at a really exciting time where there are many, many, many ways to tell stories. How can we take the thing that we love, whether it’s a stage or whether it’s an instrument, and tell a story with it in a way that we haven’t before? And more excitingly to me, how can we collaborate with other artforms? I think if you just remain open to that, something really new and fresh will come out of it.

Pier Carlo: I think it takes a certain amount of fearlessness to keep saying yes to things that feel completely foreign to you and just taking the big dive, because of course there’s always a risk of big failure, I suppose. Where did that fearlessness come for you? Where did you learn it?

chris: I love that! I want to think about it as fearlessness. I think really it’s just that I’m a workaholic. I love making work. In many parts of our lives, whether it’s in the theater or TV, there’s always this waiting. There’s always waiting for someone to say yes. There’s always waiting for someone to be available. There’s always waiting for a theater to program you or someone to want to give you money.

In a way it’s like we spend so much of our time and we put so much of our lives and hearts into these pieces that … you write a play, it sits in your desk. Or you write a movie, it sits in your desk. I think that for me I need to keep working. So when somebody gives me an opportunity that might come to fruition and come to life, I jump at it because it’s just the possibility of a new story but also it might go into the world and people might see it. I think it’s almost the other way. It’s almost that the fear of saying no might mean that that story will never exist.

I think it’s important for us to keep looking for avenues that will surprise us and that we didn’t think were actually opportunities for us to share our voices in different ways.

It’s really easy, I think, for a lot of us to think of scarcity. We’re trained that we’re not going to get these things and that there’s only a limited of amount. But I think it’s important for us to keep looking for avenues that will surprise us and that we didn’t think were actually opportunities for us to share our voices in different ways.

Pier Carlo: What’s going to keep you in the theater?

chris: I hear that fear, and I used to fear that when I was younger and I would see other playwrights go to TV. What I’ve realized now is that there are two things that are good for us. One is that there is so much opportunity and resources in TV when actually there is no money in theater, right? That’s just the truth; there isn’t. When I was coming up, you either became a playwright and then you did film, which was very rare, or you became a playwright and then you also became a scholar or you taught playwriting at a university. The reality is there are way fewer teaching opportunities than there are playwrights and creative writers who need homes.

I think the great thing about TV is that there is, if you can break in, an abundance of money, which I actually think has given me the freedom to not need the theater. What I mean by that is I still need a home, I still want to get produced, I still want a community, but I don’t need to write plays to make anyone happy anymore, because that’s not how I’m making my living. I’ve just written what I want to be writing, and actually those are the things that are now getting produced, interestingly enough.

I also think — I hate saying this, but I think it’s true — the theater is really star-fuckery. I think that the theater is more interested in me now because I’m on TV than they were before, even if I was writing the exact same plays. So if anything the fact that I’m on TV is allowing me to go back to the theater.

I do think that I’m never going to leave the theater because it’s where I love to ... . People always laugh at the fact that one episode of my TV shows has been viewed by millions of people all over the world and yet the thing that I desperately crave is to be in a small room with 200 people, and that play will maybe in its life see 5,000 people. We keep desperately wanting to be in that room. It’s like the abusive relationship where it’s never going to treat you right and you keep going back. It’s so unfortunate.

But for me, a TV episode or a movie, as wide as it will go, it’ll never be the same as sitting in a room, collectively sharing breath with people who are watching bodies in space at the same time.

Pier Carlo: Would you ever want to run a theater?

chris: [He laughs.] I think that when I was younger, I really wanted to. That was the dream. And actually Sean Daniels, who runs Arizona Theatre Company, is always trying to get me to apply. I really, really wanted to, and the only reason I’ve stepped back a little bit is because I think it would require me stepping away from my TV career in a way that I’m not ready.

But if you want to pitch this into the world … Matt Shakman just took over the Geffen, and he is a very, very, very active TV director who did “WandaVision” and “Game of Thrones.” The playwright and actress Ngozi Anyanwu and I always joke that we should co-run a theater together. So if anybody out there — CTG, for instance, or New York Theater Workshop — wants to take two people of color together … !

Pier Carlo: You are, as you said, a queer Latino man who’s been writing for major TV shows for eight years. Have you felt a change in the industry in those eight years?

chris: Yeah, absolutely. This is not a secret, so I’m just going to... . The first TV show I was ever on was “Jane the Virgin” on the CW. That show when it happened, when it got on the air, felt seismic in itself. People were like, “This big Latino show!” There hadn’t been one on TV for years. But the reality is the writers’ room was made up, I want to say, of 10 writers and the eight top writers were white writers and the two bottom staff writers were the Latinos. So that show was still mostly really driven by white narratives. That is true of shows like “Orange is the New Black.” That is true of a lot of shows that people on the front saw diverse faces. It was really shocking and hard to be on the Latino show and be one of two [Latino] writers on it.

That being said, as I’ve gone on … . I’m on a show now, which is a brand-new show for ABC — ABC being one of the most inclusive networks — and this show is being created and show-run by a Latino man. There are five of us in the writers’ room, and only one is white. It is the first time that I’ve been in a writers’ room where it is this many Latinos.

I did have the privilege also of being on “Insecure” on HBO, which in itself was groundbreaking. We all talked about how it was so great to be on that show because all the writers were used to being the one of color in all the other rooms and on that room we got to be majority. That was rightfully a Black-led show. But this is the first time that I’m with this many Latinos. It’s crazy!

Pier Carlo: What does that feel like? Clearly it’s going to change the type of storytelling, the authenticity of the stories, but how does it change your sense of your own artistry to be in a room like that?

chris: The thing that’s really exciting is that you don’t have to feel like you’re fighting to be visible. That is so just emotionally ... . It’s less exhausting to walk into that room because you’re constantly having to remind people that you have a point of view. But the thing that’s really special is I think that all of us want to tell complicated, interesting stories, and a lot of times it’s hard to write complex stories because it feels like the burden of representation falls on your shoulders.

What I mean by that, as an example, is my dad will come see my plays and he’ll say, “Why couldn’t you write a happy ... a Latino play that shows us in all our beauty and goodness?” And I’m like, “Dad, that’s not why I got into this. I got into this to question how we behave.” But all my dad knows is that he doesn’t get to see people that look like him in the mainstream, and so the one time he does, he wants us to be positive role models and people that have great stories and can succeed and are smart. And I get that; I get that need. But for me, it’s like, “Oh God, I can’t show the dark side because then we look bad, but that’s what I want to explore.”

The great thing on this new show, for instance, that even the actors say, is that they’re always used to being the one who represents the entire Latinx community and how hard is it? You’re like, “I can’t be complicated. I can’t be bad. I can’t be a villain. I can’t be on this side of the argument, because I have to represent all of the Spanish-speaking world.” Whereas when you have six or seven writers and you have 10 characters, you can write characters that are bad and good and black and white and gray because you’re not saying one thing about all of Latin America or all the Latinx people. You’re saying, “Here, we exist in all these different ways, and we can be messy.”

I got into this to represent us in all our complex good and bad parts and to really try to figure out why we are the way we are. I think finally having this many voices in the room and this many characters to unpack is allowing me to really go deep and explore as opposed to constantly be worried that I’m misrepresenting a whole of a people.

That’s what I got into this. I got into this to represent us in all our complex good and bad parts and to really try to figure out why we are the way we are. I think finally having this many voices in the room and this many characters to unpack is allowing me to really go deep and explore as opposed to constantly be worried that I’m misrepresenting a whole of a people.

Pier Carlo: It’s amazing, this varied career you’ve crafted for yourself. Is there a big challenge in the future you’re dreaming of that you’re willing to share? A dream project?

chris: Yeah. I mean, listen, I think that having my own TV show is going to be the thing that I’m always gearing towards. But in terms of the theater, the thing that I will share that I have been sort of nervous about is I’d love to write a musical. And I keep being asked to do them because I’m at that place in my career where the cool movies are looking for adapters. I keep getting those calls, and I keep saying no, because it takes like eight years to get a musical produced and who knows if it’s ever going to make it and if you’re going to get paid. So I’m like, “I’d rather go do TV.”

But also music to me is still magical. What I mean by that is I love theater, I love TV, I love film, but I can see the mechanics of it because I’ve done it for so many years, because I’ve studied it. Music to me is this thing that I don’t understand, and so I’ve never really learned to write a musical. Of course, I’ve asked several people — David Henry Hwang and Itamar Moses — to give me advice on how to write a musical because I’m so nervous. And everybody said the same thing: “If you can tell a story, you can tell a story. You know how to write a musical.” But it still feels elusive to me.

But I think this year, there’s a couple things that I’m really in talks about maybe pursuing and doing that for the first time. So that’s really the next big thing I think I’m going to take on is doing a big, big glitzy musical.

I’ve had productions across the country. I had a play in New York at the Flea many years ago, but I haven’t officially made my off-Broadway debut. That is actually finally going to happen. My play “how to make an American Son” is going to happen at the Rattlestick next season. That’ll be kind of a big moment for me, to finally have that happen.

Pier Carlo: That’s awesome. Why is it a big moment?

chris: I’m not one who doesn’t think that being produced in the regions is important. I love the regions, especially having grown up and lived in Chicago and California. I think having theater locally is really special. But you know, we all dream about New York. The Flea was such a great moment for me, but it was a tiny basement theater. The Rattlestick is a place that has produced some of the writers that have inspired me. It sort of makes it feel like you’ve made it, even though I know that’s on my head because I know I’ve made it. I have a career. I’m out here. I think just to join the storied history of that place is really important to me, also to be doing it with a play that’s really important to me.

I wrote a play about my father and myself and our relationship. One of the things that I tell people that I think is missing in our narratives is number one, success and affluence. But also every narrative that I have seen of people of color, their fathers, queer stories, it’s always about a dad who throws his kid out or beats him or hates him. My dad sent me to therapy to make sure that I wasn’t going to kill myself and took me to Madonna and is the best person in the world. I want queer kids of color to know that their parents can and will love them as well. So I wrote this play that’s a love letter to my dad. To have that happen in New York is really important to me.

But of course, I’m chris peña, so I always want to talk about the hard thing. So the play is very much about what it means to be an American and who gets to be an American. I wrote it at this time when it felt like if people of color were not successful or were not working, they were welfare queens or they were rapists. But at the same time, if people of color succeed, then white people think we’ve too much of the pie and we take what is not ours and don’t deserve. I think we’re really stuck in this position of, “What can we as people of color … what are we allowed to do? Is America really for us?”

This play is really about this question that I think we’re really in a great moment of reckoning. I think we are finally starting to talk about just how complicated it is to be a person of color in this country, so I’m excited to join that conversation.

Pier Carlo: Does your dad know the play, or is he going to see it for the first time at Rattlestick?

chris: Actually, he has seen a reading of it. It was done at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival right before the pandemic. And I got to tell you — because he is a very, very private person — but the play, it really is a love story to him. He and my mom sat in the audience. I remember my college roommates were there and my high school friends were there, because I grew up in the Bay Area. When the reading was over, I was outside with my friends, waiting for my parents to go to lunch, and we were like, “Where are they?”

I walked back inside, and my father is surrounded by 20 audience members, just holding court about what it meant to be in this play and to be my dad. It was so crazy. He’s very proud of it, and he is very happy. And I’m excited for the world to see it.

Pier Carlo: That is an achievement, my friend.

chris: Yeah. Finally, finally!

Pier Carlo: Congratulations.

chris: Thank you. You’re always trying to make your parents happy. I was like, “I can retire now because my dad smiled.”

October 19, 2021