What inspired you to write this play?

The boring answer is my grandmother’s death, but I think it’s the true answer too. I wasn’t particularly close with her, so watching her slowly die over a three-week period allowed me a bird’s-eye view of how cyclical grief can be without becoming mired in it myself. I watched my family say goodbye over and over again, and I think every goodbye granted me a little more distance so I could write the play.  

Your play's characters share names with those of the Dick & Jane books, but they look and talk very differently, and deal with considerably different issues. Why did you choose those characters to tell this story?

In the final years of my time as an undergrad, I worked as a sign language interpreter for deaf students in a handful of different middle schools throughout the region. Many of the students (few of whom were white) were required to take speech therapy lessons that I would then be required to interpret. The speech therapist frequently used early childhood primers as the texts for the students to practice with, and more often than not, it would be the Dick and Jane books themselves. This was striking to me for two reasons: one, these books used to amplify and improve one language (English) were actually suppressing another (American Sign Language); and two, these books featuring a white nuclear family were the only portal for these students of color to understand what’s “universal.” That experience became the first seed of my play. 

This play is produced in partnership with The Sol Project, whose mission is to "amplify Latinx voices" to create "create a bold, powerful, and kaleidoscopic body of work for the new American theater." As part of that movement, what are your hopes for the future of Latinx theater?