Tasha Miranda-Rojas secret theater blog

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“Nocturama was a lot of fun to write. It’s also the play that no one will produce. I wrote it during a period of crippling self-hatred and depression, and I was interested in how, even if you’re a well-intentioned depressed person, you can still really screw up the lives of everyone around you just through the things that being depressed can make you say. I was also interested in what we mean when we say ‘depressed.’ I was also interested in the way liberal-seeming white people talk about black people when they’re not around. I was also interested in historical house tours and melancholic female 19th-century poets (Emily Dickinson in particular), and at the peak of my insane depression I was attending three historical house tours a week and getting obsessed with the (always female) historical house tour guides and their fanatical interest in the minutiae of dead people’s lives.”

BANANAS. (smiling out front) Hello. I haven’t had a chance to welcome you. This is my home and I’m your hostess and I should welcome you. I wanted to say Hello and I’m glad you could come. I was very sick a few months ago. I tried to slash my wrists with spoons. But I’m better now and glad to see people. In the house. I couldn’t go out. Not yet. Hello. (She walks the length of the stage, smiling at the audience, at us. She has a beautiful smile.)

Man From Nebraska