I pretty much live in the details of them, and they teach me while I’m writing. I don’t come to it thinking, “I want this character to serve this fun… - Quiara Alegría Hudes

…As I was visualizing the play, before I even started writing it, I just imagined three characters and their lives happening, their stories happening, on top of each other. It just visually felt like a fugue to me. If you read music, you can picture a Bach fugue. You have one line and the line can come back inverted and they’ll be playing on top of each other and I was like, that’s cool. That feels like something to me. I also was excited about combining this Latin world and this very western music classics world…

…with any story there are infinite ways to tell it, infinite character arcs to follow, when you drop the needle into the story, and when you pick the needle up.

In Latino culture the idea of the border is very contemporary. It’s very much of our world, its politics are important to us. It’s also a part of our emotional relationship to the rest of our family in Puerto Rico, or wherever, and our own relationship to roots—the land of our roots—and where we are now…