I remember feeling that if I don’t express this somehow, I’ll despair, I’ll go mad. Looking back, part of it was about trying to impose some kind of … - Melinda Lopez

We’re not allowed in an open way, in a public way, to talk about our grief and our experiences, our challenges, or our failures, which is what I tried to do.

I wanted to really be sure that the play never became a play about how to grieve…And in order to accomplish that I needed the play to remain in this time of confusion and chaos.

There’s a legend in my family about my great-grandmother, who lived through the Cuban War of Independence and the Spanish-American War. The Spanish came to take over her farm when she was 16 years old and sent her family to internment camps. The legend is that my great-grandmother refused to go; she took her pet pig under her arms and walked up into the mountain to join the rebels. That’s as much of the story as I could ever get from anyone. I always had an image of this young woman finding a way to survive a terrible war. The play that I eventually wrote is not her story, but it’s certainly infused with her spirit…