Luis Alfaro’s play The Travelers, the script of which appears in full in our Summer print issue, tells the stories of six interdependent Carthusian brothers at a crumbling monastery in central California. Here Luis speaks to longtime collaborator Sean San José, artistic director of Campo Santo and now the Magic Theatre, where the play had its premiere, about their long journey together.
SEAN SAN JOSÉ: We’ve been working together for decades now, and that feels like such a beautiful, long, endless road. Not to overwork the metaphor, but the journey continues with The Travelers; this truly life-changing experience feels like it wants to keep walking with us. It’s still present, isn’t it?
LUIS ALFARO: Very much. Part of the journey I’ve been having with you is also a journey about the Magic Theatre. It’s a kind of mythical place; it’s got all of its history, and that history is also a way of working. It has always been a big part of my life, even though I hadn’t participated there—just knowing Mame Hunt, and that the theatre started with poets, and it has a history we’re both so intimately involved in, with people like Jessica Hagedorn and Paula Vogel, all of our idols and friends. The Travelers feels like a play that lives in the building, right? We’ve added another brick, or another ghost, into the building.
People that will read the play may notice that the character names for the most part carry the actual given names of the actors. And that is the way you shaped it. The work we’ve gotten to do together, especially with Campo Santo, has always felt very intimate, very personal, while somehow being about these epic journeys. The way we create together is, it’s a room full of people—it’s not a writer-to-actor-alone journey. What does that mean to you?
The last few experiences of working with you and Campo Santo have been deeply emotional. My dad died when we were working on all Alleluia, The Road; that was a show where I just wanted to stop, and you guided me through that journey of grief. With this, the pandemic had been such a part of this play. Truly, it is a pandemic play. I never felt depressed or lonely like I felt during the pandemic. So the piece is really an expression of a moment, as manifested in this kind of scenario.
Normally when I go into a room—I work a lot with Chay Yew, and we’re like technicians, because Chay is a poet also. So we’re talking structure and form and story a lot. With Campo Santo, we didn’t start with the play; we started with this amazing meal with everybody there. You look around and it’s not just the actors: It’s the sound designer Chris Sauceda and the stage manager Lauren Quan, all the collaborators—such as long-time collaborators Joan Osato and Tanya Orellana—who are going to make this thing. There’s something very joyful in feeling held up in community. The pressure goes away, but the emotional investment grows. You fall in love with everybody; you’re very real with everybody. You’re spending a lot of time with people that normally get parsed out to different points of the schedule; everybody starts together. So I never felt like I sat at the table alone.
I’ve said it many times, but in my time at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I realized I’m a repertory writer. I loved being there and writing for very specific people. But rep theatres don’t really exist anymore. So something about this fulfilled something for me around that: writing specifically for people, writing to their strengths, writing to their challenges, also writing to their story. You can try to say, “Well, I’m the writer and I’m gonna sit over here.” But that doesn’t happen in a Campo Santo show. What happens is that everybody’s story is in the show; everybody is in the experience of the creation of the play. The strains inside of this play are really people’s blood and tears. How fun to do a play that’s not a play—that’s more of a ritual.
It’s so beautiful to hear you describe it. It sounds so open, slightly formless in terms of play structure. But I will not allow you to let this experience of your process be told as something where you were merely an observer and you recorded stories. What you did in this piece is really stunning: You created characters and a world and a story, and then almost subconsciously filtered in these soul threads of people’s lives or their stories. It couldn’t really be legible on the page; it wasn’t discernible even while reading it together. It was only experienced when you watched an actor embrace this secretive or unconscious part of themselves, something they buried—as with the characters in the play, the thing that has prevented them from transforming or has them stuck. I’ve never experienced anything like that. I think that’s what makes the thing so rarefied, so awesome to behold. It was something truly felt in the room, but you couldn’t name it one-to-one, like, “Oh, that’s Juan Amador’s story.” That’s why it’s resonating. It’s like putting something in the river; how are you going to see that? You’re not going to see it until you swim. Even then you might not see it—you’ll just feel it.
I’m thinking about swimming: You jump in the water and, if you learned how to swim when you were two or three or four, you just swim again. That’s the joy of the process I learned from María Irene Fornés: I just let go of everything. Of course, there’s this long history of writing plays and thinking about arc and character and everything that you’re supposed to think of. But in truth, that’s not how you’re leading; you’re leading with your heart.
When do you realize a thing like that? We mentioned the great Jessica Hagedorn, and the way her mind works, it’s all collage. She goes in and she’s like, “Fuck that—we’re not telling a straight story, because we haven’t lived straight lives.” Your play has a really clear structure and really strong characters, it has events. But I remember a certain point where you led the company, including the incredible director, Catherine Castellanos, and said, “This ain’t that; we’re doing a different thing.” Do you realize that when you’re writing it, or after you’ve heard it 10 times? Or was it a new sprout that arose somewhere in the middle?
I think the joy of the early years of writing with Irene or Mac Wellman or Paula Vogel—they were all really invitations to bump in the dark a lot, to go into rooms where you had no idea what was going on, and to write through that, write without having to know what your ending is. There’s something very exciting about this for me, which is to not know, so just lead with your heart, let your emotional side be the thing that’s writing the play. Then you have the muscle of writing that’s always with you, that’s not going to let you go too far off the deep end. The combination of those two for me felt like: Okay, I see what’s going on here is that I don’t know what’s going on, but I have to trust that we’re going somewhere, and then the little things will happen—the little breakthroughs and connections start to happen. And the play starts to leave your yellow pad and it starts to have a sound, which I think is always my favorite part of writing—the place when it starts to go away from me because somebody else is now voicing it, taking it away and putting it in the air.
I will say—I don’t know if you remember, but some of our conversations were, “I just don’t know what’s going on here!” You have to be excited about not knowing what’s going on; that’s the joy of making art. If you know where you’re going, why go? Some of what’s happening, at least for me at my age, is that I just get lost more and more often.
But it does get exciting to not know, and to experiment deeper and fuller and richer and to trust your instincts about what is intuitive and what isn’t instinctual. There’s something very primal going on, something very essential about the life-and-death experience.
It’s not a surprise that this story came to me, of these guys in a seminary, so closely attached to farmwork, the Central Valley, heat, agriculture. I think it is truly about how we survive in the landscape of America right now, which feels like a dumpster fire but also beautifully possible. We’re always sort of living on that strange edge. I feel that very much in my life right now, like, Oh my God, everything’s a mess, and also, how wonderful and possible everything is right now. That’s what always keeps me busy, keeps me filled with the inquiry of people and the joy of discovery. That’s what was so joyful about this experience: being so intimate with actors, in a way that doesn’t feel like 9 to 5. We had meals together that will always remain deep in my heart.
So much of the play is about what’s happening in this current moment, and the despair, and where do you find love; and there’s also all the stuff you bury inside the play about the things that have not allowed us to change in our lives.
There was a point that I really distinctly remember, you and I talked on the phone every day during rehearsal, and you said, “Look, I’m really interested in characters. The plot will be the plot. I’m interested in characters creating the world.” From the moment you said that, we were able to focus on and embrace fully the people in it. That showed us where we were going, but also that the world was about transformation, or attempting transformation. How brave and how bold to do that, to say that in the middle of the thing.
If you create an environment of possibility, then anything is possible, right? Truly. It was interesting that I had written all of this pre-play—I wrote a play before the play, just to try to get to the play. When we experimented, we could see: Actually, it starts right at the moment this guy enters with this gunshot wound. That’s not normally where a play starts, but that’s where this play starts. Because this play is a meditation, and the subject of the meditation, the pray-er, has entered. Had I stayed in the other world, I think I would have written three or four scenes before that.
We did have these endless scenes with information and how things worked. In the end, sitting with an audience, they don’t need it. What they want is to sit in the feeling. They don’t necessarily want us to show them how church works; they want to just get to the spirit of the church.
You know, the reference points are always interesting. So many of the critics were like, “It’s Beckett.” It’s so interesting that that’s the place they enter from: the absurd, the strangeness of the world. But you and I both know the Central Valley really well, and the Central Valley is as American as you can honestly get. It is also a very surreal landscape, a life-and-death landscape. It’s America’s crops, it’s immigration, it’s all of the problems of the world. But it also seems like a landscape that’s deserted.
Not to be on the nose about “travelers,” but I feel like I’ve been training for this for years, literally driving up and down Highway 99. That’s the same place that a lot of our brown and API people came to, where we put our fucking fingers in the dirt and got beat up and shit on and then produced all the food for the fucking country. It’s this crazy disjunct that you’re walking through or driving through, in my case every day. And then all of a sudden I get to work on plays with you and others, like Richard Montoya—people with deep family roots in 99 and what it means sociopolitically, culturally. I always feel like if you set something on Highway 99, it will be a statement about our country. If California isn’t a statement about the country, I don’t know what it is. It’s not San Francisco or Los Angeles; the Central Valley is the true reflection of both the history and in some ways the future of this whole thing. You don’t have to name every single thing: It’s in the dirt. It’s in the air.
And here we are, before another shitty election, and let’s never forget that the country we’re living in is filled with people of color. As this play is filled with people of color who’ve been either abused or broken, on whose backs the rest of the country has walked in order to eat. I love being able to be a part of that kind of storytelling—it doesn’t have a protest sign out in front, but is clearly grounded in that. It’s a testament to all of your work, from your years with ACT UP—all of that energy is still inside your writing. Whether it’s AIDS or poverty or color or immigration status, they’re always fucking with us, and we always have to fight for our truth. It’s dawning on me in this moment, having followed your life and writing, that something that looks on the surface like a Beckett play is actually to me much more like an act of protest.
Honestly, without sounding too romantic about it, it’s not the me of it, it’s the we of it. When you were talking about the Central Valley, I was thinking: There’s a reason why we became collaborators and friends so long ago. Your Latino, Filipino heritage and my Chicano heritage plays into the work. That is slightly different for me from working in the regional theatre; with you I get to really write to the voices of the people, the poets in the room. It also shows up in the structure and form that the play takes. I think that if a person lives an experience, they’re the living, breathing example of the experience, so you just have to see them onstage and they tell you their stories without telling you their stories, right? That’s one of the joys of just watching everybody work, then writing to everybody’s best expression. You’re not losing the thing you want to do in the process. That’s collaboration. That means that playwriting is not a singular art form at all. It’s actually a communal experience, a community experience. When we do it in its fullest form, we’re doing it together.
I think since we’re in American Theatre magazine, I would encourage everyone in any position any place to say: Believe in the writer. If you believe in a voice, commit to it forever. Don’t buy a play, do it, and walk away. To tell the stories of our ever evolving communities, you need to evolve with your community. That means the community of collaborators and artists you’re working with. And the gift works both ways; not only the writers but we get such great gifts when that happens. Tell me, does the spark of inspiration come out of being in the room with people you enjoy being around?
This sounds like a strange statement, but the less I separate my art life and my citizen life, the more interesting I am and the better I am. So I keep no line between what I do as a person in my everyday world and what I do in my art world. I wake up in the morning and I do what I call my yoga, my little haiku in the morning, just to get myself writing a little bit, and I write before I go to bed, and then I write during the day. I’m teaching as well, so I’m constantly making a community of artists; I’m helping other people make their art. So I’m never not making art. When I go to the market, I’m making art.
I do what my father did before he died, which is to say: It’s a honor to labor and a pleasure to rest. There’s always a drama if you’re working in a university, but the truth is, I treat it all like an art project. All of it is going to get done, all of it’s going to be processed and will become a gorgeous little gem. The ridiculous faith that we all must have is to embrace change. The only thing that art asks of me is to change. So I’m constantly changing. You and I have been changing together for a long time, right? You’re not the same guy I met a million years doing a Nilo Cruz play, and I’m not that same person. But change is how we make this work happen.
