Interview: Marisela Treviño Orta of DECEMBER at Alley Theatre

The Alley is presenting a world premiere for its next mainstage production, which opens on January 17th, and the playwright is from Texas. Artistic Director Rob Melrose has made it very clear that one of his biggest goals in Houston is to lift up playwrights from around the state, and DECEMBER: A LOVE YEARS IN THE MAKING delivers on that promise. Playwright Marisela Treviño Orta grew up in central Texas, and she had this show as part of the New Works project at the Alley a year ago. Now, she is about to launch the premiere full-staging of this uniquely fun romantic comedy. She told BROADWAY WORLD, “If you enjoy poetry and people flirting for 100 minutes. This is your play!” It is a show about a May–December romance between a professor and a student that spans twenty years. Writer Brett Cullum talked with Marisela Treviño Orta about her work and her surprising journey into writing something like DECEMBER. 

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Brett Cullum: Okay. When did you write this piece?

Marisela Treviño Orta: I started writing this piece back in 2018. I had just moved to Chicago and finished the program at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. I was moving to this new theater landscape; I wanted to find a way to connect, so I applied to the Goodman's Playwrights Unit. Every year, playwrights can apply to get into the unit, and they accept four people every year. You get an artistic home for a year. This gave me a really great anchor, and this is the play that I pitched to them. I was like, “I'd like to write this play.”

It's a May-December relationship. But, unlike most May-December relationships that we see. The woman is older, and I wanted to explore that. HAROLD AND MAUDE is one of my favorite movies.

Brett Cullum: Oh, my! Gosh! Yes. I watch HAROLD AND MAUDE almost every week! It’s amazing! 

Marisela Treviño Orta: Yeah, I love that movie, though that May-December relationship is obviously done for comedic effect. But I used to live in the Bay Area, so I watch that movie, and I've been there! I love to watch it, and not just for the story but for what it gives me, a chance to see a place where I lived for 13 years. And I think of myself as a Bay Area playwright! Because that's where I found theater. It's actually where I met Rob [Melrose - Alley Artistic Director] and Paige [Rogers - his wife] when they were at a Cutting Ball Theater.

I knew Paige more than I knew Rob. I had been volunteering a lot for Cutting Ball, helping to produce some of their events. So I would see Rob at all the events. But it wasn't until he came out to the Alley that I had a show at Stages called THE RIVER BRIDE. I called him up and said, “Rob, I'm in town. I know you're at the Alley. Let's meet up.” We did, and he was telling me about his interest in featuring writers from Texas, and I am from Texas. He wanted a comedy, and at first, I was like, “Oh, I'm not your girl, but then I did send him this play, and it's turned out every audience has found it really funny, so I can accidentally write a romantic comedy. I guess! 

Brett Cullum: You know what I think? That's the secret to comedy, anyway. It's one of those things where if you try to be or force funny, you're not funny. But if you go out there and be authentic, people will read it, get comfortable, and see the humor in real life. So, the title DECEMBER refers to the kind of May-December romance. Now I got it.

Marisela Treviño Orta: That's the name of the play, DECEMBER. It goes up in January, which is kind of funny. 

Brett Cullum: I know, right after we left December, but hey… just in time for Valentine’s Day. So, is it a two-person play? 

Marisela Treviño Orta: It is two characters played by four actors so that we can see them age and how they do it is it's sort of a daisy chain through time. So there's Benjamin and Carolina, and we see younger Benjamin only in scene one. And so then the next scene. It's another actor, but the same actress from scene one. So then, by scene three, that actress has left, and an older actress has come in for the final scene. So there's always one person moving from the previous scene into the next scene, which is why I talk about it as a daisy chain.

Brett Cullum: When I read the summary, I just thought, “Oh, it's like LOVE LETTERS, a two-person play that does that. So that's cool, that it's four people. And it's obviously about a creative writing professor and a former student. So, I'm guessing the professor is the older one. DECEMBER looks like it has a lot of poetry. I've been looking at the recommended readings, including many poets, such as one from Chile, Robert Frost, and someone from Texas. Naomi Sheevnai, who's based in Central Texas. And then we've got Pablo Neruda.

Marisela Treviño Orta: All of those are influences, discussed, or quoted. The characters read poems that they themselves have written. My 1st Masters in Fine Arts was in poetry. It's ironic that there's a line in the play where the characters talk about where you're never going to see 600 people come to see one poet read their work, and I was like, “Well, we're going to have a good amount of people listening to my poems at different points in the play.”

Brett Cullum: That's awesome. I didn't even think about that. You had to come up with this poetry for this professor and the student.

Marisela Treviño Orta: Well, I mean, when I decided to make it a professor and a student, I was like, “Okay, what kind of professor?” The lovely thing about being a playwright is you can dive deep into all sorts of research areas. I could have made this a history professor because my background is Latin American history. I could have made her a science professor because I love science, and that kind of research is easy. But I did give in because my 1st MFA Is in creative writing, and it was focused on poetry. And I was like, “Well, I know a lot about that, and I know how to analyze poems. I have a lot of love for poetry. Some of my favorite poems are in the play at some point, like Robert Frost. 

Brett Cullum: You are actually in the Hubbard Theater of the Alley! We're going to see this on the big upstairs stage and not the smaller one downstairs! 

Marisela Treviño Orta: Yeah. In the main house, which is exciting. Yeah, it could be in a smaller space. And DECEMBER was part of the Alley’s New Works Festival in the summer of 2023. And we were in the smaller house for that. I think the reaction of the viewers made us all think it should have a bigger audience. I've seen several readings of this play, including the Goodman at the Playwright Center in Minneapolis, where I was a core writer. You can feel this giddy energy whenever it's in front of an audience. Apparently, people love watching characters flirt on stage, and you just have 100 min of people flirting and kind of like, “Will they? Won't they?” energy in the room. The Alley was like this: it could do well in the big space. And what's beautiful about their larger space! When you walk into it, the way they've designed this one, you could be in the back and still have a great view. You still feel like you're close to the stage and the actors, so they convinced me it could work. I mean, they didn't have to convince me. I was like, yeah, that sounds great.

Brett Cullum: So it sounds like it's gonna be designed really heavily. You've got sets and effects and things like that! 

Marisela Treviño Orta: I always said the beauty of this play was that it's a unit set. It's set in which each scene takes place in the same home and the same kind of living room—kitchen space. You only have to switch out or demonstrate the passage of time in one space. And how do we do that? What kind of objects come in and come out? What reflects a person getting older, living a really interesting life, or even mellowing out, and all sorts of ways that our space changes. And that's been as I've gotten older; I remember my idea of design early on was a sleek West Elm-looking kind of minimalism. And now I just want maximalism. Just throw everything on the wall! So this is how our spaces fluctuate and change as we do! 

Brett Cullum: Yeah, that's very cool, and I love the idea of getting to see characters through several years. How many take place? Is it twenty?  

Marisela Treviño Orta: It's 20 years. Yeah, it begins in 1999 and goes forward 20 years. 

Brett Cullum: How did you become a playwright? 

Marisela Treviño Orta: It was super haphazard! It was the genre I had been searching for my whole life, and I just didn't know it. I've been writing since I was very young, and I have memories of sitting at our old Apple 2 writing my novel. But poetry was the first genre that I kind of took seriously as a young writer, and I did that all through high school and college. I had this idea in my head that maybe I could write poetry on the side while I was a history professor. I decided to get an MFA and focus on poetry. That took me out of Texas because I grew up in central Texas. I went to school at Southwestern University for my BA. Then, I went to the University of San Francisco for my studies.

So Bay Area University of San Francisco. While I was working on that, I was very image-driven as a poet. I draw a lot of inspiration from imagery in the natural world, and I usually describe a lot of imagery in my poems. And so for the poetry workshop, I had to bring in a poem every week, and I was like, “Oh, I need inspiration.” And I just happened to have an on-campus job that had me interviewing professors in different departments, and we had to get a B-roll of a theater professor's rehearsal process. I walked into this rehearsal room, and they were doing a movement exercise. And I have no idea what that is. I've never seen that. But it's just so visually interesting and inspiring. I joined this theater company and dubbed myself their resident poet, as they were devising pieces of theater before I even understood what devised work was. That theater company was based in the Mission District of San Francisco and mainly made up of Latin American immigrants, so they were called Teatro Jornalero, which translates to “the day laborers in the theater.” 

So, I got curious a year after watching them create theater together. And so, in my last semester as a poetry graduate student, I audited a playwriting survey course at the university, and it felt like my brain and mind were blown! My hair was blown back by Sarah Kane, Sam Shepard, Jose Rivera, and Neil Cruz. I was like, “Oh, my gosh! This is exactly all the things I love - narrative quality and amazing imagery. The imagination that you can imbue the work with. And I was just so taken with it that I started writing my first play.

The theater company (Day Laborers Theater Company) informed my first couple of plays. I was writing Social Justice pieces. So, my first play was about femicide in Ciudad Juarez. Doors started opening, and opportunities started coming my way in playwriting that had not been happening in poetry. Poetry is solitary. You write by yourself; you may read it at a bookstore. You hope to make a book and then get it published, and it's a very different kind of experience. But my first play got into the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. After that, I received a commission from Marin Theater. And so things just kept happening. And I was like, “Okay, well, we'll just go. All these doors are opening. We're just going to lean into this big yes.” So I spent the next ten years after that in the Bay area taking classes and going to see theater. And that's how I met Paige and Rob at The Cutting Ball. 

So that's when I decided to apply to grad school and went from San Francisco to Iowa, the Midwest. I was climbing the walls at first because I was like, “Where's the good food?” But it was a great program and exactly what I wanted and needed. It was like an extended residency for three years. You're presenting a new play every semester. No one tells you how to write your play, and you can develop your body of work. I also got to study theater for the first time, which really situated me in the Midwest. I was like, “Okay, well, Chicago is nearby. I'm going to go to Chicago.”  I got my first big production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2016 with THE RIVER BRIDE, which is my most popular play.

Brett Cullum: Yeah, which STAGES here in Houston did, right?

Marisela Treviño Orta: It was so exciting and also sort of connected because one of the actresses in DECEMBER was in that production - Patricia Duran. I think she was playing the mother in THE RIVER BRIDE, and it was great to be reunited with her. 

This play is my most realistic. I don't often do too much realism. And then when I do, there's something like, well, twenty years are going to pass. So, there is a bit of fantasy and magic happening. This one is set in higher learning, and the funny thing is that I have no interest in academia. It would completely take me away from this kind of work. 

Brett Cullum: How did you assemble your cast and crew? 

Marisela Treviño Orta: The whole team - our director and our cast were all the same people that were part of the reading here at the Alley in 2023. And that's really special for the actors, me, and the director. It's special because sometimes people are busy, and you can't get everyone back for one reason or another. It's really exciting.

DECEMBER: A LOVE YEARS IN THE MAKING runs at the Alley starting on January 17th through February 2nd. Tickets are available through the link below. 

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