Confessions of a Frenzied Playwright

Playwright-performer Josefina Lopez never seems to need a break--a quality that’s been a blessing and a curse.

“I’m a very multi-task person,” Lopez, 30, said during a recent interview in a Hollywood bookstore-cafe filled with Mexican folk art. “I feel like I can do 20 things at once.”

To wit: Her eight-character play “Confessions of Women From East L.A.” opened last week at Santa Ana College. On Wednesday--Cinco de Mayo--a festival of Chicana playwrights and performers, including Lopez, arrives at Glaxa Studios in Silver Lake.

She’s also preparing what she calls, with characteristic irony, “my undocumentary”--a film documentary about undocumented workers. She’s writing a semiautobiographical screenplay, “No Place Like Home,” for New Line Cinema, while at the same time studying in UCLA’s master of fine arts screenwriting program.

And those are just the highlights.

Beneath all the activity--perhaps even responsible for much of it--is a quiet, personal struggle Lopez has been battling for years. It’s a struggle that beginning in 1996 caused her to stop writing altogether for two years, and which she only now feels able to discuss.

Despite writing plays constantly since her teens--she was a precocious student at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts in the mid-’80s and has had her works produced frequently in Southern California and beyond--she confessed to a gnawing feeling of inadequacy, compounded with a nearly traumatizing lack of patience and focus.

“I just could never keep my eye on the ball, with my mind just scattering around from here to there to everywhere,” she said. “I needed to [stop writing] for self-help, and self-discovery.”

What she learned during her hiatus is that she has attention-deficit disorder, a condition she may have inherited.

“I had seen it in my father--this impatience to focus on one thing very long--but I was made to feel ashamed about it when I was young,” she said. “I always thought I was just lazy, that I couldn’t stick with a book,” she said, “and the more success I had, the more of a fraud I felt I was. My greatest fear isn’t dying; it’s being bored. I need constant stimuli--not things, but experiences, the more stimulating the better.”

Recognizing her condition has helped her gain a sense of acceptance about her need to always be accomplishing more.

In her writing she’s drawn upon her upbringing in Boyle Heights, where her family moved when she was 5 from her birthplace in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Her family lived in the U.S. illegally for 13 years until they were granted amnesty.

Now she plans with her architect fiance to buy a building in Boyle Heights and transform it into a cultural arts center and home for her new theater company, Rascuachi Rep (rascuachi loosely translates as, “Do what you can with what you have”).

Her first play to be produced, the autobiographical “Simply Maria or the American Dream,” came out of a complex childhood during which she learned persistence from her father, and more.

“He also gave me contradictory messages growing up: ‘Live to marry the man who will be the provider,’ and also ‘Be ambitious.’ He was deported to Mexico four times, but he always landed on his feet and tried to get to the U.S. again, and finally made it.”

While in high school, Lopez was already developing her playwriting chops at the now-defunct Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Young Playwrights Lab, and writing “Simply Maria,” which went on to two touring productions under the auspices of Luis Valdez’ El Teatro Campesino. At the time, she received critical praise as one of the few, if any, examples of a teenager writing for the stage with such confidence.

From there Lopez’s career seemed to move from strength to strength. Her next play, the acclaimed “Real Women Have Curves,” has enjoyed several stagings at major Latino venues, including El Teatro Campesino, Northern California’s El Teatro de la Esperanza and San Antonio-based Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Theatre. This was followed by stage works, including “Food for the Dead,” “La Pinta,” and “Unconquered Spirits,” which had its 1995 premiere at Cal State Northridge, where Lopez also teaches playwriting.

While an undergraduate at Columbia College in New York, she was a member of USA Today’s All-American First Academic Team. She graduated in 1993 and went on to become a resident artist at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre and Tucson’s Borderlands Theatre, and, she notes, “the first Latina television writer to have one-hour drama, half-hour comedy and sketch comedy scripts in development at the same time [1996] at three different networks.” None of these have aired to date, however.

With her festival, Lopez intends to launch an ongoing effort to combine plays and performance works through Rascuachi Rep, “but it’s all with the sense of strong women having fun.

“Our three-woman comedy group, P.M.S. [Pinche Mentirosa Sisters, consisting of Lopez, Monica Martinez and Miriam Peniche], put on Mexican wrestling masks and pin a guy to the floor. Originally, we tried to get a real man, but it ended up being funnier with a blow-up male doll.

The festival also will feature Lopez in a slightly self-mocking solo piece as well as solo performances by Maria Elena Fernandez (“Confessions of a Cha-Cha Feminist”) and Consuelo Flores (“Santa Divorciada Catolica”).

“It was pretty rough for a while there, especially when I wasn’t writing,’ said Lopez, who dashed off from this interview to a workshop she’s taking with fellow Latina author Edit Villareal. “But there’s a sense of purpose now. I think we’re really going to be bringing theater to the people, and most importantly, to the kids, of East L.A.”

* “Confessions of Women From East L.A.,” Santa Ana College’s Phillips Hall Theatre, 1530 W. 17th St., Santa Ana. $6-$8. Through May 16. (714) 564-5661. Glaxa’s Chicana festival opens Wednesday and runs through May 15. Glaxa Studios, 3707 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, Performances Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; May 8 and 15, 2 p.m. $10-$12. (323) 665-5009.