Five Questions with Gabi Garcia

2019 Thespian Playworks finalist Gabi Garcia. Photo by Corey Rourke.

Garcia’s high school playwriting career culminated in her selection as a finalist for the Thespian Playworks program at the 2019 International Thespian Festival. In Ismene, Garcia imagined a sequel to the classical Greek play Antigone, looking at the aftermath of Sophocles’ tragedy from the perspective of several of his secondary characters.

Garcia now attends the University of Chicago, where she’s still contemplating which career path to pursue. “I’m changing my prospective major every day,” she said. “Right now, I’m thinking about classics, statistics, or computational and applied mathematics. The great thing about the University of Chicago is they encourage you to explore your options through a rigorous core curriculum, so I still have a while to decide.”

Regardless of her final choice, Garcia sees more playwriting in her future. “I hope to write more roles for women and explore my voice a little more,” she said. “After submitting Ismene to Thespian Playworks, I temporarily swore off writing tragedy, but the development process throughout ITF showed me the power of tragic writing as a reflection of the world around me. My next project is more comedic, though, and I’m looking forward to developing it when I’m not swamped with schoolwork.”

When and how did you first become interested in playwriting?
I started writing plays in fourth grade, but I began seriously writing plays my sophomore year of high school. My advanced theatre class included a playwriting residency through Portland Center Stage called Visions & Voices, which made me interested in potentially writing for the stage as a career.

What inspired you to write Ismene?
In my junior International Baccalaureate English Literature course, we read Jean Anouilh’s Antigone as part of a works in translation unit. During one of our in-class discussions, a classmate commented that it was strange that Oedipus, Eteocles, Polynices, and Antigone essentially got their own plays in the traditional Theban cycle by Sophocles, while Ismene got practically nothing. I thought that was an interesting point, so I took it and ran with it. I read Antigone as research over the summer before putting my pencil to paper.

Writing stories for women is very important to me. I feel that I have a responsibility to tell stories that represent myself onstage. If I don’t tell my story, who will?

Your script changed quite a bit from your Thespian Playworks submission to what audiences saw in the staged reading at the 2019 International Thespian Festival. How did you approach the evolution of your writing? 
To be honest, I wrote the majority of the first draft of Ismene the night before it was due, so I was more than willing to adjust it. I had a staged reading at my high school’s one-act festival, which emphasized parts of the play that did and didn’t work.

In May, I met with playwright Andrea Stolowitz of Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre and discussed Ismene with her. She asked me about the Greek conventions I did and didn’t use in the piece — I had mentioned that, initially, I wanted to stray from Greek style to set the piece in modern times — and encouraged me to consider the impact of pulling directly from ancient Greek tradition, particularly in the addition of a chorus. I also had a long email chain with Mark Kaufmann, my dramaturg at ITF, in which we discussed potential adjustments to Ismene. I ended up redrafting it with the chorus a week before ITF, which required me to cut and rewrite about half the play.

After the first day of rehearsals at ITF, I restructured about half the play again to tighten its style. Essentially, three distinct drafts of Ismene exist, each one (in my opinion) significantly better than the previous version. In Thespian Playworks, I learned that dramaturgy is probably the best invention ever for playwrights, and seeing your work rehearsed or performed repeatedly gives you a better perspective on what works and what doesn’t in your play.