The pathway between the childhoods of director Jeffrey Lo and playwright christopher oscar peña was just a few blocks long in East San Jose. That was discovered when they decided to meet up for coffee to discuss their first collaborative project, peña’s play “malcriados,” receiving staged readings at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s New Works Festival on Aug. 12 at 7:30 p.m. and again on Aug. 16 at noon. The festival runs through Aug. 17 at Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern Theatre.
The reading is one of five, along with two other special events, and has added significance considering readings at the festival have often gone on to receive full productions by TheatreWorks. TheatreWorks’ recent critically acclaimed production of “Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean: The Musical” was a darling of the 2024 festival.
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Lo was a member of Evergreen Valley High School’s first graduating class in the mid-2000s, while peña attended neighboring Silver Creek High a few years prior. Lo, now a Campbell resident, said finding out that he and peña grew up in the same neighborhood “was a really cool starting off point where, like a lot of work he does that sort of surrounds East San Jose, but an east side that’s more on the border of people interacting with different levels of privilege.”
While peña has written about Silicon Valley for commissions in major theater cities like Chicago and New Haven, the Bay Area has only just begun to come calling.
“When Jeffrey asked me to be part of the festival, I was like, fu****** finally,” said peña, who also writes for television, notably working for and appearing on the Issa Rae show “Insecure.” “I’ve been writing about this community forever, and I’m so glad that he and (artistic director Giovanna Sardelli) noticed. She was like, ‘We need to bring you home.’ So it feels like things are finally lining up.”
“Malcriados,” loosely translated to spoiled or bad manners, tells the story of Julian and Erick, two brothers who struggle to get along. When their mother passes away, their tense reunion leads to difficult questions about where their mother’s ashes will be laid to rest. The play contains themes of connection, mourning and culture.
Peña’s growth as a writer paralleled his maturity as a person. Growing up among people of color in San Jose, race was not something he thought much about, but class was more clearly defined. And as he curved through the industry, discovering that people who were considered “woke” spoke openly in racist terms angered him. For peña, it led to a more nuanced examination of Latinos in a post-American dream context, writing more about race in ways he didn’t even notice.
“In television and film, we constantly see undocumented people, which is an important narrative, but it’s the only narrative we see,” said peña, noting that his coming out as a young teen to his supportive parents went against many accepted narratives, especially regarding fathers of color. “We constantly see poor and uneducated Latinos, and don’t often see wealthy and successful post-American dream Latinos, which is what I am. Therefore, my plays are asking who gets to be American. What are privileges? What have we given up to be here? How successful are we allowed to be, and how do we retain our identity?”
Both peña and Lo are children of immigrants, which allowed Lo to bring his own questions to peña’s work. Lo, who serves as associate producer of casting and literary management at TheatreWorks, found his own connection to the play as a Filipino-American creative.
“There are so many experiences such as how the brothers wrestle with skin tone, interacting with people of other ethnicities in terms of love, romance, friendship, and especially their interaction with their parents, where it resonated with me and hit me really, really deep.”
Resonance is definitely an aim for any great playwright. For peña, who has a bicoastal career in New York and Los Angeles, to offer up that resonance in the place that built him is everything.
“It’s very exciting to finally come home,” peña said. “It’s really important to be specific and capture people’s honest, authentic stories, so it’s really nice to be writing about the people I grew up with and finally have that conversation with the community that these stories are about.”
Tickets for TheatreWorks’ New Works Festival are $25-$95 at theatreworks.org, where a complete schedule can also be found.
David John Chávez is chair of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association and a two-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (‘22-‘23); @davidjchavez.bsky.social.