Anne García-Romero


Anne García-Romero is a Latina playwright, translator and professor.

Early life

Anne García-Romero was born to a mother of English, Irish and German descent and a father from Spain. Her hometown is Wellesley, MA and she currently lives in South Bend, Indiana. Her work has been greatly influenced by her ethnic and cultural background, as many of her plays deal with issues affecting both White and Latino communities. In her work, she tries to bridge the gap between these two communities. She translates plays from Spanish to English, to make different works accessible to different communities and has written many plays about Latino experiences, while making it accessible to larger audiences. García-Romero received her B.A. at Occidental College and then went on to the Yale School of Drama, where she received her Masters in Fine Arts majoring in playwriting. She completed her Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara, where she majored in Theater Studies. García-Romero is also an alumna of New Dramatists in New York City, which is an organization that specifically supports and provides resources to talented playwrights.

Career

García-Romero has taught at universities such as University of Southern California, California Institute of the Arts, Loyola Marymount University, Macalester College and Wesleyan University. She currently teaches at The University of Notre Dame. Some of the courses that she teaches are Playwriting, Script Analysis, and Story Structure. García-Romero has written eight major full-length plays, her most popular are Juanita’s Statue, Paloma, Earthquake Chica, Provenance. Her plays have been presented in prestigious theaters all over the country. These theaters include, but are not limited to, the New York Shakespeare Festival with The Public Theater, INTAR, The Mark Taper Forum, Borderlands Theater, East L.A. Repertory, Jungle Theater, and National Hispanic Cultural Center. She has also written three short-length plays, which have garnered her much recognition as well.
García-Romero’s work has been the National Latino Playwriting Award runner-up as well as a National Latino Playwriting Award finalist. She has also had work that was a part of the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. García-Romero has also published a book which has a selection of her plays. The book is titled, Anne García-Romero: Collected Plays. The plays that are included in the book are, Santa Concepción, Earthquake Chica, and Mary Peabody in Cuba. Latino playwright Octavio Solis said, about her plays in this book, “Anne writes the stories we had always known by heart but had forgotten. With a purity at once spare and rich, she creates characters we not only feel we have broken bread with, but who have been in our dreams and crises.”
Much of her work focuses heavily on narratives of Latinidad. She has written plays about Mexicans, Cubans, Spanish folks as well as White folks of different ethnicities.
Anne García-Romero works with the organization HowlRound and their Latina/o Theatre Commons. This includes a large network of other Latina/o artists, and has brought them together to discuss what is best for the Latina/o Theater community at large. García-Romero has written essays for their journal, Café Onda. In one of her essays, she writes, “US culture in the twenty-first century continues to move from a mono-cultural to a multi-cultural experience. However, US theatre currently does not always reflect this reality and therefore can perpetuate an outdated narrative.” Much of Anne García-Romero’s work is to counter these mainstream, stereotypical, dominant narratives through a retelling of what it really means to be a Latina/o in the United States.

Plays

Full length

Anne Garcia-Romero’s book The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes was published in 2016 by the University of Arizona Press. Garcia-Romero creates an archive of five contemporary Latina playwrights—Caridad Svich, Karen Zacharías, Elaine Romero, Cusi Cram, and Quiara Alegría Hudes—writing a chapter on each, touching on themes in their major works, and mapping them into a genealogy of Latina theatre helmed by Fornes. Garia-Romero’s work explores how Latina playwrights began to find their footing in the American theatre in the 1960s through the work of Maria Irene Fornes. Garcia-Romero builds upon prior of studies about Fornes’ work, such as Fornés: Theater in the Present Tense by Diana Lynn Moroff and Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Life of María Irene Fornés edited by Maria Delgado and Caridad Svich. Focusing on transnational ideas of Latinidad instead of focusing on one ethnic identity, Garcia-Romero has chosen these five Latina playwrights because each originates from a different Latina background. The first chapter focuses on Fornes herself and serves to contextualize Fornes within Latina theatre. It offers biographical information in addition to contextualizing her artistic and pedagogical styles. Garcia-Romero asserts that there are four cultural themes which link each playwright to the legacy of Fornes’ work and to the larger body of Latina theatre: cultural multiplicity, supernatural interventions, Latina identity, and theatrical experimentation. Garcia-Romero theorizes three waves of playwrights that studied with Fornes. The first wave began in the 1980s with playwrights like Cherrie Moraga and Milcha Sanchez-Scott. The second wave includes playwrights Migdalia Cruz and Carmelita Tropicana. The third wave began in the 1990s and continues through the present. The Fornes Frame is a tribute to the late playwright. Garcia-Romero’s work updates the narrative about Fornes, a foundational US playwright. Garcia-Romero demonstrates how contemporary playwrights are actively involved in conversations about identity.