There’s a question underneath a lot of the conversations I have with actors right now, even when they’re not asking it directly: why keep going? Not in a crisis way — in a practical way. The work is slow. The industry is contracting. The machinery that used to validate a career is running at half speed. So why keep showing up?
I can only answer for myself. And my answer is that I stopped waiting for the industry to tell me who I was allowed to be in it.
When I started writing plays, I hadn’t written one before. Not a real one. I was an actor with thirty years of experience and zero produced plays, which is a strange place to begin. But I began anyway, because something in me knew that showing up differently was better than not showing up at all. Co-founding LAByrinth Theater Company came about that way. The coaching came the same way. The teaching. Each time I said yes to a version of myself the industry hadn’t specifically invited, a door opened that I didn’t know was there. You can always say no later. But you can’t walk through a door you never tried.
Here’s what I know about myself: I have always been a writer. I didn’t have that language for it until recently. Now I’m not dabbling. I am a playwright. A scribe, as a friend of mine likes to say.
When I was a kid — before I knew anything about theater, or scripts, or any of this — I used to write roles for my cousins. We’d play cops and robbers, my three brothers and I, and whoever came over, and I’d write out what people would say when they came out of the room or the closet. I was directing. I was giving them lines. I just thought I was playing.
Then there was an English class in 8th grade. The assignment was to write a story inspired by a popular song. I chose Tony Orlando and Dawn — Tie a Yellow Ribbon — and turned it into a murder mystery. The teacher handed back everyone’s paper. He read mine aloud to the class. I don’t fully have words for what that moment did to me. Something shifted in a way that doesn’t shift back. I was specifically seen for something I had made. Not performed — made. I think about that classroom more than that teacher will ever know.
I’m telling you this not to trace the arc of a career but to say: the things that are most yours have usually been yours for a long time. You don’t discover them so much as remember them.
Now I do something with it. I write plays. I write roles that come from my community, my experience, my particular way of seeing the world. And I do that in part because I got tired of complaining about what wasn’t there.
The Latiné actor’s relationship to this industry has always involved a certain amount of waiting — waiting to be seen, waiting for the right role, waiting for someone in power to decide our stories are worth telling. I have done my share of that waiting. But I am not interested in spending the rest of my career waiting. We cannot simply complain about the lack of representation and then go home. We have to try to do something about it. Make the work. Tell the stories. Create the roles. Not instead of pursuing what the industry offers — in addition to it.
That’s why I show up. Not because the industry has made it easy, obvious, or well-compensated. But because the alternative is to stop, and stopping has never once felt like the right answer.
I show up for the actors I coach because watching someone crack something open in a session — watching the moment when the performance becomes real, and they can feel the difference — means something to me that doesn’t diminish with repetition. I show up as a playwright because the plays need to exist, and I appear to be the person who is going to write them.
And underneath all of it, I show up because of a kid who wrote lines for his cousins in a cops and robbers game, and a teacher who read a murder mystery out loud to a classroom, and the thing that happened in that room that has never entirely stopped happening.
You find your reasons. You show up however you can. You say yes before you say no.
The doors are there. You have to try them.