Posts Tagged The Ballad of Alejandro Lopez
New York actor praises my work as “complex, beautifully structured”
Posted by Dwayne Yancey in News, Reviews, Uncategorized on June 19, 2014
While taking my morning walk last Saturday, I came upon a startling sight: A hornet’s nest lying in the road, brought down by a storm the previous.
Thankfully, this was an old nest, unoccupied for some time. (I’d been keeping an eye on it as I walked under it each morning, just to be sure.)
Naturally, I did what everyone does these days. I took a picture of it with my phone, and zapped it out to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. On the latter, it produced much chatter, including this high praise from a New York actor I know: “Hornet nests seem an apt metaphor for your plays: complex, beautifully structured, fascinating and vaguely dangerous. Although I’ve never found hornet nests to be as funny as I find your writing. Hornets need to work on that.”
As I note in the screen capture, hornet’s nest figure in both THE BALLAD OF ALEJANDRO LOPEZ and SOFTBALL IS LIFE. In the former, a young boy’s pitching prowess is discovered when he hurls a rock through a hornet’s nest. In the latter, a high school principal tries to solve two problems at once — the softball coach refuses to recognize a girl’s throwing skills, and the neighboring landlord refuses to remove a hornet’s nest near the school grounds. You can probably guess how that goes.
Here’s the nest, if you’re curious:
Video: “Coyote” at the Liminal gallery in Roanoke, Va.
Posted by Dwayne Yancey in News, Productions, Uncategorized, Video on December 12, 2012
The Liminal gallery (housed in the same building as Community High School) in Roanoke, Va., hosts monthly readings. They’re built around a particular theme — usually something on display in the gallery, or something students are studying.
Writers from both the school and community are invited. Most of these are short story writers, but I’ve been going — and reading organizer Cara Modisett has been kind enough to recruit students to perform my work.
For the Nov. 29, 2012 reading, the theme was based on “Children in the Shadow of Conflict: Selected Novels and Cultural Perspectives,” a course being taught at the school.
Hannah Garry performed my piece “Coyote,” about how an illegal immigrant had to pay off a “coyote” — one of the border crossing guides — to get her family across. It was inspired by a newspaper story I read some years ago about how dangerous such crossings can be because many “coyotes” are quite unscrupulous.
Immigration is a theme of another one of my works — the yet unpublished and unproduced full-length script “The Ballad of Alejandro Lopez,” which is currently under consideration at a theatre in New York.