2026 – Interview with Playwright Christina Pumariega

Christina Pumariega (she/her) acts and writes. Often simultaneously. Last spring she performed in the world premiere of her play ¡VOS! at Two River Theater. ¡VOS! was developed at the Ojai Playwrights Conference, received the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and was nominated for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize. She recently performed in Vidas Privadas, inspired by Noël Coward’s Private Lives, at New York Stage & Film. She is a 25/26 member of Center Theater Group’s LA Writers’ Workshop and just completed a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. Other plays include Labor (Leah Ryan honorable mention), Joan Dark (Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ New Play Summit), Harbor Girls and Her Math Play (EST/Sloan Grant). She is currently under commission by Manhattan Theatre Club/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and DCPA. TV writing credits include Disney+ and NBC.  Acting on and Off-Broadway and in television and film, Pumariega has cross examined Coach Taylor, made out with the Fly and set a Cuban pharmacy ablaze in a corset. MFA, NYU Graduate Acting Program.

CATF:  What is the literal translation of “¡VOS!” – the title of this play – and why did you call it this? 

CP:  It’s a pronoun which means you, the person I am speaking to, but it also has a plural meaning, you many. Therein is the metaphor for the play.

Living in Argentina for two months, I encountered the word vos all the time but it was not used in the same way as the Spanish I had learned in school. So when I heard vos, I didn’t understand the broader context until a barista broke it down for me, which is reflected early on in the language of the play between the characters, Dr. Cossi and Annie.

Your play is a biographical and actually, quite personal, part of your infertility journey as reflected in your character, Annie. Why did you place this journey in the larger context of the Dirty War and Las Madres – Mothers of the Disappeared?

My own lived experience was a fraction of what Annie experiences. I spent about one year undergoing fertility procedures that drove me into massive debt, and that led me to put my things in storage and live not in Los Angeles or New York, but in more affordable cities. That grew to include more affordable countries… I have always had a fascination with Che and the School of the Americas, but when I arrived in Argentina – specifically Buenos Aires with its Evita Perón lore – I felt as though I was walking around in a city filled with people I couldn’t see. This impressed upon me the need to learn more. My husband and I lived in the small province of Palermo within Buenos Aires and I started to see plaques and memorials handmade of people remembering their lost loved ones through the decades. I started taking notes and going to different museums and archives interviewing people. Argentina has a long history of many, many societal ruptures and suppression – I just needed to know more.

In terms of the framework by which I told this story, I am reminded of the time I saw Tony Kushner’s play, Homebody/Kabul which came out during the Iraq War when we had limited information about our own military involvement due to Patriot Act I and then II. Instead of putting his play in the framework of an American family, Kushner chose a British family so we were able to remove ourselves, ever so slightly, from our involvement in real time. The audience had to think about what was happening as opposed to immediately feeling it in the theater. Catharsis, in a way, was preserved to ask questions after the dramatic event. I think I’ve tried to accomplish something akin to this intentional objectivity for North American audiences in ¡VOS!

My dad came to the States a month shy of the Missile Crisis, so politics was going to be embedded in whatever I created and may, in many ways, be my calling as a playwright.

Why do you feel it’s necessary and important to tell this story now?

I can hear the echoes of this story in our own society. The struggles and triumphs of these women continue to teach us, even directly, by way of our own ICE raids in the United States. I live in Los Angeles and every day we see the ramifications of people disappearing.

Your play reads like poetry; the language is very spare. Do you read a lot of poetry?

I love poetry. I have several poetry shelves to my husband’s chagrin. My favorite poet is Larry Levis who is no longer alive, but he wrote very deeply about the relationships between fathers and sons. I also love Jean Valentine, Carl Phillips, Ada Limón. When I was acting professionally, a lot of my work was in regional theater. Between shows in D.C., Boston and everywhere in between, I traveled up and down the Amtrak line. Poetry was a perfect companion because it was light enough to take in right before rehearsal or between scenes.

Your play demonstrates how small things can lead up to big things like war. What are the small things that we say or do on a daily basis that can lead to kindness?

I’ve always been interested in the veils that we are born into or are kind of thrust upon us from our formative years into our adulthood. I grew up in the Bible Belt, but my dad is Cuban and my mom is Italian-American, so our house was communicatively and culturally very direct, unlike our immediate environment. We were an anomaly.

Nowadays everywhere I see barriers to intimacy thresholds; little points of connection, looking someone in the eye. A person may not say anything to the person in front of them in line, but just looking is a kind of connection, no? Which can lead to kindness.

The perfect lesson in this for me was when my mom – exhausted by me – sent me to spend weeks at a time with my great aunt and uncle in New York City. My great uncle took me everywhere with him – to the Fairway to go grocery shopping – and he always connected with someone. No one was a stranger. He made a point to recognize their humanity. Today, we have many more distractions, yet there’s always an opportunity to connect when you encounter another person, even virtually.

What’s it like to act in a play you have written? How much do you defer to the director?

It is a dance, a true dance. The previous director I worked with knew me as an actor. She would give me direction knowing that I could absorb it as an actor, then return to it as a playwright and say, “You know, I want to examine this line” or “We can cut that” – change that goes back and forth.

As an actor-playwright, I can enter the language practically and am able to understand it on a poetic level. Is the character speaking as monosyllabically as possible by way of the region she or he grew up in? Is the character in a psychological place that feels untethered in the right way? I always find my way into story by way of character. I used to think the story was about cracking open a plot mystery, but even D.H. Lawrence confirms that’s no, it’s about the people. What are the people doing? And how do they do it?

Why do you believe that the audience is the last character in communal storytelling?

I’ve been in many great plays and not-great plays, and everything in between, but your story is only worthwhile if an audience remains engaged and awake. The first time I truly internalized this as a storyteller was acting for the Public Theater by way of the Mobile Unit—truly the bedrock of Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park. We went to the boroughs and brought Shakespeare to the people. We did our play in halfway houses, women’s shelters, and maximum and minimum-security prisons.

One day in a shelter for unhoused people, snacks were distributed during our play—dozens and dozens of noisy bags of chips. Everyone opened them at the same time and the focus of the room totally shifted: the dramatic event was the chips! We became obsolete, mere ornamentation. We had to work with the chips. It was an incredible lesson. In a live performance like that, you have to ask, “How are you going to be relevant in this moment? Can you be more relevant than the chips? What does that do to your moment-to-moment preparation curated by a fancy director in a fancy theater? Was the audience going to talk back? Fall asleep? My goal is always to pick a good fight with a listener/viewer and give them a reason to care at all.

How do you balance following established theatrical practices with pushing and/or breaking theatrical boundaries?

If you had asked me that 10 years ago before I started writing, I probably would have been influenced by what I had seen on stage and what I had read. But now I feel like learning comes from real life. I think less about theatrical giants and more about what I’m privileged enough to experience every day. My subjectivity disappoints and surprises me. If I feel really strongly about something it becomes its own rabbit hole. I ask myself, why do I feel so strongly about this or what am I missing here? To question the worthiness of a story being told at all. Is my perspective the one worth exploring or am I missing seven other perspectives that I am refusing to listen to? Can I get out of my own way to learn them?

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.