2026 – Interview with Playwright Christina Pumariega

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.

When my husband and I landed in Argentina to continue our infertility journey, we 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 know who someone was talking about until a barista broke it down for me. How she broke it down 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 have always had a fascination with Che and the School of the Americas, but when I got to Argentina as part of my fertility journey – 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 studied journalism as an undergraduate, so I started taking notes and going to different museums and archives with a tape recorder 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 brave brothers and sisters fighting in the war because of the Patriot Act I and then II. Instead of putting his play in the framework of an American family, he chose a British family so we were able to remove ourselves, ever so slightly, from the direct call-out about what was happening. 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 outside of the theater. This is what I’ve done with ¡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 see and feel the echoes of this story in our own society. The struggles of these women have become more relevant in light of ICE raids. 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 which really affected my way of thinking. My dad is Cuban and my mom is Italian-American, so our house was very direct as I imagine many households were. However, there have been some behavioral shifts. I see more and more little intimacy thresholds or points of connection such as looking someone in the eye. A person may not say anything to the person in front of them, but looking at that person is a kind of connection with them, no?

The perfect place for me growing up was when my mom – exhausted by me – sent me to spend weeks at a time with my great aunt and uncle. My great uncle took me everywhere with him – the fairway or the grocery store – 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 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. I look forward to working with a director I have no acting history with. 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, put it in my toolbox, 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, I definitely feel like there’s always somewhere to improve, but as a playwright, I get into the language and am able to understand it on a poetic level. For example, 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 mystery, but D.H. Lawrence said, “Oh, no, it’s the people. What are the people doing?” It’s comforting in that way because that’s how we live and move in the world.

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

I’ve been in so many great plays and some shitty plays, and everything in between, but your story is only worthwhile if an audience is engaged and awake. The first time I worked in theater was by way of a mobile unit like Joe Papp’s, which was the rock of what Shakespeare in the Park was built on. 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. 

All the snacks in one shelter for the unhoused were in plastic bags of chips. Everyone was opening them at the same time because the important thing was the chips. We were the ornamentation for their entertainment for the evening, which was 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 to these people? Are you going to 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 the structure and standing on the shoulders of the Romans and Egyptians 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 Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole for me. I ask myself, why do I feel so strongly about this or what am I missing here? For me to go there is 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 – the established theatrical forms – that I am refusing to listen to? I also pay attention to the points of view within those forms. I do think we’re probably all telling the same 30 stories. I do my part to crack that open and make them more relevant to the world.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.