Moving from big stages to little screens, artists reflect on what really matters

“Since the age of five, I’ve been a storyteller,” said Josefina Lopez, author of the play Real Women Have Curves (later produced as a film starring America Ferrera), and founder of the CASA 0101 Theater in the Boyle Heights neighborhood in Eastern Los Angeles. “And when I was 10, I was trying to build a theatre in my backyard. At 11, I directed the first play that I wrote and had my cousins perform it in their back patio. At 15, I took my first drama class. At 16 I attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA), where I learned how to create theatre from practically nothing. By the time I was 17, I had written a play that was produced at age 18.”

The challenges (cultural, geographic, and emotional) 

But as any artist — or parent of an artist — will tell you, it’s not just about setting and meeting milestones. To move forward means having the resilience and earned luck … well, to move forward. For the artists interviewed in this story, there were a number of big challenges — cultural, geographic, and most important, emotional. 

Let’s start with the cultural. As a light-skinned Latino in the 1990s, I was immune but sensitive to this particular set of challenges.  

“I could not find a theatre company that would produce the LA Premiere of Real Women Have Curves,” said Lopez. “I got tired of complaining that no one would produce my play and annoyed by the sexist and racist responses I got for some literary managers who read my play that I decided to just produce it myself. The obvious challenge was that there was no financial support, so I used money from my student loan from UCLA when I was studying screenwriting, and that’s how I funded my first professional production.” 

As any artist will tell you, it’s not just about setting and meeting milestones. To move forward means having the resilience and earned luck to move forward. For the artists interviewed in this story, there were a number of big challenges — cultural, geographic, and most important, emotional. 

To read the full article by Giovanni Rodriguez, Contributor to Enterprise & Cloud, go to Forbes.com