Anne García-Romero is a bi-racial Spanish-American playwright, educator and scholar. Coming from a long line of performers and artists on her father's side, she was born in Wellesley, MA and was introduced to theatre at a young age.

Ms. García-Romero got hooked on playwriting at Occidental College in Los Angeles where she received her undergraduate degree in Theatre Arts. Playwriting in Los Angeles led her to attend the Padua Hill Playwright Festival for two summer where she met and studied with María Irene Fornés. She continued to study with Fornés in the MFA Playwriting Program at Yale. She has done playwrighting residencies with the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis as a Jerome Fellow, New Dramatists, and Chicago Dramatists. She also holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Fully embracing an artist-scholar lifestyle, Ms. García-Romero is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in playwriting, screenwriting, dramaturgy, and Latinx and Latin American Theatre Studies. She is a founding member of the Latinx Theatre Commons which seeks to raise the profiles of plays that give voice to the complex Latinx identity and community. She contributes to The Fornés Institute with the Latinx Theatre Commons and is the coordinator of the Fornés Playwriting Workshop in Chicago. Her book The Fornés Frame, published in 2016, examines the foundational frame and legacy of María Irene Fornés' playwriting and teaching through contemporary Latina playwrights.

Her plays have been produced and developed at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, The Mark Taper Forum, The Goodman Theatre, Hartford Stage, South Coast Repertory, Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, INTAR, Nevada Repertory Company, National Hispanic Cultural Center, and many others. Her plays have been published by Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, NoPassport Press and Smith & Kraus.

Discussion Questions

1. What was your initial impression of Santa Concepción? What questions arose for you about the piece?

2. How does García-Romero use nature as symbolism throughout the play?

3. Knowing García-Romero has mapped out the Fornés Frame with four key concepts -- cultural multiplicity, supernatural intervention, Latina identity and theatrical experimentation -- to what extent do you see these concepts reflected in Santa Concepción?

4. What effect did the hybrid Spanish-English language have on your experience reading the play?

5. The Minneapolis Star Tribune review of Santa Concepción said, "interesting archetypes are at work here, but if they were pruned and sharpened, they would be allowed to reveal themselves organically."

   • What archetypes do we see in Santa Concepción? How effective is Santa Concepción in portraying and challenging those archetypes?

   • Do you agree or disagree with the review? Why?

   • To what extent to do you think this play is anti-religion or pro-religion? Feminist or anti-feminist?

6. What relevance do the themes in Santa Concepción have today?

Sample Activity: Role on the Wall

Target Audience: This activity is designed for a high school drama or literature course.

Materials

• Role on the Wall Handouts: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EIhJDdpk8U9pTzmILBotMgQAuOgktC8LPK5i_n_Sk-c/edit?usp=sharing

• Post-It Notes

Procedures

1. Divide the students into groups of 3-4. Provide each group with 3 Role on the Wall handouts, one for each main female character in Santa Concepción: Connie, Aurora, and Delores.

2. In their groups, students will discuss the beliefs and objectives for each of the three women in the play.

   • On the inside of the head image, students will write down words or phrases that express the character's interests, beliefs or desires.

   • On the outside of the head image, students will write what other characters in Santa Concepción think about that character. Make sure to note which character thinks each idea.

3. The groups will share their responses with the whole class. The teacher will document the ideas shared on post-it notes and attach them to large poster-board versions of the Role on the Wall handout.

4. The teacher will go through the following prompts and ask students to identify post-it notes that relate to the prompts. Students may also choose to add additional post-it notes to the Role on the Wall from their group work to satisfy the prompts. Students should explain why they selected the post-it note for the prompt.

   • Identify any beliefs, desires, or interests that bring the women joy.

   • Identify any beliefs, desires, or interests that bring the women pain.

   • Identify any beliefs, desires, or interests the women have in common.

   • Identify interests, beliefs, and desires the characters hold to be true themselves that contradict each other, or the ideas others have about them.

   • Identify any post-it notes you that personally resonate with you.

   • Identify any post-it notes you personally disagree with or think are misguided.

5. Students will return to working in their groups to brainstorm what additional understandings they wished each character could have to ease their inner turmoil in the play, while still validating the character's core identities. Students should write these ideas on the back of the Role on the Wall handout for each character.

6. The groups will share their responses with the whole class.

7. Following the exercise students will have an opportunity to debrief the activity and ponder the beliefs, desires, or interests they hold for themselves.

García-Romero, A. (2008). Collected plays. NoPassport Press.

Anne García-Romero on Playwriting and Latinx Theatre. (2018, March 8). Notre Dame Colleges

of Arts and Letters [video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzSQcryLsTc

Aragón, F. (2013, February 12) And Now…Words on the Stage. Letras Latinas Blog.

http://letraslatinasblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/and-nowwords-on-stage.html

Boyd, A. (Host). (2020, September 15). Anne garcía-romero: The fornes frame [audio podcast

episode]. New Books Network. https://newbooksnetwork.com/anne-garcia-romero-the-fornes-frame-u-arizona-press-2016

Fonte, L. (2016, May 6). In kitchen theatre’s ‘Paloma’ romance and religion intertwined

García-Romero, A. (2008) Collected plays. NoPassport Press.

García-Romero, A. (2009). Fugue, hip hop, and soap opera: Transcultural connections and

theatrical experimentation in twenty-first century U.S. Latina playwriting. Latin American Theatre Review.

García-Romero, A. (2011, September 14). Adventures in Cyberturgy. HowlRound Theatre

Commons. https://howlround.com/adventures-cyberturgy

García-Romero, A. (2012, August 9). Latinx Theatre Commons: Updating the US narrative.

HowlRound Theatre Commons. https://howlround.com/latinx-theatre-commons-0

García-Romero, A. (2014, January 25). Girlus Equinus. Eleven Eleven.

https://issuu.com/eleven_eleven/docs/girlus_equinus_by_anne_garcia-romer

García-Romero, A. (2016). The fornes fram: Contemporary latin playwrights and the legacy of

maria irene fornes. University of Arizona Press.

García-Romero, A. (2017, December). Paloma. Broadway Play Publishing Inc.

García-Romero, A. (2020). Anne García-Romero: Playwright, Educator, Scholar.

http://www.annegarciaromero.com

Lawton, J. (2013, March 23). CC PlayLab Festival-Panelist Interview: Anne Garcia-Romero.

Jaqueline E. Lawson Blog. https://www.jacquelinelawton.com/blog/xx-playlab-festival-panelist-interview-anne-garcia-romero

Lynch, E. (2011, November 3). Playwright and theatre scholar give voice to lost stories.

University of Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters. https://al.nd.edu/news/latest-news/playwright-and-theatre-scholar-gives-voice-to-lost-stories/

Official Paloma Program. (2015, May 27). Los Angeles Theatre Center.

https://issuu.com/latinotheatercompany/docs/palomaprogramfinal

Romero, E. and García-Romero, A. (2017). Expanding the chair: A conversation on Fornés’s

Pedagogy in Action. Theatre Topics, 27 (1), 83-90. doi:10.1353/tt.2017.0000.

Royce, G. (2000, March 18). Ill-conceived ‘Santa Concepción’ suffers under its own weight. Star

Tribune, Minneapolis, MN 04B.

Saborío, Linda. (2011). Reclaiming religion: Milagros and the sexual objectification of Latinas. In

Embodying difference: Scripting social images of the female body in Latina theatre (pp.

109-139), Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Web page complied by Elisabeth Milbank (2021).