“Ash Tree” author Georgina Escobar was born and raised in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. She uses her plays to describe the Mexico in which she grew up.
Escobar relates her plays to her personal life, chronicling events such as the death of her mother in “Ash Tree.” She has a master’s degree in dramatic writing from UNM and is an up-and-coming playwright who has already received numerous awards for her work.
Q: What is your writing process and how has it developed into what it is?
A: Well, it’s different for every play. Mostly I put myself through experiments with them, so for one play I did the whole wake-up-at-four-in-the-morning-for-five-days-a-week thing and tried to write the play that way. I think that was part of my master’s (degree), to figure out what my process was … “Ash Tree” was incubated at home, so they all have their own process, I guess.
Q: So all of these had different processes behind them?
A: One of the goals that I had when I started my master’s (was) to try to find the discipline, because I know I have what my professors call “monkey brain,” so I jump from a lot of projects, and I do a lot of the visual stuff.
Q: How does each different writing process affect the corresponding play? Why was “Ash Tree” written from home?
A: The truth of the matter is, what I find works the best for me is I create the world visually and tangibly. I turn whatever writing room I’m using or whatever space or whatever I’m carrying in my purse into things that relate to that play.
Q: What drew you to writing as an art form?
A: I had tried acting before, and I do enjoy it sometimes, and I am an extremely visual person, and I do like the discipline of sketching and painting and sculpting and all that, but for some reason … stories are what inspired me … It was just second nature to try to understand the world as a fantastical narrative.
Q: How do the themes of “Ash Tree” fit into your own personal life?
A: One of the risks I run in talking about my writing with certain directors is they want to see the parallels, and they want to play those parallels because they think that’s what I want. It’s not; I mean, obviously I’m writing fiction, but it’s inspired by real events.
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So in the case of “Ash Tree,” the characters are very similar. I think they’re about one year off from what me and my sisters were when we lost our mother, and their personalities are not carbon copies but rather blurred out copies of our personalities exaggerated and fictionalized, obviously.
Q: Has writing helped you cope with this kind of loss, or does it make it more difficult?
A: I think in every form of art-making, I am coping with who I am as a person. It’s so removed. I mean, especially for me with the loss of my mother, (it) is so removed by years that it didn’t upset me in the sense that I was like barely hearing something …
But what it does do, especially this piece, is truly give my family an understanding of what it is to be a playwright. Although they’re very supportive, we’re an old-school Catholic Mexican family, and they are very cultured and well-read in the arts, but they didn’t really understand what playwrighting was.
It wasn’t until this play came to life, and I shared a copy with them, that they were truly able to understand perhaps what you’re going at, which is the healing qualities of writing.
