PERMISSION

In her play Permission, playwright Elaine Romero looks at a Latine playwright (Sara) embedded in a PWI, a university in the desert southwest. At the top of the play, Sara learns from her white department chair, Doug, that her play has been pulled from the season. It is revealed the decision is, in part, because Sara has attempted to write from an Anglo POV. The play explores which playwrights have permission to write from which points of view and tell which stories. The play reveals pieces of Sara’s personal history that have made white spaces challenging. Steeped in the world of the southwestern border, Permission looks at the position of an artist/academic in a predominantly white institution that struggles to include those it has invited to sit at the table. How does a Chicane artist/academic negotiate their space and their place in a PWI? When it comes to the rules of engagement on the southwestern border, who decides what’s right? In the end, Doug asks Sara for help in diversifying his season even though he has excluded her play.