No longer ‘Insecure’ at work
San Jose playwright gives show more diverse voices
It was the morning after. That morning, as he walked into the writers’ room of “Insecure,” Christopher Oscar Peña may have felt just that. The San Jose-born, New Yorkbased playwright had received an offer to write for Issa Rae’s hit HBO show. It was Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016. When he left Harlem the morning before, he’d finished voting for Hillary Clinton. When he landed in Los Angeles, “the world had ended.”
The next-day interview had an urgency it wouldn’t have had in other circumstances. The “Insecure” writers pressed him on what he’d bring to the show. Their words? “This show mat-
ters more than ever now, because we’ve got to give these people a voice.”
Those people were the queer and Latino characters that will pop up, with more frequency, in Season 2 of “Insecure,” premiering Sunday, July 23. Rae’s goal for the next season was to explore, in richer detail, the diversity of the Inglewood and South Central portions of Los Angeles — that intersection of Crenshaw/ Slauson rarely dealt with until artists like Rae come along.
And that’s where writers like Peña come in. His presence contributes greatly to the show’s success, which thrives on providing that widescreen view of today’s L.A. Not only does he write regularly for the series, but he’s also scheduled to make his acting debut on the show Aug. 3, in a part written by and for himself. He plays Gary, a gay, Latino close friend of Lawrence’s ( Jay Ellis).
In an email to The Chronicle, Rae says Peña has “been a great, fresh addition to the room. We frequently do ‘writer table reads’ to see if an episode reads well and we would typically assign him the part of Gary. He did a great job and then asked to audition for the role and then got the part! He did this on his own.”
Needless to say, Peña is overjoyed.
“It’s had me feel aware of what I engage, which is giving voices to all these people that haven’t had a voice in a long time,” he says.
The San Jose native writes to reflect not who he “should” be, but how he was, how he grew up.
“I’ve always resisted being called a ‘gay’ or a ‘Latino’ playwright,” he says. “I certainly talk about them in my plays, but I don’t want to be defined by them. Not because I’m not proud — but the minute you define yourself in a certain way, there are huge assumptions about what you’re supposed to be. And those boxes don’t really fit anymore.”
His work is, in his words, “less about speaking about the Asian or Latino experience, and more about finding the commonalities between people of color.”
Growing up in San Jose dramatically shaped his view on the dynamics of class when it comes to the lives of marginalized folks. Peña had a front-row seat for the Silicon Valley dotcom boom. He noticed that what divided his changing neighborhood was defined more along lines of class than race. His neighbors — black, white, Indian — all shared, in his view, “the experience of having had nothing, and the opportunity of suddenly having everything.”
He tells stories of the pressures his father faced when he found prestige and success.
“One day, my dad called me and he asked, ‘Should I buy a Corolla or a Jaguar?’ I said, ‘You’re a CEO; buy the Jaguar.’ And he said, ‘But I’m more comfortable in the Corolla.’ ” Real-life moments like this are the springboard from which Peña launches his ideas.
What was Peña’s journey like on the way to “Insecure”?
We’d have to fly back to New York, where Peña currently lives and writes his plays. He has honed a lyrical style that, according to literary manager Ignacia Delgado of the Sundance Institute, is “like magic” and “an art unto itself.” (“Even his stage directions move you,” she ecstatically tells me.)
Peña’s work (“A Cautionary Tail,” “Tiny People”) tries to find the common thread that ties communities of color and lower classes together. He wants to challenge the stereotypes that surround images not only of marginalized communities, but of his own generation.
“It’s important for me to give us a voice,” he says. “To not be talked down to as dumb Millennials, but as people who struggle.”
His play “Awe/ struck,” which deals with the struggles of a young immigrant (played by America Ferrera in the original production) and the poor, white working class, was selected to be performed as part of the 2015 Sundance Theatre Lab. It encourages experimentation outside of traditional forms, but Peña’s way was especially impressive to Philip Himberg, the artistic director of Sundance Theatre.
“Mostly at Sundance, Chris was experimenting mightily with a final “3rd Act” whose rules worked differently than what he had set up in the preceding two (which were much more naturalistic),” Himberg writes in an email. “Sundance is meant to be used as a ‘sandbox’ to play, experiment, and take big risk. Chris did that, which I found wonderfully inspiring and a true testament to the Sundance ‘laboratory.’ ”
Always looking for the best ways to tell his stories, Peña strayed into the world of television. He started a Web series, “80/20”, which looks at the ambiguities of sexuality. A guy breaks up with his girlfriend and moves in with his gay best friend, Peña, who says the guy is “about 80 percent straight, 20 percent gay. The tagline: “A completely straight man is hard to find.”
Later, he wrote a pilot for a show about a parallel-universe version of himself, where he fails as a playwright and has to move back to San Jose to deal with all of his high school frenemies (“That is the most horrifying thought I’ve ever had.”) It was this pilot and Peña’s theatrical work that brought him to the attention of Ashley Holland, Rae’s agent, who also linked Rae to Prentice Penny (showrunner) and “Lemonade” codirector Melina Matsoukas, who has directed several “Insecure” episodes. Holland enjoyed his sense of humor and insight, and wanted to make sure he fit right into the family.
Now, as the second season of the show nears, Peña reflects back and marvels at its inclusivity, and how it dovetails into the concerns of his own work.
“People think of it as ‘the black show,’ ” he notes. “But it’s not. It’s just about people of color, and about the feeling of being the other. And the experience of the everyday. Not just as some ghettoized immigrant or poor person.”
“Five or 10 years ago, people really didn’t like working on TV,” Peña says. “It was sort of lowbrow. Now, TV is actually more exciting than theater. There’s this enormous Latino market that isn’t being reached, and TV is trying to reach it.”
As exemplars, he cites Mindy Kaling (“The Mindy Project”), Lena Dunham (“Girls”), and Aziz Ansari (“Master of None”). In a medium where authorship is even more dispersive than in movies, they have proved themselves as auteurs of their works by playing protagonists who are thinly veiled spins on their own selves.
That’s where Peña hopes to go. His pilot is already being shopped around as a show in which he’ll star.
As Peña’s writing matures, he sees television as a crucial battleground to explore the themes which matter most to him. What appeals to him is TV’s signature mix of entertainment and high taste.
“I’m a little bit highbrow and a little bit trashy,” he says, laughing. “That’s what I think good storytelling is. If you can lure in an audience and have a good time with them, but also teach them what it’s like — to be a person of color, to be poor — that’s a success.”