Award winning playwright Laura Maria visits the Mendocino Coast
Award-winning playwright and screenwriter Laura Maria Censabella spent her first day in Mendocino teaching a seminar on creating meaningful dialog. The class was held at The Woods in their community center and included local poets, playwrights, actors, and fiction writers.
Censabella wrote Paradise, which finishes out its successful run on Memorial Day Weekend at the Mendocino Theater Company. This play focuses on the clash of cultures first-generation immigrant communities face in the United States. She takes a nuanced approach to difficult subjects like arranged marriage, plagiarism, and the male-dominated world of science.
She teaches at the New School for Drama in New York. The New School University was founded in 1919 to encourage research, free speech, and expression. Censabella is herself a first-generation Italian American and remembers all too well how to walk that fence between the culture you love at home and the culture you learn to love in public school.
Her plays and her awards are many. Here are just a few. Paradise was a finalist for the 2016 Saroyan/Paul Playwriting Prize for Human Rights. She also has two Emmy Awards, the Geri Ashur Award in Screenwriting and the Tennessee Chapbook Prize for Drama, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Paradise was also produced in Los Angeles with funding provided by actors Viola Davis and Julius Tennon. Censabella didn’t get to meet Viola Davis. The actress who played Yasmeen was given one-on-one instruction from Ms. Davis, and Censabella says that told her a lot about Davis and her willingness to help others.
The seminar was an enlightening entry into the world of the playwright herself and how she builds her characters. Censabella talked about the theater and the transfer of feelings. “We go to the theater so that we can be affected by one another, to open up. We watch people on stage be affected by one another. It’s a moment by moment, transition of feelings.”
The writing portion of the class started with a centering exercise, where students imagined warm water flowing over them while they relaxed and loosened their creative muscles. The next exercise was a free writing trip back in time to objects participants cherished as a child. Afterward, participants wrote a short scene and play where one character gave away that cherished object to a second character. The exercise created characters infused with genuine emotion and pried open the door to those creative storage units that many people keep locked away. Following the writing exercise, volunteers read the short plays.
The range of material and emotions created by the class participants was stunning.
Censabella would not take credit for the writing exercises. Instead, she said she borrowed from the teachings of María Irene Fornéz (1930 — 2018), a celebrated Cuban-born playwright well known for her off-Broadway theater work, teaching, and influence on modern playwriting.
The Mendocino Theater Company brought Censabella to Mendocino through an Ensemble Theatre Company / Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant. A local writer hosted her. While Censabella was in residence, she also participated in a post-play conversation with Cultural Consultant Neamah Hussein on May 21st. The theater company has reopened its theater arts classes and workshops. They feature classes for adults and youth. For more information, go to mendocinotheatre.org/educationprograms.