A Note from Tony Award Winning Director Thomas Kail
Quiara’s writing is full of imagery that gets trapped inside your brain and lingers long past the moment you first encountered it. I saw her play, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue well over a decade ago, and I can still feel the pain and possibility of a mother talking about what it means to plant seeds in the ground. Those scenes remain with me, still unfolding, still cropping up when I least expect them to accompany me.
Quiara’s ability to coax stories out her characters makes me think of the most gifted of gardeners: that rare human that can seem to make anything grow anywhere. She plants her plays, these remarkable seeds, and then nurtures the vines and fruit that sprout from them with enormous skill and care.
Quiara’s characters are constantly in dialogue with the past and the future, and they remind us that we are all connected on a subterranean level to each other. Her plays all have roots that go deep into the ground and co-mingle with other roots from seeds she planted in seasons before. This interconnectedness is what make it incredibly exciting to know that the Profile Theater Company will be shedding light on so much of her work, allowing it to be seen and felt over the course of a year.
Quiara and her collaborators in Oregon are the sun and rain, urging the seeds to take root, and giving them the sustenance to reach to the sky. I applaud the Profile for being the soil that will allow these seeds to emerge and be felt and experienced – and remembered – by all those who come to see them.
-Thomas Kail, Tony Award-winning Director of Hamilton, In the Heights, Daphne’s Dive
Season subscriptions to the 2017 Quiara Alegría Hudes Season available here.
