Who is Benjamin Benne?
Benjamin Benne is an award-winning Latino playwright whose works explore "intimate, realistic relationships mixed with surreal, supernatural, and numinous elements that spur expansive, existential questions about grief and loss, death and the afterlife, faith and the divine". He graduated with an MFA in Playwriting at the David Geffen/Yale School of Drama in 2022.
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Read more about Benjamin Benne at his website, linked HERE.
American Blues Theater Interview with Benjamin Benne on Alma...
WHAT WAS YOUR INSPIRATION FOR WRITING ALMA?
I actually first began working on this play around 2015 leading up to the 2016 election. Trump's campaign to build a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants was a violent attack that made me deeply reflect on my own family's immigration story. My mother's side of the family emigrated from Guatemala to the U.S. and I was born in Southern California, as a first generation U.S. citizen. My family came to the U.S. at a unique moment in time where they qualified for Amnesty--my mother later became a citizen, when I was in elementary school, and I still remember that day. So the question of "Who gets to be a citizen and why?" was central to the writing, as well as the question of "How could my story be different had my family come to the U.S. at a different time?." As the play has developed, the generational differences between the immigrant generation and their first gen children took more focus, as well as reflections on the long history of who has lived on/occupied/claimed the land that I grew up on (I was raised in Hacienda Heights which borders the city of La Puente, where this play is set).
WHAT DO YOU HOPE AUDIENCES TAKE AWAY FROM THIS PIECE?
The heart of this play is a relationship between a parent and child. They are so very close and intimate with each other — but are also discovering the ways in which they've grown apart; namely, they have very different visions for the future and ideas around the American Dream. My hope is that audiences will take away a sense of how their experiences feel similar and different than what they're seeing in Alma and Angel's relationship. Maybe they'll reflect on questions like: Do they feel the love between these characters? Can they empathize with (or at least have compassion for) these characters' struggles? Where are our areas of privilege and how can we use our power to advocate for others? Finally, after seeing this show, maybe the audience will feel moved to call their mother and/or someone who is a source of nurture to them and tell that person what they mean to them.