By VCUarts staff
Christine Stoddard is premiering her play “Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares” at the historic Gene Frankel Theatre in Manhattan from June 15-26 for a total of 10 performances. The play won a national award from Table Work Press and was published in the book “Two Plays” in 2020. Stoddard is the playwright and director; she also plays a bit part in the show.
The story centers on Maya, a young Salvadoran-American, navigating trauma and family mythology through magic and folklore as she comes of age in Phoenix, Arizona. It explores mother-daughter relationships, mixed race identity, and fantasy as a coping mechanism. It also features movement and dance.
Stoddard has written various other plays, most recently seen at the Broadway Comedy Club in Midtown Manhattan. She is the writer/director of “Sirena’s Gallery,” an arthouse feature film next showing at Cinema Village, a historic theatre in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. She is also the author of books, such as “Heaven Is a Photograph” and “Water for the Cactus Woman,” and a visual artist with major exhibition credits at the Howard County Center for the Arts, the Queens Botanical Garden, the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House and elsewhere. She is the founder of Quail Bell Press & Productions, including “Quail Bell Magazine.” She is a graduate of VCUarts and The City College of New York.
Lead Image: Mi Abuela Queen of Nightmares Jaguar. From Christine Stoddard.