The Play's the Thing Summer Fest

Chicanas Cholas y Chisme are coming to New Orleans on Sunday, July 7, for a special installment of LMNL Arts' series of staged readings: The Play's the Thing Summer Fest!

THE LINE-UP** (12-5pm)

Calliope, by Lindsey Haley, 12pm

BESO, by Abel Alvarado, 12:30pm

English as a Second Language, by Claudia Duran, 1pm

~Intermission with music by David X, 1:45pm

Special Performance by Melinda Palacio, 2pm

Fan Club, by Mariana Herrera, 2:30pm

Aliens, Immigrants, and Other Evildoers, by Jose Torres-Tama, 3pm

Locked Up, by Patricia Zamorano, 3:30pm

**Each performance will be followed by a brief Q&A and craft talk with the playwright and/or performers.

12:00 pm - Calliope

A middle aged woman going through crisis, runs away to New Orleans where the Goddess Calliope confronts and comforts her. (Written by Lindsey Haley.)

12:30 pm - BESO

It's Prom Night and love is in the air! But for Gabby and Peter, two best friends since second grade, will this be the most perfect night in their teenage life or will a BESO change everything? This heartfelt coming of age story reminds us that trusting someone can sometimes be even more meaningful than a KISS. (Written by Abel Alvarado.)

1:00 pm - English as a Second Language

A young Salvadoran girl narrowly escapes one nightmare to live her American Dream. (Written by Claudia Duran.)

1:45 pm - Intermission with music by David X

2:15 pm - Special Musical/Transpoetic Performance by Melinda Palacio

2:30 pm - The Fan Club

Women navigate the symptoms of menopause and love while deciding whether money or men will satisfy their itch. (Written by Mariana Herrera.)

3:00 pm - Aliens, Immigrants, and Other Evildoers

With spoken word and exaggerated characters, Torres-Tama takes the immigration issue head on in ALIENS, and he shape-shifts into a variety of characters that exposes the hypocrisy of a capitalist system that dehumanizes immigrants and exports their labor simultaneously. (Written and performed by José Torres-Tama.)

3:30 - Locked Up

The story of Santa, a streetwise Latina from the Aliso housing projects of Boyle Heights. Facing the demons of an abusive past and the lures if the street, Santa finds herself locked up in juvenile hall. In this school of hard knocks new behind the wall, new torments await her. (Written by Patricia Zamorano.)

About the Playwrights

Abel Alvarado (BESO) Musical Book writer/Lyricist, Designer, Producer. His award-winning work has been seen on numerous stages throughout the Los Angeles area including CASA 0101, The Pasadena Playhouse, 24th STreet Theatre, The Renberg Theatre, Plaza de La Raza and the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse. His musical ARENA: A HOUSE MUSIC-al" played to sold out crowds with raving media reviews. As an openly Gay Chicano, producing the largest and longest running LatinXperience LGBT writers workshop & festival "Brown & Out" is one of his greatest highlights, and fulfills his lifelong mission to always amplify and uplift the voices of his comunidad that he loves, through stories, music, and art.

Claudia Duran (English as a Second Language) is a Mexican/Salvadoran first generation graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. Duran has written, directed, and produced for theater since 2012 at The Los Angeles Theater Center as part of their Encuentro de Las Américas, LA Short Play Fest, Short+Sweet Hollywood Festival, Brown & Out Theater Festival, and Co-Created the Chicanas Cholas y Chisme Women's Play Festival. As a filmmaker Duran has screened her films that she wrote and directed at various film festivals including the Boston Roxbury Film Festival, Latino International Film Festival, Pan African Cinema Festival of Cannes, and The Toronto World of Comedy Festival and has received Best Director and Up and Coming Director awards. She has shared her love and knowledge of filmmaking and theater throughout Los Angeles and New Orleans with youth through non-profit organizations such as Future Storytellers, Live Arts, the Guerilla Filmmaking Intensive and the Director's Cut. Duran is a teaching artist with the Social Political Art Resource Center and the California School for the Arts and Young Audiences Charter School. She is currently an MFA student at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Creative Writing. To view more work visit:

Lindsey Haley (Calliope) is an 8th grade dropout, GED recipient, teenage mom, former farmworker, community activist and Homegirl hailing from Venice, CA. Her poetry, short stories and journalism focusing on Chicano/Latino arts and culture, have been published over the course of thirty-five years. She made her debut as a playwright and producer with the production of Chicanas, Cholas, y Chisme in 2013, and has remained as its Executive Producer/Co-founder. She has produced, Mi Casa Es Su Casa, a touring production using selected plays from Chicanas, Cholas y Chisme that was staged at the Infringe Festival in New Orleans and UC Santa Cruz. Her short play, “El Jardin” was presented at LATC’s 2017 Encuentro De Las Americas Festival. She was also selected to be one of the writers for 2019 Latino Theater Alliance, Los Angeles’ Writer’s Nest Program where she developed, “15”, a full length play. Her play, Favorite Cousins, was staged at Casa0101 as part of its 2023 Season.

Mariana Herrera (The Fan Club) is a playwright, actress, singer and more recently, a director. She is fluent in Spanish and English and loves to weave the elements of diversity in her plays providing a rich context to remind the audience of the beauty of differentness. Fueled by her sarcastic charm, Mariana is naturally drawn to writing comedic pieces. Over the years she has performed in several plays with Teatro Mestizo in San Diego, California and at Cal-state University in Los Angeles. She is honored to be one of the original playwrights for Chicanas, Cholas y Chisme for eleven years. During that time

she had the privilege of presenting ten of her plays and a short film at CASA 0101 Theater. Mariana was also a semi-finalist for her comedic play, ‘Nuestra Senora de la Santa Pena’ at the Short and Sweet Festival in Hollywood California. Mariana has a master’s degree in public administration and public administration. She is a Licensed Marriage and Family therapist.

José Torres-Tama (Aliens, Immigrants, and Other Evildoers) is an Ecuadorian-born "Mestizo" of Quechua indigenous descent and an interdisciplinary troublemaker. He is a published playwright and poet, journalist and photographer, renegade scholar and arts educator, visual and performance artist, and founder and Artistic Director of ArteFuturo Productions in New Orleans, the only producing entity of socially conscious Latin American theater events and performance art in the Crescent City. his list of honors and awards is long, including prestigious New York City MAP Fund Grant Award for his radical dinner theater on wheels called the Taco Truck Theater and a Regional Artist Project Award from the NEA for his genre-bending performances and a Louisiana Theater Fellowship. His current touring solo show, ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS was developed through a National Performance Network Creation Fund award.

Patricia Zamorano (Locked Up) is a queer Chicana born and raised in Boyle Heights. Since 2019, she has been the dramaturg for Abel Alvarado's ARENA A HOUSE MUSICAL which has been staged at CASA 0101 and the LGBT Center in West Hollywood to Sold Out shows! Her credits include a dozen short plays and monologues (2011-2024) produced by “Brown and Out”, LGBT play festival, and “Chicanas, Cholas y Chisme” festival both created at Casa 0101 Theater. She also has two short films, PUTA (2021) & MATRIARCHY (2019) produced by Matriarchy Films. Patricia began working with CASA 0101 in 2007 when she took Josefina Lopez's playwriting class and wrote her first full length play, YOU DON'T KNOW ME. Then, she received a grant to write her second full length play, LOCKED UP in 2013. She is honored to have been included in the www.50playwrightsproject and is an award recipient of Boyle Heights for her artistic contribution.

About Summer Fest's Musical Performers

DAVID X was born and raised in New Orleans. He has played for Jazz Fest as well as French Quarter Fest. David has been playing in the band since his youth at St. Aug. He can be seen live playing trombone and rapping weekly at Bamboula’s.

Melinda Palacio divides her time between New Orleans and Santa Barbara. Currently, she is the City of Santa Barbara’s Poet Laureate. She is the author of the novel, Ocotillo Dreams (ASU Bilingual Press 2011). Her first full-length poetry collection, How Fire Is a Story, Waiting, (Tia Chucha Press 2012) was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Award, the Paterson Prize, and received First Prize in Poetry at the 2013 International Latino Book Awards. In 2015, her work was featured on the Academy of American Poets, Poem-a-Day Program. Melinda's latest poetry collection is Bird Forgiveness, 3: A Taos Press. She writes a poetry column for the Santa Barbara Independent.

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