South Florida’s theater scene is about to take center stage with the launch of the Coconut Grove Theatre Festival, a brand-new celebration of local talent, stories, and creativity running May 8–11 at the historic Woman’s Club of Coconut Grove.
On Inside South Florida, Entertainment Insider Ariel Cipolla sat down with two key creatives from the festival—director Karina Batchelor-Gómez and playwright Alejandro Rodríguez, whose play When the Sea Wall Cracks is among the eight featured.
When speaking about the inaugural year Karina shared, “You all have created an incubator for creation. And I think the collaborative process means intuiting the needs of everyone in the room—actors, musicians, playwrights. We all figure it out together.”
Alejandro’s play is described as a love letter to Miami. “It’s a love story between a father and daughter who are separated in a Category 5 storm and must fight their way through Miami to find each other,” he said. Featuring live music and cinematic staging, the play captures both the beauty and urgency of South Florida living.
But for Alejandro, the true gift is telling this story in the city that inspired it. “When you're a writer, you hear the play and see it on your mind, but there’s always going to be something that's lost when it travels and a gap between where those artists are and their lived experience. I write plays about the people I know, so there is no gap in this experience. The actors sound like what I heard and the air feels like what I wanted to feel like. That is a rare privilege.”
Cipolla, who is also Managing Director of the festival, emphasized the uniqueness of the event: “These are play readings, but at the end of the day, we're spicing them up, and we're making them a little bit different.”
To see When the Seawall Cracks and the seven other dynamic new works, visitCGTFest.com. Alejandro and Karina’s show runs on Sunday at 4:30 PM, just in time for Mother’s Day.
