For playwright Tony Meneses, "twenty50" is a timely conversation between production and audience

Northwest Arkansas audiences were first introduced to the wildly unique and incredibly entertaining work of Tony Meneses during the 2022 Arkansas New Play Festival when the playwright took an outline and turned it into the witty, mysterious Ashes of a Great Fire—in just two weeks! Now he’s back at T2 with twenty50, a play the Denver Post called a “near-future drama that dwells in the thorny space in which the more things change, the more they stir up the same old problems.”

Meneses was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and raised in Albuquerque and Dallas. His plays include “Guadalupe in the Guest Room”, “The Women of Padilla”, “twenty50”, “The Hombres”, and “El Borracho”. He is an alumnus of the Soho Rep. Writer/Director Lab, Ars Nova Play Group, Sundance Institute Playwrights Retreat at Ucross Foundation, The Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship, and Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood, and his work has been previously developed at the Lark Play Development Center Playwrights’ Week, Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s The Ground Floor, Denver Center for the Performing Arts Theatre Company’s Colorado New Play Summit, The Old Globe’s Powers New Voices Festival, and South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival and New SCRipt Series. He is a two-time recipient of The Kennedy Center Latinx Playwriting Award, is published by Dramatists Play Service, and has been previously commissioned by Denver Center, Two River Theater, and The Juilliard School. He is currently under commission from The Old Globe and South Coast Rep. Education: The University of Texas at Austin, Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Juilliard.

Can you talk a little bit about the birth of twenty50? What’s the message you hope to send with your words?

It was after the 2016 election and I think, artistically, we all were wondering—Okay, how do we, as artists, reckon with what felt like a pretty big cultural shift happening? Particularly the way that  immigration stories are rendered in the news cycles or in headlines. It always just feels like it's a very reductive way of looking at human beings. And given that my own history is part of that narrative—we came here as Mexican immigrants. People might see that on paper and have an immediate, charged reaction. So, you know, as any story does, [twenty50]  gives more complexity and dimension and humanity to those narratives. That's a big, important tenet of my work: Let me just tell human stories that are grounded, that give insight into something that sometimes people don't really understand or think they understand, and make assumptions about. For me, given the (and I hate saying this) ‘build the wall’ of that particular moment, I thought, ‘How can I, as an artist, show people that immigrants aren’t bad?’ And that people like me and those of us that come from other countries, particularly Latin American countries, that we have stories to tell, and then hopefully they can connect and exercise empathy and compassion. So it's a very lofty goal. I don't know if it always works, depending on the headline of that day in the news, but it's what I've chosen to do with my life—to sort of combat the way that we are often separated by these kinds of political discourses. And if a play or a story can get an audience that thinks they know what immigrants are, has a negative opinion of them, by watching what is ultimately a family story—maybe there's a little bit more compassion and empathy again into the world once they leave the play.

Is that sort of a driving force when you get a new idea—the desire to send a message?

Sometimes you write something where you think you have a theme in your mind. This is one of those plays that’s very much an argument play. I definitely knew the argument that I was having with myself that I wanted an audience to chew on. Because of who I am, the work that I do is often Latino, so it may not wrestle with sort of big themes in terms of what  an audience might expect. It might just be a different kind of story that's accessible and universal, but just happens to be populated by Latino characters. So yes and no: Sometimes you do sort of think, I'm going to tackle this idea, and sometimes you just sort of let it sort of happen and evolve on its own while you're exploring characters that you care about and that you hopefully also get an audience to care about. What's really important to me, actually, that I think is a sneaky kind of tactic of mine, is the use of humor. I think this play is also very funny. So just getting an audience to laugh—and especially post pandemic—it feels like such a gift that an audience comes together, and, given how sometimes the world can be on certain days, just the gift of laughter feels like a big thing.

The show is set 25 years in the future. What are the challenges involved in writing a futuristic play?

I think most of the [futuristic] narratives that we’ve seen have been technology-focused. For me, this isn’t about some dystopia where one day machines take over. I think there are subtle hints of how technology could work or should work, or even the way we might be dressing in the future, too. But mostly I was interested in just our social dynamics and how those might evolve. I think that the prominent area of focus for this play is, ‘How are we going to treat each other 25 years from now? Are we still going to be haunted by the past? How are the cultural shifts that are happening now going to evolve into the future?’ There are hints of other things, like technology, but I didn't want that to be the forward color, and even climate change is not really that much of a pronounced thing. I know that's a big thing that we're all thinking about in terms of the future, but it just feels like there's only so much the play can hold. So if I can just sort of tip my hat at the small things like technology, or like climate change, then maybe what I hope to really do is get the audience to focus on how society also evolves, in addition to the larger technological advances that we're experiencing right now and what they might be one day. 

Twenty50 has had only one fully realized production so far, in March, 2020 at the Denver Center for Performing Arts (who also commissioned the play), closing just before the pandemic shut down the theater world. During that first run, what kind of reaction did you have to the show? Did anything surprise you? 

There was a very diverse makeup of people in Denver—we had white, Latino, Black audience members, Native American audiences, and it was just nice to see them connect to this material. When I very first shared this play at Juilliard, when I was a student there, one of our professors, who's of Jewish heritage, said, ‘I saw my grandmother's story in this,’ and that's always such a gift to hear— that we can always find the things that we connect with, that we connect with the universal themes of immigration and legacy and history and how we honor our past. So that's all really rewarding. 

I also have this funny story where, one night, I saw two women in front of me, a mother and a daughter, that you could just tell hated the play from the very beginning to the very end. They rushed out of there as soon as it ended. I was so tempted to tap on their shoulder at the end, like, ‘Hey! What happened?’ But I never knew, and I was a little bit haunted by that, because I was like, huh, this isn't working on them. I wonder what's going on. I wonder why they don't like this. I could guess. I don't want to make assumptions about anybody, but, you know, it's always illuminating for me. This is also the point of theater, right? They're there, they're stuck, they're being challenged. I don't know if they were listening or they were zoning out but, either way, they did bear witness to what the show was about. And I hope they did think about it on their own, even afterwards— even if it was, ‘I didn't like I didn't like it because it was too political.’, Maybe it was too in their face with its messaging. I don't know. I can't guess. Maybe they had a barbecue to get to. But it was fascinating to see, and informative, to say the least.

You’ve had a relationship with TheatreSquared for some time now—we were lucky enough to see Ashes of a Great Fire at the Arkansas New Play Festival in 2022. What has it been like for you to work with our organization? 

I love the staff there. I love how they support artists. When you meet people that you can tell really believe in you, and really want to believe in what you do, when they say, ‘We'd love to work together,’ you actually believe them. And that's what it’s always felt like with TheatreSquared. When I met [Artistic Director] Bob [Ford], when I met [Senior Artistic Associate and Director of New Play Development Dexter [J. Singleton], when I met [Executive Director] Shannon [Jones], it just felt like they really, like they had my back, I could tell. And for me, it was: I’m going to cross my fingers and hopefully one day they’ll consider doing something of mine. And it was such a wonderful day when they called and said, ‘All right, we're gonna do this show.’ So I just trust them, and I know they're going to support the work. They're going to build bridges in the way that all of their plays in their season often do by creating these great conversations with their audience. I assume the audience that comes to these shows is open to that,  but even they come in with their own assumptions about the immigrant community, and then they see the show and it helps them see it in a different way—that’s a good thing, too.  We are all always learning, and I love that TheatreSquared creates that platform for their audiences to continue to engage in the world and not just retreat from it.