Melinda Lopez's Playwriting Residency at Huntington Theatre Company, Boston

Melinda Lopez is the Playwright-in-Residence at the Huntington Theatre Company through the National Playwright Residency Program, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Find out more about her residency experience here, and learn about the impact of the program at large here.

HowlRound is working with playwright residency sites around the country to track the impact of what it means to have a playwright on staff. At each of the fourteen theaters we have a Commons Producer—a theater practitioner from the local community working with the theater and the playwright to tell the story of each residency and make the learning from this experiment accessible as it's happening. Periodically we will post these residency updates on HowlRound in the hopes that it will be useful to field-wide learning on the question of what it means to employ playwrights inside of theaters.

Melinda Lopez has nearly completed her first year in residency at the Huntington Theatre Company and in the following video series, Melinda talks about her experiences and her goals for the playwriting residency and gives us a taste of Becoming Cuba, her play opening at the Huntington Theatre Company in April 2014.

I began this series with the hope that using an accessible, digestible form of documentation could promote better engagement with the residency while offering a more intimate portrait of Melinda's journey. The Huntington Theatre Company website will also house all the content collected over the three year residency in an effort to familiarize their patrons and subscribers with Melinda Lopez and the work she will be doing as a member of the Huntington Theatre Company staff.

Videos shot & edited by Alesha Gunn: