Hope Villanueva

Ms. Villanueva is a stage manager by profession, but holds a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Playwriting.  She has continued writing on and off since graduating.  Her one act musical, Rooftops, was produced by the university and again at Center Stage in Santa Barbara.  During her tenure at Honolulu Theatre for Youth, her play Renovations was mounted as a part of Where Do Things Go?. Pacific, a play about the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese tsunami had a staged reading in 2013 at the Next Act! New Play Summit in Schenectady, NY. Her devised piece, The Crane Fable Project, about the Japanese American soldiers in WWII, was part of the Capital Fringe Festival in DC in 2015 and she has been a contributing playwright for the DC One Minute Play Festival for two years running. The Veils was selected for participation at the Baltimore Playwrights’ Festival (2016), The Black and Latino Playwrights’ Conference (2016), The Kennedy Center Page to Stage Festival (2016), The Discovery New Play Festival (2017), and The Kitchen Dog New Play Festival (2017). She was invited to be a participant in the HMBG Winter Playwright Retreat in 2017 and The Veils received its first full production in February 2018 in Washington, DC as a part of the Women’s Voices Festival. The Head that Wears the Crown, was a part of The Kennedy Center Page to Stage Festival in 2018 and produced by Ally Theatre Company in 2019. Her new play, Her, Across the River, about the friendship between an American woman and a novice monk who meet in Bangkok, was part of the INKubator On Air series (iTunes and Spotify) and is a part of the WTF Occupy the Space Festival this November. The QoL Mandate has been developed at NextStop Theatre Company and with The Quarantine Reading Society in NYC. She also is working an original musical about a college student who is slowly disappearing.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.stagewoozle.com
FB: Hope Villanueva
IG: stagewoozleSM

MORE ABOUT ME
My favorite moments as a playwright are when I know something has really connected with people. My friends who know my work well tease me that almost every play reduced the audience to tears at some point, but it's a point of pride that people are so close to the characters emotionally. In one of my plays in particular, about a female Marine with PTSD, every time I attended a performance, someone pulled me aside and said that they were reminded of a friend or sibling or family member who had gone through something similar and that I'd really captured the agony their loved ones were going through. I really feel like that why I write.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I've got two full length pieces that are in late development and that I'm starting to submit. One is about a hypothetical future where we require boys to have reversible vasectomies at puberty. The other is about a Vietnamese American family in the South, trying to decide to sell their shop. There's also a superhero musical mid-process (musicals take much longer!) with a female lead and a sweet queer love story at the center. I'm also in early days of a TV pilot about a company that disappears people and a new play about murder hornets.

KEYWORDS
​Female, Filipino, Mexican, American, drama, musical, magical realism, family drama, contemporary, relationships