The Gift of Grace: A Note from the Playwright

When I was commissioned to write a family Christmas play for South Coast Repertory, I had no idea there would be deep synchronicities with my own life. I simply thought I would write another play for another theatre and that would be that. But while my talented collaborators (director José Cruz González and composer Marcos Loya) and I toiled away on our first draft of Posada at the Sundance Theatre Lab in Utah, I received a call from my wife Jeanne that she was pregnant with our daughter, and that changed everything.

The play suddenly revealed to me the essential universal sanctity of life, the glowing sense of hope and love that babies always suggest for the world. But the confluence of this play with my wife’s news also transformed the holiday of Christmas for me. The adoration bestowed on the infant Jesus spoke more deeply and directly to my new status as a father. The Nativity became a metaphor for the profound responsibility we all owe to the fragile innocent children we dare to bring into this brutal world.

Later that spring, as I continued to write Posada and Jeanne pored over all the books of baby names, she told me that she wanted to name our baby girl Graciela, or Gracie, for short. This stunned me because I had just settled on that name for my protagonist. How could she have known? She hadn’t read the play, nor had I spoken of it to her. And yet here now, our daughter was not only coming into our house, she was filling our play. It seemed fitting.

Gracie was born on September 24, 1994, and the play itself was delivered three months later. We brought her for one of the first performances, and to this day, I can't help but feel that the wide brown eyes of the infant Graciela have shone their grace on La Posada Mágica.