Posted February 20, 2025
The Interview – Santiago Guzmán
Santiago Guzmán
Santiago Guzmán is an award-winning playwright, dramaturge, performer, and director originally from Metepec, Mexico, now based in St. John’s, NL. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of TODOS Productions, and Artistic Director for Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre. Santiago’s work is very gay, very brown, and very real.
Santiago, I’d like to start by asking you about your play Altar, which is about a young man who is trying to understand why his romantic relationship has ended. Over the course of the play, however, the story becomes larger than that, bringing in themes of love, culture, loss, and growth. Can you tell us more about Altar?
I started writing Altar in 2019 when I was still in theatre school out of sheer frustration of feeling like I was not being seen. When I was performing, I was constantly told that I had an accent (don’t we all?), that I had a different skin colour than my peers, and that there were no parts for me to play in the local theatre scene. I was told that Newfoundland and Labrador theatre was about the place’s history and its people. However, the stories of people like me, those who do not “fit” with so-called tradition were nowhere to be seen. So, I had to write my own. I wanted this play to meet me at my intersections, me being a racialized, queer, migrant ESL person in NL.
As an unashamed hopeless romantic, I wanted to write a play about my experience with dating and ghosting, and I thought the festivity of the Day of the Dead was the perfect entry point for those who were a bit familiar with my culture—and my favourite Mexican tradition! See? Intersections.
Altar had its world premiere in 2021 with the Resource Centre for the Arts Theatre Company and toured across high schools in Newfoundland and Labrador as a digital offering (we shot it like a movie, and it was soooo fun.) I’ve been lucky to have taken this same production on tour for national presentations at the Prismatic Arts Festival, (NS) and Aluna Theatre’s RUTAS Festival (ON) in 2022, a summer presentation at the Gros Morne Theatre Festival with TNL in 2023, an Atlantic Canadian tour in 2024, as well as a performance at the SpotOn Festival in Lancashire (UK). Altar received a second production by Theatre New Brunswick in the winter of 2023 and toured schools in their province.
You’ve been quoted as saying, “I think at the core of my values as an artist is advancing community. How can I encourage others to carve space for themselves through theatre and storytelling?” Can you expand on that?
The first workshop production of Altar at the Annual St. John’s Short Play Festival gave birth to my theatre company, TODOS Productions. With this special presentation of my first play, I learned that this story was raising other emerging artists in NL, while also introducing local audiences to culturally diverse narratives. I thought that TODOS could also serve to uplift Black, Indigenous, Artists of Colour, 2SLGBTQAI+ artists, landed immigrants, and artists with disabilities within Newfoundland and Labrador.
Over the years, I have come to understand and appreciate why I write plays: I want to speak to the people in NL that historically have been silenced or ignored. I intend my stories to resonate with audiences in my community who struggle to be seen and heard, but also to provide paid and professional opportunities to equity-owed artists in my community who can grow with the production of my shows.
Your play Urndeals with siblings who are grappling with their mother’s death, and also with their differing concepts of “home.” I know that you have put down deep roots in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. When you decided to leave Mexico, why did you choose to move to NL? What do you love about the place?
2025 will mark the tenth anniversary of my arrival in Canada. I always say that landing in NL was a happy mistake. When I embraced the idea of pursuing professional training in theatre creation abroad, Canada seemed to be a great place to live, based on the idea I had of this country. I found a university in NL that offered a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts in Theatre and, at the time, was affordable to my family finances. So I took the chance, applied to uni, and got in. I have to confess two things: 1) I had no backup plan if this didn’t work, and 2) I thought leaving Mexico would be best because I was so afraid of failure. You see, I started performing when I was eight years old, everyone back in Mexico knew I was “the theatre kid,” and I was so afraid that I hadn’t gotten into the National Theatre School of Mexico, the most prestigious way to achieve theatre education in the big city. I thought of applying somewhere where they didn’t know me, so if I failed my audition, at least nobody would know me.
Upon arrival to Newfoundland and Labrador, I was met with warmth, love, and appreciation. And, although I had no intention of staying in Canada upon graduation, this place grew on me and made me feel it could become home. And it has.
The people. The people have kept me here.
You’ve received several awards, including the John Palmer Award for being a changemaker in the theatre world, the Inspired Innovation Award from the St. John’s YWCA, and the Senior Dramatic Script Award at the Newfoundland and Labrador 2024 Arts and Letters Awards for your new play, Seis Grados en Mayo. Can you give us a sneak peek of the new work?
In Seis Grados en Mayo, Mexico City meets St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. After not seeing her son Carlos for almost five years, María visits him in Canada to celebrate his graduation and help him pack to return home. Carlos has other plans in mind. He has to find a way to tell his mother that St. John’s will be his new home… indefinitely.
This play was inspired by having my dad come to my graduation back in 2019 and seeing Newfoundland and Labrador for the first time. I think it was then, when he understood why I had fallen in love with this place and saw how loved I was here, that he trusted me with my decision to stay. It was too cold, though.
This play is fully in Spanglish and it’s quite physical. A Spanglish Canadian farce if you will.
Recently, you were chosen by the Canadian Museum of Immigration to be their Winter 2025 Playwright in Residence. What sorts of things will you be doing in that capacity?
The main focus of the residency is to support the writing of my newest play long-distance-short, a play that explores the intersection between my fear of long-distance relationships and my fear of spiders. Through the residency, I will hold informal coffee houses at the museum for community members to drop by and learn about my process, and to write together (especially when writing can feel like a very solitary endeavour). My residency will culminate with a public reading of the latest draft of the script, as a sneak peek into my process of writing a play! This will help me gauge the potential impact and/or areas of interest from my audience that will inform my next steps in pursuing this play.
Finally, do you have any advice for aspiring playwrights?
Write your story. Don’t give up.
If you are passionate about your play, someone else will be too.
