Tierney Finster interviews Maya Martinez about her debut book, “Theatrics: Collected Theatrical Writings.”:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2FTheatrics.jpg)
Theatrics: Collected Theatrical Writings by Maya Martinez. Wonder, 2025.
THE BEST PRAYERS are not affirmations. Affirmations promote positive thinking: you say something as if it is true, hoping that it will become so. Affirmations ignore reality in an attempt to shape it. They often require you to bypass your pain and override your hardship in hopes of manifesting something different. The best prayers—or, at least, my favorite prayers—include that pain. They acknowledge the suffering, the fear, the sickness, the terror, and the endless void of unknowing that brings most humans into communion with the divine in the first place. Affirmations can be escapism. Prayers require presence. These are the kinds of prayers Maya Martinez writes.
Theatrics: Collected Theatrical Writings by Maya Martinez is a gathering of poems that feel like plays and plays that feel like poems—but all of them feel like prayers to me. Martinez, a poet and performer, stares down existential despair with unmistakable soulfulness. Crashing your car, falling into sinkholes, committing manslaughter, and surviving capitalism are just a few of the problems she explores in these pieces. When I finish one poem, I return to the start and read it again. I wake up the next morning and read it a third time, and then I send it to a friend without comment or context. She writes back, “I want to read it two more times.” Writing like this begs for repetition. Each moment with Theatrics sends the reader plummeting deeper into her own body, his own consciousness.
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TIERNEY FINSTER: Are you performing for yourself the whole time you’re writing and editing?
MAYA MARTINEZ: In a way, I guess I am. You know when you’re writing something, and you want to describe a room, and you see the room in your mind? And you try to write down every detail? I feel like when I was writing these pieces, I was seeing certain people. I was seeing characters and settings and letting myself inhabit them. Sometimes, the pieces come from a screaming emotional truth inside me. But as I write, I’m aware of how I would say something, like what I would want to do with my mouth during a certain part. I have a sense of the narrative arc and the performance arc, what emotional notes I want the piece as a whole to hit. Ultimately, I want each piece to break people open and give them something they can take home with them.
You mention starting with a “screaming emotional truth.” The pieces in the book feel like they’re imparting wisdom. Is that something you set out to do? Are you writing to teach or illuminate certain concepts?
Usually, I start because I’m feeling burdened by something. Or there’s something I can’t figure out. Maybe that’s my responsibility to the world around me within a dying world. Or, it’s like, the relationship I have with money in this insane capitalist society. Or relationships with friends. For example, I wrote “I Lived How I Died” as the first piece I was going to perform live at a reading post-COVID.
From there, I usually start with a cheeky character. I just love a cheeky character. I’m into being a trickster, being a jester. I think one of the best ways to get someone to learn or care about something is by making them laugh. Being playful is a really nice way to help people engage with something new. Playing makes people feel safe. So a cheeky character is the other starting point. This rich gay guy who is stuck in jail in Ibiza. This party girl on Halloween. This housewife who’s telling you about her ego death.
The cheeky character gives people someone to be on the ride with, and then from there it’s a lot of personal stuff. Like, what does it mean to have humility? What does it mean to be sorry for something? What does personal responsibility mean? What does it mean for your friend to not believe you? Or try to believe you? What does it mean to go through a friend breakup?
With the book out now, how do you feel about the potential for other people to perform these pieces?
I feel really excited. When I was discussing what things could look like with Metalabel and Wonder Press, I was clear about this being a book of plays and monologues, and about wanting people to perform them. I think it would be selfish to be like, “Only I can perform them.” There’s something really nice about seeing what else can be revealed when other people step into your work. I believe more can always be revealed. Anytime I do a show, I ask other people to direct me. Even though I wrote this work and have an idea what it can be like, I just know that other people will see things in the work that I could never see myself. I’m really excited to see other people perform it.
On July 16, I’m having five people tag-team “Hole Play” for a reading at Dear Friend Books, so they’ll each read five minutes of it. Then this writer in London is planning to perform “The Play” with their best friend. It’s nice that something can have a life again and again.
You’re about to take this book on tour. Why do you consider bringing your work on the road so important to your writing practice?
I love a reading. I even love when a reading is bad. I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s just so much beauty in the unexpected. There’s beauty in witnessing someone trying to figure something out. I’m doing a book tour this summer, and I’ve done cross-country poetry tours in the past. When I lived in Baltimore, I performed up and down the coast a lot, down into Florida, where I’m from. A lot of the first performance art I ever saw was just like, in someone’s basement in Tallahassee. It blew my mind that you could just do something right there. You could experiment as much as you wanted in that kind of space. I remember going to shows in Tallahassee and feeling like, “I didn’t even know we were allowed to do that.” Going out and seeing shows and performances is such a good way to learn to give yourself permission.
In 2018, I did a two-month poetry tour around the United States and up into Canada. In August, I’ll do the East Coast for two weeks, and then fly to the West Coast and drive the West Coast and Southwest loop for another two weeks. I’m already thinking about next year, maybe going to New Orleans and hitting the middle of the country. We live in a country with so many pockets of people who want to commune and do things. There are so many cities and places that get forgotten, and there are so many scenes that are still revealing themselves.
I’m excited to perform this work in new places. I may have performed the pieces in the book before, but I’ve never done them in Gainesville, Florida. Never in Durham, North Carolina. I get to throw it all out there, be balls to the wall, and see how it comes out differently each time. Getting to do your work every night is such a great way to see where it can go next. It’s a way of reaching new ideas and getting to the next piece of work I’m supposed to make. I’m also just addicted to performing. At my book launch, I feel like I scared myself. I shocked myself, because I accessed a place I didn’t even know I could go. I didn’t think I could push my performance that far.
You list Molly Shannon, Ryan Trecartin, and Cookie Mueller as the inspirations behind this collection. Will you tell me more about the influence each of those artists has on you?
Molly Shannon, okay. I love her character Mary Katherine Gallagher, this awkward girl who gets nervous and smells her armpits. I love the insane body comedy of her throwing herself around. Then when my grandma died, I found her memoir [Hello, Molly!] and listened to it as an audiobook. Molly Shannon’s life is a lifelong process of grief. I’m still learning how to grieve, and like most people, I have a weird relationship to death, because nobody teaches us how to grieve. But her book taught me how to grieve. I was living in Philly for three weeks, for no reason, and listening to her audiobook every day. I’ve listened to it multiple times since.
I’m also just drawn to her desire to create characters from people in her real life, like her dad, and to make stuff out of the crazy situations she’s experienced. Like being a parent to her own dad. I love the complicated, beautifully tragic relationships she’s had and what she’s made out of them. I felt every part of that. I’ve created a lot of characters from a place of looking at my parents and trying to make sense of everything that’s happened between us. I admire how she’s never making fun of anyone. There’s a real heart to it all. And that’s something I try to do with everything I make.
Ryan Trecartin, I love how his work breaks down language. You know, “I fell down a hillllllllllllllllllll” [from Trecartin’s 2004 film A Family Finds Entertainment]. Language is a toy and Ryan Trecartin plays with it like Legos.
There’s something so beautiful about how Trecartin writes scripts like that, but also in how he makes sculptures and is building a water park. I am someone who’s like, a poem is a sculpture and a sculpture is a photograph and a photograph is a poem and a performance is a sculpture. I think it’s all connected. Ryan Trecartin is a guiding light for me in that way.
Cookie Mueller—she was living her life! Every time I want to lean into the serendipity of life and the experience ahead of me, every time I want to let go of rigidity, I think of her. She goes to Italy and stays there for three years, you know what I mean? She’s just so open—body, mind and soul. One would be so lucky to live even just a quarter of her life. She’s so open to how other people live their lives, and really embodies that sense of there not being a right or wrong way to live a life. She’s open to playing. The way she lived her life is the way I want to live mine.
The final piece in Theatrics is “Prayer for Money.” But other pieces feel like prayers too. Your characters have this signature sense of yearning, but many of them are alone with their desires and sense of uncertainty. They’re expressing a lot to nobody, or everybody, in a way that reminds me of how people talk to God or the divine. Do you see your work that way?
When I write, I do feel like I am talking to God. Maybe I wasn’t conscious of that before, but I am now. I think a lot of my writing is a prayer—not always praying to God, but just praying for others. Praying for understanding. I feel like “Vehicular Manslaughter in Ibiza” is praying for an understanding of what humility could mean. “I Lived How I Died” is about praying for others because we are all connected, through many things, but also because we’re workers. I feel like “Hole Play” could be a prayer for the earth and for understanding what our responsibility to each other and the earth is … and trying to understand ourselves and our friends.
I pray every day. It’s very easy for me to get caught in my mind. I need to stop and make conscious contact with the God of my understanding. I’ll just say the serenity prayer a lot, right when I wake up and right when I go to sleep, just to quiet my mind. I need that level of spirituality in my life right now in order to feel really free and connected to something greater than myself.
If you brought all of the characters from Theatrics together to form the cast of a reality show, what kind of show would it be?
I love reality TV. I work at a restaurant right now, and I love it. It’s always so exciting there. We have work drama. There are so many different personalities trying to work together, and the stakes feel so high when you’re in there. Then you leave and they’re not. I love romanticizing working at a restaurant. It’s so fun. I would want to work with Girl from “Hole Play” and Pig and Lamb from “The Play” and the gay guy that’s stuck in Ibiza [from “Vehicular Manslaughter in Ibiza”] and the girl crashing her car while “Tomorrow” plays [from “Stage Directions for a Car Crash”]. So I have to say something like Vanderpump Rules or Southern Hospitality.
If Theatrics were a fragrance, what would it smell like?
Ocean and cigarettes. Something citrusy too. I was at the grocery store yesterday, and they didn’t have passion fruit anymore, but I could still smell them. I was tweaking because the bins still smelled like passion fruit, but there weren’t any. It’s such a beautiful smell.
LARB Contributor
Tierney Finster is a writer, editor, and artist from Los Angeles. You can follow her here.
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