These audios are excerpts from a 1-act experimental play I’ve written that is my attempt at intervening & subverting the dead-missing-white-girl trope via assemblage, via multi-vocality and monstrosity. The play is structured through the voices of 8 “monsters,” specifically inspired by and from Los Angeles and Chicana culture and history. This play tries to engage with performance and excess, horror and girlhood, humor and rage; it tries to expand femmeness rather than define it.

These are my altars, my homage(s) to the shes who’ve disappeared. 
listen in order: 1 incudes some fragments from the play, and 2 is the entire final monologue

Notes on character

The archetypes and myths referenced serve as sorts of open wounds, as liminal beings between fact and fiction. I’m not writing about the actual Sharon Tate or Black Dahlia, but I’m trying to subvert the mythology their existences have been denigrated and flattened into, see if there’s some power in letting the myths have their own voices. I don’t want to re-center the dead-white-girl narrative that a few of these characters have inherited; that’s why Dahlia/Vivian/Sharon aren’t actually based off of real people, they’re based off of the untold, the urban folklore. They’ve become akin to monsters in how defiled, rewritten, and broken-into their posthumous constructions are. Each monster—our SHEs—are our performers, vessels, historians, living breathing archives, our cartographies and cartographers of the city and patriarchal narrative, our supercuts, our inhabitants of monstrosity. SHE is, in my mind, Latinx, and any age; however, these monsters are GIRLS, teenaged and “hysterical” and moody, unruly, clumsy, abject to themselves in so many ways, feeling more monster than girl most days. Meaning the spirit of each SHE is reminiscent of a teenage girl in some way, whatever that might mean, since girlhood is a largely made-up, unmapped, roadless experience and can take on so many shapes and forms.