At the PWC this week: Max Delgado

Many Voices Mentee Max Delgado is at the Playwrights’ Center tonight for a reading of his play We Look Up and See Our Galaxy. The public is invited to this reading, taking place Thursday, March 19, at 6:30 p.m. at the Playwrights’ Center, 2301 E. Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis. No RSVP is necessary. We asked Max a few questions:

Tell us about We Look Up and See Our Galaxy

It’s about a school therapist who encounters a student claiming to have been visited by aliens. The idea came to me when, as teacher for a high school in California, I attended a conference where one of the presenters shared that a client of hers had made the same claim a few years back. The idea stuck with me all day. That night I went home and began writing.

Who or what inspires you?

Well-crafted stories inspire me, as I feel they’re essential to creating well-crafted characters—and not the other way around. I’m a big fan of the belief that the audience can only truly understand a character by seeing how that character reacts to a given situation. I’m not a big fan of internal rumination; if you want to show me who someone is, have them respond to something. In this sense, I’m a bigger believer in character revelation than character development.

What are you looking forward to this year, artistically?

The Many Voices Mentorship’s emphasis on the nuts and bolts of playwriting is exactly what I need. As a short story writer by training, I don’t naturally have the skills and vocabulary necessary to push this story where I'd love for it to go. This belief feeds directly into what my goals for this mentorship are: to complete a full-length play, to engage a community of like-minded writers, and take a first step on the road to becoming a trained playwright.