Interview: Playwright Mario Vega on TuYo Theatre's OUR LADY OF THE SAN DIEGO CONVENTION CENTER

Back in 2021, Mario Vega was working as a youth care worker at the San Diego Convention Center, where he first encountered the migrant youth who would inspire Our Lady of the San Diego Convention Center. That experience has since become a play, bringing the stories of unaccompanied children and the people responsible for caring for them to audiences across San Diego County.

Written by Vega and directed by Maria Patrice Amon, Our Lady of the San Diego Convention Center follows Lulu and Milli, two youth care workers hired to care for young migrant girls being held at the Convention Center. As the months pass, the two women navigate the changing rules and restrictions of their jobs while getting to know the girls in their care.

For Vega, a Southern California playwright, lyricist and digital artist, the production marks his second world premiere with TuYo, following the immersive musical Pásale Pásele. A graduate of San Diego State University, Vega recently received his MFA in playwriting from UCLA. His work explores Latine identity and the borderlands through satire and fantasy, and he has written the book and lyrics to four full-length musicals in addition to multiple plays.

As Our Lady of the San Diego Convention Center prepares for its world premiere and tour from September 11 through October 18, Vega spoke with BroadwayWorld about turning his experience into a play, finding humor within a difficult story, and what it means to bring the production back into the San Diego communities connected to its history.

You've talked about how your experience working with migrant youth in 2021 stayed with you and eventually became this play. What made you want to tell this story then? What has that process been like for you?

Immediately after working at the Convention Center, I attended a summer program at the National Theater Institute in Connecticut. I had left a job where I had encountered hundreds of stories to travel across the country and learn about storytelling, so I was processing many elements of the experience while I was there. Once I started grad school in the fall of 2022, I wrote a couple of pages and realized, “I’m not smart enough to write this yet. Let me learn more.” I’m still not sure I’m smart enough to write this play, but I ended up trying again at the end of my second year of grad school.

It eventually became my thesis at UCLA. I was working three jobs while writing it as my thesis, so the process was basically: wake up, work, write, work, write, repeat, for months.

I feel like a lot of people don’t know that the place where they go for Comic-Con was essentially a processing facility for migrant kids. I wanted to remember that, so I had to write about it. Hopefully, I did it justice.

The play deals with an incredibly difficult subject, but it's also described as funny and deeply human. Where did you find the humor in these experiences, and why was it important to you to keep it in the story?

Humor is super important. Kids are naturally resilient and funny. There were as many funny moments working with migrant kids as there were heartbreaking ones. I also think humor allows the emotional beats to land better. Jokes allow the audience to bring their guard down and fall into the world more.

The play has gone through readings, a workshop and development at several San Diego institutions before arriving at this full production. What has changed most about the play through that process?

The thesis version was pretty different. It had narration and a different framing device, and it had a cast of eight, which I knew I would have to whittle down to make the show easier to produce. After that, we did a reading with The Old Globe’s 360 Project, where I removed all the narration chunks. We also incorporated these mini-monologues where random dudes around San Diego would give their opinions on the kids at the Convention Center.

We did a reading in NYC with The Sol Project, where I got to test the play outside of Southern California. Finally, we did a reading with the Latinx New Play Festival at La Jolla Playhouse. For that final reading, I changed the device from random dudes to random mothers around San Diego. It was kind of like the final missing piece of this version of the play.

I also feel like the play shifted more and more of its focus from the older girls to the younger girls. I think who the protagonist is has shifted with the rewrites. I feel like maybe I’ve written 1,000 pages of this play over the course of three years.

The title Our Lady of the San Diego Convention Center has a spiritual element to it, even though the setting is a very institutional, temporary space, so how did you land on using “Our Lady” in the title?

I remember a night when the migrant girls held this huge prayer circle. They sang this beautiful worship song, “Sumérgeme.” The moment really stuck with me; it was profoundly spiritual.

I was also thinking a lot about the Marian apparitions, where the Virgin Mary would appear to marginalized people around the world. I had always been so fascinated by them growing up, and even now I ask myself, how come there are no apparitions now, when we could really use them? This led to the idea of migrant girls longing for a Marian apparition, and hence the title. It’s a reference to Our Lady of Fatima, Lourdes, Miracles, Guadalupe, etc. The characters’ names also reference these apparitions.

You're bringing this play to audiences at the Convention Center's own city and community, including performances at Casa Familiar and other community spaces. What does it mean to you to have the story travel through the communities connected to the events that inspired it?

It’s the coolest thing ever. I like writing about the community for the community, so I’m very excited that we get to hit so many spots in San Diego and that the play is accessible. It’s pay-what-you-can for most of our shows. I also interned for Casa Familiar in college before I worked with them at the Convention Center, so it’s a big full-circle thing that they’re collaborating with us to put the show on.

What do you hope audiences leave with after seeing this play? And especially, what do you hope changes for them?

I believe we all have a shared responsibility to take care of each other. I think the biggest thing I learned as a person while writing this play is how important it is to take care of the people we love, and how good it feels to be taken care of when we feel lost. I hope the audience leaves with a little bit more love for the people in the world. These migrant girls are still out in the world, seeking out their happy endings and continuations. How can we make everything better for them?

Anything else you'd like to share? 

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