Christopher Oscar Peña

Christopher Oscar Peña is a playwright, screenwriter, actor and educator who resides in New York City. He teaches theater at NYU's Tisch School of Arts and is a member of the Playwrights Unit at Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

Personal life

Peña was born in San Jose, California. . His parents emigrated from Honduras.

He received his B.A. in Dramatic Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara and his M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.

Career As a playwright, Peña has produced a large number of plays, some of which have been produced all over the United States and in the UK. Peña's plays include Maelstrom, Icarus Burns, Alone Above A Raging Sea, L(y)re, The Suicide Tapes and Awe/Struck. His work has been developed or seen in theaters in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles such as: The Public Theater, INTAR Theatre, LAByrinth Theater Company, Goodman Theatre, Theater for the New City, Son of Semele Theater and more. As part of the T.S. Eliot US/UK Exchange in 2011, Peña attended the premiere of his play However Long The Night at The Old Vic. Peña is a recipient of the Norman Corwin Award for excellence in audio theatre. 80/20 was selected for the 2013 New Media Film Festival and the 2015 Outfest Web Series: In With The New Out. The web series also won the 2013 LAWEBFEST Outstanding Achievement writing award. A Latino himself, Peña works closely with culturally diverse theaters like The Lark Playwright Workshop, US/UK Exchange, INTAR'S Hispanic Playwrights Lab, Diverse City Theater Company and New York Theatre Workshop, where he was named an Emerging Artist of Color Fellow. Through these relationships, he works to represent a variety of cultural and sexual populations in theater. One play that stood out to him was Angels in America due to its use of metaphors. This was different from the realistic plays that he had read earlier and it made him realize that realism was the not the only form of theatre. He doesn't believe that Latinx playwrights should be forced to write plays about "immigration, drug cartels, and the working class" because not every Latinx individual shares those experiences. For this reason he has received questions about what makes a play "Latinx" and has had a hard time at some theatres putting on his plays. He sees the fact that you can be vulnerable for people like an actor but avoid being in front of them on stage; which is what he loves. The play has been positively reviewed by many critics.

Awe/Struck "Denia arrives in Chicago, looking to create a place for herself in this unfamiliar land. Monique's never left Chicago but feels more and more like a stranger in her own home. A chance encounter between them transforms their lives forever in this new play about identity and perception." Peña has said that the inspiration for this play came from a terrible incident he saw in a newspaper one day. He has not clarified on the event. Reading about the event made him think about "What [it] means to be a good neighbor" and "how we can be good neighbors" in our local neighborhoods but also as countries that are next to each other. He has acknowledged, after the fact, that his personal loneliness from moving to Chicago, where he didn't know anyone, and his own questioning of what makes somewhere home, influenced the play and the development of his characters. The play takes place during the environment of the 2008 election where the political rhetoric of "hope and change [is] giving rise to dreams." The play focuses on the lives of six individuals who, because of this rhetoric, are hoping to go after their dreams but face obstacles that make it harder for them survive as part of marginalized communities. Key themes the play touches on are immigration, same-sex marriage, and domestic abuse.

TV shows and web series Year Title Distributor 2013 80/20 HBO 2019 Sweetbitter Starz 2020 Motherland: Fort Salem Freeform 2021 The Jenkins Family Christmas Stargazer Global Media 2022 Promised Land ABC