Melinda Lopez
Melinda Lopez is an actress, playwright, and educator from Boston, Massachusetts. She is the first ever playwright-in-residence for the Huntington Theatre Company. She is a professor at Northeastern University.
Career
As a playwright, Lopez has produced a sizable body of work that spans the last two decades and has garnered a variety of awards. Lopez's plays include Alexandros, Caroline in Jersey, and Sonia Flew, which premiered at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, MA in 2004 and won several Best New Play awards. The Huntington's production of Sonia Flew was the inaugural production at the Huntington's space for new work, the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts. Sonia Flew has since been produced for radio broadcast and in multiple other cities. Lopez has also authored God Smells Like a Roast Pig, The Order of Things, How do you Spell Hope?, and a translation of Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding for Suffolk University. In 2009, she was commissioned by the National Institute of Health to author a work celebrating the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, leading to her play From Orchids to Octopi, An Evolutionary Love Story. In 2013, Lopez was made the first ever playwright in residence at the Huntington Theatre thanks to a three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Lopez has held residencies with Harvard University, the New York Theatre Workshop, Sundance, and The Lark. Lopez has also acted in regional theaters across the country, most recently with Huntington Theatre Company and Speakeasy Stage Company of Boston.Lopez's works frequently focus on the stories of Cuban or Cuban-American characters. Her play Becoming Cuba is set in 1897 Havana on the eve of the Spanish–American War, Alexandros centers on a Cuban family in exile, Sonia Flew is about a woman who was sent to the United States from Cuba as a child in 1961, and her one-woman show Midnight Sandwich/Medianoche deals explicitly with Lopez's own struggle with her Cuban heritage.
In November 2016, produced Lopez's work, Mala. Mala is Lopez's one woman show about "an utterly unsentimental journey towards the end of life, Mala is an irreverent exploration of how we live, cope and survive in the moment." The production was directed by, and was remounted at the Calderwood Pavilion in January 2018 by the Huntington Theatre Company. The Huntington presentation was recorded and broadcast by GBH Channel 2 in 2020.