Playwright's Note - CAROLINE AVAKIAN

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Playwright's Note:

I am a writer drawn to stories that sit at the fault lines of history. The moments when human lives collide with political forces and people have to reckon with moral choices that reverberate far beyond their own lives.

My work explores how memory is erased and reclaimed, particularly within communities displaced by war, authoritarianism, and systems designed to render them invisible.

As a first-generation American born to Cuban and Spanish refugee parents and raised in Queens, NYC, I grew up with so many inherited histories that were fragmented and often deliberately hidden. Deemed too painful to discuss yet quietly present in our family life. This experience has profoundly shaped both my artistic lens and my work as a social justice professional.

I write to uncover what has been buried, to give language to what history has sidelined, and to ask what responsibility we carry once we know the truth. My play 1939 exemplifies this.

Set in a French refugee camp on the eve of World War II, the play centers Spanish women in exile, whose stories have long existed in the margins of both WWII history and Spanish Civil War narratives.

Inspired by historical events recently uncovered through survivor testimony and the work of Spanish historians and Holocaust scholars, 1939 resurrects a long-suppressed chapter of history and what it means to use art and performance as a tool of resistance and survival. I would be remiss to not mention that the work is deeply personal to me and my grandmother’s testimony is a part of the story.

By day, my professional work has focused on forced migration, democracy, and social justice, and that experience deeply informs my writing. My work invites audiences to see themselves in people navigating impossible circumstances, making the best choices they can under flawed, dangerous conditions, and recognizing the humanity in those choices.
Ultimately, I write because theatre can hold what life so often does: beauty and brutality, hope and despair, existing at once.

My work is an act of reclamation. A belief that stories sidelined by history carry vital truths, and that in centering them, we learn something essential about ourselves, our responsibilities to one another, and the choices we make.