By Patti Roberts | Solving Sacramento
Local playwright Jerry Montoya recently had two of his plays running simultaneously on B Street Theatre stages, which is why B Street is referring to this season as “The Spring of Jerry Montoya.”
Besides being B Street’s executive producer, Montoya has written at least 17 plays for the theater group — 15 for their Family Series and two for their MainStage during the 23 years he’s worked for the organization.
The two most recent ones were “The First Adventures of The Hardy Boys” for B Street’s Family Series (an adaptation of the much-loved children’s detective story) and “Nosotros La Gente (We The People),” a close-to-the-heart story of Montoya’s family roots in the Coachella Valley.
“Nosotros La Gente” follows Montoya’s Mexican American family at the beginning of World War II and works its way through a couple of generations with stories of love, lust and loss in one of California’s prominent agricultural centers.
Besides his work with B Street, Montoya has written numerous plays for other local theaters through the years. Solving Sacramento recently spoke with Montoya and two other talented Sacramento playwrights to get their take on their playwriting process and their final products.
Jerry Montoya: turning a moment into a story
Although his lineage can be traced to the Coachella Valley, Montoya was born in Los Angeles, and his family eventually moved to Sacramento when his father became postmaster.
“I started at Sacramento City College with a goal of becoming an accountant and making a million dollars by the time I was 30,” he says. But the arts caught his fancy — painting, music producing, visual arts, and when he took his first acting class, theater grabbed him. He says his professor Donna Sparks taught him “how theater people become family in the process.”
Montoya’s first paying job was at Garbeau’s Dinner Theatre as staff and stage manager. Then he moved to Sacramento Theatre Company as assistant stage manager for 10 seasons, with stints at Oregon Shakespeare Company.
B Street Theatre’s Buck Busfield eventually hired him as a production manager in 2002 to jumpstart the children’s theater facility in the back building of B Street’s original location at 2727 B Street (now home to Celebration Arts). Montoya’s adaptation of “Treasure Island” was the first play he wrote for B Street in 2003, and it taught him that kids can be a tough audience.
“Children’s plays are the greatest discipline in writing because children are the most critical of audiences,” he says. “The second they get bored they let you know. I’ve found that kids respond to events; they follow the story through events. I apply that to adult plays.”
Montoya also experienced the partnership between the playwright, the actors and the audience during the production of “Treasure Island.” He says the first time he heard his words being spoken by actors in rehearsals he viewed it as “handshakes between the writer and the actor.”
His process begins with the subject matter. If it’s a play about a historical figure, Montoya starts by researching and reading biographies. If it’s an original play, he pictures a singular moment.
“I come up with the moment or moments. It’s like life. When you fall in love with someone, or something bad happens, or when you first saw that person, or someone does something brave, those are the moments you remember,” Montoya says. “Life is full of those moments. And then I write toward the moment, or around that moment.”
He describes the next step as the tedious work of building an outline, conducting research and beginning to fill in the details to connect the dots. “I tend to hear the characters’ voices in my head, and I let them lead me,” he says. “It’s challenging to write something all in dialogue, but I prefer it because the story is driven by my characters speaking. I know I have something good when I can barely keep up with the scene that’s in my head.”
And then comes the editing, rewriting and saying goodbye to things that don’t work. That involves a methodical process of doing things like removing repetitive words, or turning questions into statements, or shortening long passages.
He values getting feedback from others. “You have to trust the people you work with — trust that when they tell you it’s a great line, but you don’t need it, it’s time to remove it. Or a scene where they suggest leaving it out.”
The next step is the rehearsal, where the actors hear his words aloud for the first time, which he describes as an amazing experience: “It’s magical, life-affirming and art-affirming.”
And, finally, comes opening night, when all the elements come together: the play, the performance and the production. Montoya’s family saga, “Nosotros La Gente (We The People),” also brought his family together to attend the debut.
“I think this play is the purest to my voice, on how I would like to hear the story. I wrote the original draft in four days,” Montoya says. “I spent my whole life hearing these family stories, and it came out like a stream of consciousness. It was literally like watching a movie in my head.”
He watched as his family saw their family stories come to life, including his Uncle Jim, the last of the generation he portrayed. He says his uncle was moved by the play, and noticed a photo of himself and their family displayed as a backdrop photo onstage.
As the play ended its run, Montoya was already directing another B Street Theatre play, “Advice,” and contemplating what his next play will be about.
Anthony D’Juan: from pen to paper to stage
Every day, Anthony D’Juan puts pen to paper: literally. He prefers to write by hand, something he’s always done.
“I approach it like a job — I write five to six hours a day,” D’Juan says. “Though I do take Sundays off.” His daily writing ritual involves jotting down ideas or thoughts; other times, it’s refining a project in progress. Gradually, he shifts to writing on his computer but prefers the rhythm and flow of handwriting.
D’Juan has been writing and directing plays in Sacramento for over 25 years. As he puts it, “I make my living using my imagination.” He also teaches playwriting at Cosumnes River College.
While D’Juan’s resume includes acting, the real place he calls home is on the other side of the stage. The number of local theaters where D’Juan’s talents have been staged include CapStage Theatre, B Street Theatre, Celebration Arts, Big Idea Theatre and Actor’s Workshop.
In Sacramento’s tight-knit theater community, D’Juan has partnered with Montoya on several projects. They’ve known each other for 30 years, and D’Juan credits his friend, whom he calls his brother, with giving him the idea of telling “To Kill a Mockingbird” from the perspective of Tom Robinson. Called “BirdMocking,” the story highlights the Black side of town and will get a staged reading at Cosumnes in October. A week later, it will be staged at The Fourth Wall in South Sacramento.
D’Juan is a Sacramento native, “raised as an only child by a single mom who was a radical feminist,” and a community of formidable women. He gives them credit for the fact that many of his plays feature strong women; both historical figures and assorted characters.
“Most of my stories are focused on women because growing up, I was surrounded by a community of moms, aunts, relatives and friends,” he says.
D’Juan had dreams of going to Los Angeles to write B movies and horror films — his favorite genre — but became a father in his early 20s. “I was a college dropout. I taught myself how to write plays by reading plays,” he says. He gives credit to his career launch to Ed Claudio, a theater legend in town who started Actor’s Workshop and Actor’s Theatre. That’s where D’Juan’s first play was staged. He worked there several days a week, writing and directing, while also working at a coffee shop.
His mentor, Claudio, also helped found B Street’s Fantasy Theatre for Children and assisted in getting D’Juan on board.
One of the first plays he wrote for B Street’s Family Theatre Series was “Safe at Home: The Jackie Robinson Story.” Other plays he’s written that have been performed in various Sacramento theaters are “3: Black Girl Blues,” “Any’Person,” “Keeping the Dream Alive,” “Theory of the Dream” and “Domestic Disturbance.”
D’Juan describes his playwriting process as first coming up with the idea (or someone gives him one) and then doing research, but avoiding getting too caught up in the details. “I start by writing everything I want in the play, or figuring out the characters, or the style of dialogue. By the time I start writing the play, I have 75-100 handwritten pages.”
For his first draft of “Jackie Robinson” he wrote from the start of Robinson’s life to the end and then showed it to Montoya. “Jerry helped me understand that I need pivotal moments. Then, I need to determine how I’m going to end the story and what the goals of the characters are to get there,” he says. “He also taught me that sometimes I need to cut and get rid of things.”
D’Juan has three rules for every play he writes: determine the boundaries of the story; the boundaries of the dialogue and language; and the physical boundaries of the location or setting. “One of the things I teach in my playwriting class is the more specific you are, the more universal and diverse your play will be,” he says.
When he’s done, it’s off to rehearsal, where he hears his lines for the first time spoken aloud. “I love it,” D’Juan says. “It’s so gratifying. It also reveals to me what needs to be fixed, what works and what doesn’t.”
It’s then time to watch the audience’s reaction at the first live performance — where the material can land a lot differently than what he may have intended. And it’s the positive audience responses that keep him putting pen to paper.
Imani Mitchell: writing for the audience
Imani Mitchell is an up-and-coming playwright who is also an actress, director and marketing and community development manager for Celebration Arts.
Mitchell grew up in Sacramento, where she participated in school productions and earned her degree in theater arts from Sacramento City College. She tried pursuing theater in San Francisco, auditioning for commercial television, but eventually returned to the Sacramento theater scene.
In her early 20s, she started acting on local stages, such as Big Idea Theatre, while holding down daytime jobs and being a single mother. Then, she added scriptwriting to her resume when she wrote and directed her first feature screenplay called “Whirlpool.” She says she “crowdsourced the production using all local actors and crew.”
The production’s success built Mitchell’s confidence, and in 2022, she got the idea to write about the friendship between Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. “I was entranced with imagining those two pivotal writers together,” she says. “I had no idea they were friends.”
And thus began her process of writing “Zora and Langston” where she used a method she employs with most of her scripts.
“I began by researching, and since it’s two historical figures, I read books — including autobiographies — that provided their stories and their voices. I figured out plot points that give me the start, the journey and the resolution. … Then the fun begins when I let the characters guide me through their stories, oftentimes leading me to areas I hadn’t conceived in the beginning.”
After that, the revision process begins with Mitchell sharing her work with industry insiders, friends and family. Playwright Montoya gave her advice about bringing her subjects down from the pedestal and making them more human, less saintly.
“Industry people help with the more technical perspective, though sometimes they overthink,” she says. “And since I’m creating pieces for the audience, I rely on my mom and friends to bring their perspectives.”
During rehearsals, when she hears her words spoken aloud, they give her insight into her dialogues, pacing and rhythms. It’s also a surreal experience to have her dialogue performed. “I have mixed reactions, sometimes it’s amazing, sometimes mortifying, but a thrill to hear the cadences, the stresses — and I can use all those in my revisions.”
Last year “Zora and& Langston” had a three-week run at Celebration Arts followed by a staging at “SheLA” a Hollywood summer theater festival, where it was also performed for a live Facebook production: and Mitchell got positive feedback.
“The audience connected to it. I don’t want to be too braggadocious, but I try to bring forward the emotions and heart of a person or their plight, and the feedback I got … felt very vulnerable and raw,” she says.
Mitchell also wrote a one-woman play, “The Window,” that premiered at Celebration Arts, and “New Dawn Recovery” for B Street Theatre’s 24-Hour Play Festival. She’s currently working on a romantic comedy to submit to B Street Theatre for next season.
In addition, Mitchell is still directing as well as acting at Celebration Arts, CapStage and Big Idea Theatre. Recently, she was one of the leads in Ginger Rutland’s “When We Were Colored” at The Guild Theater.
This story is part of the Solving Sacramento journalism collaborative. This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics, the city had no editorial influence over this story. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Hmong Daily News, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review and Sacramento Observer. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.