Arizona Theatre Company has announced its 2020 winner of the National LatinX Playwriting Award.
Eliana Pipes is a third year graduate student at Boston University.
Her winning play “Dream Hou$e” follows two LatinX sisters who are selling their family home in a gentrifying neighborhood on a reality TV show and that causes tension as the plot develops.
Speaking Friday on the theatre company’s weekly vid cast, Pipes said, “The show sort of slips into a surreal place. One sister has this particular attachment to the idea of culture and history. One sister has this particular attachment to the idea of progress and upward mobility and things clash.”
Pipes said her inspiration came from her time growing up in a neighborhood similar to the one in the play. “The knitting shop turned into a bar and everything felt different all of a sudden, but I didn’t really have that vocabulary yet. And then when I was 13, my family actually moved because all of a sudden our dinky little house was in a hot neighborhood and we had that opportunity for upward mobility and we took it.”
She wrote the play during her first year in graduate school and now will receive $1,000 and a workshop of her play with Arizona Theatre Company.