The Show for May 13, 2026: Southwest lithium mining, cigarettes in pop culture and more

Lithium is a key metal for electric vehicle batteries, and there is a global push to find new sources of it. We’ll hear why most of the U.S. lithium projects are right here in the Southwest. Plus, after decades of anti-smoking campaigns, cigarettes are making a pop-culture comeback.

Transcript

LAUREN GILGER: Hi, I’m Lauren Gilger, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, a long-time Arizona playwright is retiring, but not from the stage.

MARK BRODIE: And we’re speaking fewer words than we used to. Why that is and what it could mean.

LAUREN GILGER: But first this morning, let’s turn to lithium, a critical mineral for a clean energy future that is about to boom as demand for it spikes. Lithium is a key metal for electric vehicle batteries and there is a global push to find new sources of it. There’s currently only one lithium mine operating in the United States, but that is about to change—and drastically. Companies have already staked claims to more than 100 new lithium mine projects. By 2030, at least six new mining projects are projected to be operating on American soil, and they’re mostly located right here in the arid Southwest. Wyatt Myskow is a Phoenix-based reporter for Inside Climate News, and he and his colleagues at Columbia Journalism Investigations are out with a story digging into the future of lithium mining and finding out who will be impacted most by it. Good morning, Wyatt. Thanks for coming in.

WYATT MYSKOW: Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, so you compiled this kind of first-of-its-kind database that shows there are 100 lithium mining projects on the horizon in the country. That’s a lot. Just begin for us with a little bit about how big the demand for lithium is right now, where it’s coming from.

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, well, as you said in the intro, right, lithium is expected to demand in — production in the next decade or so, and demand for it is going to double as well. And so there’s this huge push to get more of it.

In the U.S. there’s three or kind of three regions of the world that produce a lot of it: China, Australia, and then what we call the Lithium Triangle down in South America. And the U.S. produces very little of its own lithium right now. And there’s been a big push both under the Trump administration and the Biden administration to source more of our own domestic lithium, to have more of our own supply chain so we don’t have to rely on these other countries that we’d rather not do, I guess in these cases.

And so there’s a been a big push at the federal level to incentivize companies to mine here in the U.S.. Now this is a long process; those 100 projects in the U.S., many of them are nowhere near mining. Only a handful are going to start digging maybe in the next couple years. Most of them are what we call exploration, where they’re drilling into the earth, taking samples, seeing if it’s financially viable to mine this lithium, and if the lithium’s good enough quality to do it.

But this lithium powers, you know, electric vehicles, but it’s also used to store energy for, you know, ... solar power and wind power. And so there’s quite a few uses for it and a big demand for it.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, so that, I mean, that’s a good thing in some ways, right? Like you’re looking at a clean energy future and what will power it, it’s, this mineral is going to be necessary for that, but that of course involves mining the mineral from the Earth.

You talked about the Trump administration, the Biden administration sort of touting our energy independence in lithium, trying to jumpstart this industry. I mean, Trump is famous for, you know, "Drill, baby, drill." What’s this look like under his administration?

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, well, it’s "Drill, baby, drill," but also "Dig, baby, dig" is what he has said and what his administration has said on the mining aspect. And in the Trump administration — you know, again, this has been a bipartisan issue mining for the past decade, but it’s really ramped up over the last year under the second Trump term.

One of the first things the Trump administration did was put out an executive order saying that on the nation’s federal public lands, the No. 1 use of that land is mineral extraction, mining for critical minerals like lithium, and there’s scores of others. And so what the Trump administration’s done is, one, incentivize that, you know, push it forward.

Another key thing, you know, the Biden administration was putting out loans, they were doing some fast-tracking of projects. The Trump administration has really ramped that up. They’ve rolled back regulations of the National Environmental Policy Act that regulates any federal project that needs federal approval, any like any mine that might be on federal land. And that means there’s been less public comment for a lot of these projects that are coming through now, whereas before there was more public comment, both under the first Trump administration and obviously the Biden administration. That’s been rolled back.

You know, one of the projects we looked at in this series — typically when you have a public comment period for a project, we’re talking about at least a month to for community members and stakeholders to give their public comment on their thoughts on a project. One of them got rolled back to just five days. And public feedback prompted them to change that, but that project’s now being sued, and partially because of these rollbacks.

LAUREN GILGER: Interesting. I want to talk before we run out of time here, Wyatt, about about who’s impacted, right? Because you mapped that basically. And you were able to prove that socially, economically vulnerable communities are are going to bear the brunt of this boom, and that often intersects with tribal lands.

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, no, exactly. So we mapped, using S&P Global data, where these projects are and then we overlaid that with data of tribal reservations and then also the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, which measures counties that are socially vulnerable, as the name suggests, to climate and public health risks.

So 70% of the projects we mapped in the U.S. are within 35 miles of a reservation, and two-thirds of these projects are in highly vulnerable communities to climate and and public health risks. And so what that means is that these projects are going into communities that are already facing kind of the brunt of impacts from, you know, wildfires, drought, public health risks in general from, you know, whatever it might be. And a lot of these communities have already faced this before. A lot of these communities already have poor drinking water quality.

And so what we really wanted to do with this project was show, OK, one, who’s behind these projects, but second, what are the impacts looking like? And it’s very clear, even in these early stages, that communities are being impacted. You know, where mines use a lot of water, they pose public health risks, and those impacts are already being seen on the ground.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us about one situation here in Arizona where there was a kind of a legal battle between a lithium mining project and the Hualapai Tribe, right? This is kind of up near Wikieup. They were successful in that legal challenge, it sounds like the tribe was.

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, they were, and it’s one of the very rare cases where a tribe has, you know, so far won in their legal challenge against a mine. But, you know, this project was Arizona Lithium’s — at the time, Arizona Lithium’s Big Sandy project, and it was near a sacred spring to the tribe, near Wikieup.

And for years during the permitting, the tribe had warned the Bureau of Land Management that this site was, one, designated as a cultural property under the National Register of Historic Places, and they had concerns that this spring would be affected by the drilling that would happen, right? When these companies drill into the earth, it can puncture aquifers, it can change water flow, and there were concerns that this spring would be affected.

The BLM ignored that even though other federal agencies during public comment had said, "Hey, you really need to evaluate this." That was ignored. They permitted the drilling, and when the company started drilling, the spring went dry. Fissures broke open in the Earth.

Other, you know, some of the Hualapai sources I had shared these photos and videos with me — it’s really quite striking. And so the Hualapai sued. And they said, "Hey, the Bureau of Land Management had a responsibility here to consult with the tribe and to protect this property that is protected." And they won that case.

It’s one of these very rare cases. I’ve been to a lot of court cases for mines; very rarely do — for situations like this — very rarely do the tribes win. They won here, though, because it was such a blatant example of how these projects can impact even when they’re early, right? This was not a mine that — this project was not going to be mined tomorrow. They weren’t even guaranteed that they would mine; they were just testing to see if this would work.

LAUREN GILGER: And the impacts were already there.

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: Last 30 seconds for you, Wyatt. I mean ... what could this look like in Arizona? Do we know how many mining projects might end up on in our state?

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, well, we mapped seven potential lithium projects in Arizona. Most of these are all — all of these are in the very early stages. It’s kind of hard to tell how many might end up becoming mines.

That Big Sandy project was the one that was kind of the most developed. That one’s now on pause; the company that was behind it sold it off. It’s now owned by the Navajo Energy Transitional Company. Will they move forward with that? It’s really hard to say. But for right now, the jury’s still out on Arizona.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. All right. Lots to watch for. Wyatt Myskow with Inside Climate News, thank you so much for your reporting. I appreciate you coming in.

WYATT MYSKOW: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. We are talking less now than we used to. That’s the finding of a study done by Matthias Mehl, a social psychologist and professor at the University of Arizona. He and a colleague found people are speaking around 340 fewer daily words — and that this has been going on for more than a decade.

Research from 2007 had found that people speak, on average, nearly 16,000 words every day. But this new data showed that number has now dropped to fewer than 13,000 per day. Matthias, what was your reaction when you saw these results?

MATTHIAS MEHL: My response was surprise. So this happened in a very particular context. We were trying to replicate a finding that we had published years before in 2007. In 2007, looking at gender differences, we found that men and women speak on average 16,000 words a day. And so last year, we had an opportunity to replicate that with a much larger sample, a much more heterogeneous sample.

And a postdoc that I was working with at the time, who is now a faculty member herself, Valeria Pfeifer, ran the analysis and she came to my office and said, "Yeah, I have the analysis, I have the findings, here they are." And she shared with me numbers that were around 13,000 words. So I was very surprised and I said, "That’s wrong. That can’t be." And she went back to check and of course they were right, and that’s how it all started. So we were quite surprised to see that we had lost about 3,000 words over over that time span of maybe 14 years.

MARK BRODIE: Also, what does it mean that we are speaking that many fewer words?

MATTHIAS MEHL: If we were to think that, or if we try to calculate how long it takes to speak 300 words, and there’s calculators on the internet, it comes out to about a minute and a half. So that’s really not much, right? But that’s not how it works. Those 300 words or 338 words are really lost across a number of smaller interactions.

So I think the reason this matters and the reason this is quite a bit because every day we have fewer interactions, fewer spontaneous short random here or there conversations, fewer conversations with a neighbor, fewer conversations with a cashier at the grocery store, fewer conversations with a passerby, and I think it’s a real loss of social connection.

And when you do it over the years, so 300 words a year, when you do the math, it comes up out to 120,000 words in a year. And that’s the length of a novel, but again spread out over a large number of conversations.

MARK BRODIE: Ah. So I notice in what you just said, you didn’t mention technology and specifically devices, cellphones, tablets, things like that. Are those playing a role here as well?

MATTHIAS MEHL: I very much think they do. And I believe that that our society has changed, the infrastructure is in a way that that it requires fewer conversations, but in part that is because of the electronic devices. So when I need to find out where to go, I check my Google Maps and I don’t talk to a person anymore. In the same way, we don’t go in the department store anymore, we buy online. And I think that that plays a big role. In addition to that, of course there is all the digital communication like texting and social media that plays a major role as well.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so it’s interesting. So it’s not just the fact that, you know, we have our noses in our phones because we’re texting or scrolling social media, it’s because we can sort of replace conversations with digital activity that, you know, absent the phone, would require you to speak with somebody at the grocery store or at the coffee shop or in the department store or at the library or wherever it is you happen to be.

MATTHIAS MEHL: Exactly. And so we tested this hypothesis. We didn’t have detailed information on how much the participants were using these kind of digital communications, so we had to go with a bad proxy. And the bad proxy was age. Assuming that younger people use more digital communication than older people.

So we split our sample at the age of 25, and so we checked how how we could estimate the loss for the younger adults and for the older adults. And consistent with the idea that the digital communication plays a role, younger adults had a loss of 451 words, so a larger loss, and that makes sense.

But our older adults or older than 25 also lost 314 words. So there’s something that’s really cuts across these different age groups, and so we do think digital communication plays a major role, digitalization of our society, of the way we meet our needs plays a major role, but it’s not just posting on social media.

MARK BRODIE: What do you think it is that we lose when we kind of stop talking to each other to some extent?

MATTHIAS MEHL: I think what we lose really is these these moments of microconnection. So when we text, we are limited to the written word, to the typed word. And the typed word is good. But the typed word always comes with a certain degree of uncertainty.

We see this when we receive a text message and we say, "Was that person serious? Is that person offended? Did I miss something?" And so we try to use emojis. There’s always a certain degree of uncertainty.

In-person conversations, we have the facial expressions, we have the prosodic information through the voice, we have gestures, and we have the words. So humans have evolved to really be very good at reading, "Is this conversation going well? Am I OK?" And I think that leads to to these easier moments of connection with the other person, these microconnections. And I think we see this in in the conversation with a barista that may not last many words, but you’re seen. You feel seen by the other person, you feel noticed, and I think that is the connection that we’re missing out on.

MARK BRODIE: So I want to point out that your data doesn’t go beyond 2019, which means it of course does not include the pandemic, which is a time that it seems like a lot of people at least anecdotally believe that we kind of — many of us anyway — stopped talking to each other and forgot sort of how to interact with each other.

I wonder that if you were to do this study again — like do you think that the data would continue to show that we are continuing to speak fewer words? Like how do you think it would look if you were to try to replicate this study again?

MATTHIAS MEHL: Yeah, this is why I think this was so surprising to us because if this had been after the pandemic that we lose 3,000 words, nobody would probably be surprised. But there’s very little reason to believe that we have reached an upward trend again. As you suggest, people tended to report that after the pandemic they felt socially sluggish, there was hard to find the energy to reach out to people.

So I do think that the trend probably continued, so I don’t know whether we now may be approaching 11,000 words, 10,000 words, somewhere in that ballpark.

MARK BRODIE: Well, what do you think it would take to reverse that? Like what would it take to get us to speak more to each other?

MATTHIAS MEHL: The answer really lies in understanding that that 300 words isn’t really that much. It’s a little bit when we take the equivalent of physical activity. What it takes to counter our sedentary behavior is not running a marathon. It really is putting a little bit more physical activity into our daily life. So taking the stairs instead of the elevator, getting up after an hour of sitting and walking around a little bit. And I think that’s a good parallel that we can draw to social activity. I think a few more words exchanged with people here and there can go a long way.

MARK BRODIE: So maybe something like if you’re at the grocery store, use the checkout person instead of the self-checkout, or look up from your phone when you’re ordering your coffee and say good morning to the to the barista taking order. Like little things like that.

MATTHIAS MEHL: Exactly. That’s actually directly the equivalent of not taking the elevator and taking the stairs is not taking the the self-checkout line. Yeah, I agree.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is social psychologist Matthias Mehl with the University of Arizona. Matthias, thanks so much.

MATTHIAS MEHL: Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Cigarettes appear to be making a comeback, at least in popular culture. Celebrities are being photographed with them and they’re popping up in TV shows and in movies. This follows decades, of course, of anti-smoking campaigns and declining smoking rates. With me now to talk about why cigarettes seem to be having a moment is our resident pop culture expert Amanda Kehrberg, a Ph.D. student at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Amanda, good morning.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Good morning, Mark.

MARK BRODIE: So why? What’s happening?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: [LAUGHS] I know. No, it’s fascinating as a trend because historically we see cigarettes in movies and TV as this kind of quick way to make a character seem sophisticated, to seem cool. And of course we get a natural backlash to that, as you talked about.

And then all of a sudden in like 2024, they start coming back into films, like especially Oscar-nominated films. Unprecedented rise ... like 50% of Oscar-nominated movies ’24, ’25, ’26 have had characters smoking. If you’ve watched the HBO series “Heated Rivalry,” you see smoking both in the show and then its breakout stars — Connor Story, Hudson Williams — photographed, videoed smoking all the time. We see celebs like Hailey Bieber smoking; Kylie Jenner on magazine covers.

It’s been all over social media, and what’s so interesting about that is that it’s being talked about as a kind of pose. Like do you remember when everybody was T-posing or planking?

MARK BRODIE: Oh, yeah. I sure do. Yeah.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yeah, so like if you watch the Pinterest trends, “smoking pose” has gone up like 77% in how many people are searching for it. It’s like considered a way to look cool, posing with a cigarette.

Now nobody got addicted to planking except maybe your annoying CrossFit friend. But what is so fascinating about this is that it’s an aesthetic cultural trend that doesn’t seem to be impacting the actual smoking rates, which are still going down year over year.

MARK BRODIE: So people — am I hearing you say that people think cigarettes are cool but they’re not actually lighting them and smoking them?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: That appears to be the case currently. We have no evidence that they actually are, unless you’re a cool Gen Z celeb on the Met carpet or getting ready. That was actually really funny. I saw there was a video posted of Connor Story and Hudson Williams on a Reddit thread and you can see them smoking getting ready for the the afterparty. And the mods had to to close comments because there were too many comments about them smoking.

And so we’re still — this is like controversial. It’s like people are still reacting, including Gen Z themselves to like, “We don’t want people to actually think this is cool,” but it’s happening. And even though we’re seeing like movies, TV, streaming, social media, there’s something about smoking that still people think looks, you know, functionally cool.

MARK BRODIE: That’s so interesting, because like when you talk about Gen Z, this is a generation that like they didn’t grow up with smoking sections in restaurants or on airplanes or having to walk through that cloud of smoke into almost any public building you walked into. Like they’ve never experienced that. So I wonder if that plays into this this feeling like, “Oh, this thing that a lot of people worked really hard to get rid of is suddenly cool again.”

AMANDA KEHRBERG: It is really interesting because I wonder to what degree they were exposed to — do you remember the Truth ads that would be these really extreme performance art ads, right, of like coffins on the street, and that sort of thing?

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, people having to like talk through like their esophagus.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yeah. And there’s this theory called Reactance Theory that fear appeals in persuasion can be really, really impactful up to a point. Beyond that point, people will react against them.

But when it comes to Gen Z, one of the reasons that people think this is kind of a cultural trend is that it plays into the kind of malaise about the future. Another HBO show, “The Leftovers,” that basically, you know, signaled a sort of sense of the end of the world, they had a cult that just constantly smoked —

MARK BRODIE: Because thinking like, why not?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yeah. So it does signal something about a sort of embeddedness in the present with no real sense of a future. If you think the — reminded me of the classic [Antonio] Gramsci quote: “Now is the time for monsters.” Now is the time for smokers, I guess. [LAUGHS]

MARK BRODIE: But again, like it doesn’t seem as though the idea that people are posing holding cigarettes is necessarily leading to more smoking. But I would imagine that if you’re an anti-smoking advocate or a public health expert, that would be the fear, right?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Oh, you’re understandably worried about this, because research shows that seeing people make smoking look cool in media makes someone, particularly youth, more likely to take up smoking. So understandably they’re concerned about that, which I think says something interesting about media effects when it comes to social media. There must be something we don’t necessarily understand about the way that I think a lot of Gen Z users are experiencing this as something that looks cool but maybe isn’t cool to do.

MARK BRODIE: Is it possible to pinpoint whether this started showing up on social media and then ended up in the movies or vice versa, or was it just simultaneously in both places?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: I would say my theory is that it started showing up in streaming and TV first, before making it more into movies and then on social media. That’s my theory, is that social media kind of came last but is really driving the trend now. Because I remember when I first started seeing people smoking on TV again, and it was kind of a shock.

MARK BRODIE: It’s so jarring, right?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: It is jarring.

MARK BRODIE: Like it was one thing during like “Mad Men,” when it was portraying a time when unfortunately almost everybody smoked. And on that show, almost everybody smoked. But the shows you’re talking about take place now when a lot of people don’t smoke.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yeah, yeah. It is very strange, because I understand that it’s like an anachronism if you’re set at that time to not be smoking constantly. But also that’s OK. You know what? Everybody wasn’t as hot as they were in “Mad Men” all the time, too. Like there are lots of anachronisms and that’s not a big deal.

But I think what’s interesting is if smoking really does completely go out, which we I think expect it to based on numbers, what are they going to do in media to make someone look cool? You know, there’s the classic save-the-cat trope that makes us immediately know if somebody saves a cat, they’re a good character. So if somebody lights up, they’re a cool character. What’s going to be the new cigarette? [LAUGHS]

MARK BRODIE: That’s a really interesting question. I guess we’ll have to have you back to to think about some ideas. We’ll have you back. We’ll talk about what makes — maybe listening to public radio makes you the the cool character.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Oh, I would love that. Save the radio.

MARK BRODIE: Save the public radio. All right, that is Amanda Kehrberg, our resident pop culture expert here on The Show. Good as always to talk to you, Amanda. Thank you.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Thank you so much, Mark.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. Guillermo Reyes has been a part of the Phoenix theater world for three decades. He first came to the Valley in 1996 to head up the Masters of Fine Arts Dramatic Writing Program at ASU. In 2000, he founded Teatro Bravo with Trino Sandoval and Daniel Enrique Perez. They put on shows in both English and Spanish at a time when no one else was doing them here. A Chilean immigrant, Reyes’s plays have tackled gender, sexuality, immigration and more, from Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown, which tells the story of Federico, the gay little immigrant that could, to That Day in Tucson, which tells the story of Daniel Hernandez Jr. when he was an intern for Congresswoman Gabby Giffords on the day she was shot. Now Reyes is retiring from ASU after 30 years, but as he told me when he came into our studios recently, he’s not retiring from the theater. I spoke with him more about his career, his take on Phoenix’s theater scene, and his own immigrant story, how and how it’s shown up in his work throughout his career.

GUILLERMO REYES: Well, it definitely has shaped some of the stories that I tell. I just think that as a family, well, maybe all families are theatrical at a certain point, and it’s just a matter of capturing the drama, knowing how to do that — in other words, learning how to do it. But I felt that there were a lot of stories in our family.

My mother was a great storyteller, I believe, because she always had a story to tell about her childhood or about our grandmother or something like that. So stories came naturally to me, I think, you know, so it was just a matter of being theatrical with them, how does an actor play this character? You know, that was on the back of my mind always, it seems, since since I was a child.

LAUREN GILGER: So did you always want to be in the theater or was that something you kind of came to as a student or later on?

GUILLERMO REYES: I think I always wanted something theatrical because I think I wanted to be an actor first, you know, but then I —

LAUREN GILGER: Lots of kids do. Fair enough.

GUILLERMO REYES: Yeah, yeah. I thought I was going to follow in that path, but then I found myself writing it down, you know, like I want to write it down, you know. I mean, I remember being 8 years old after I had seen the movie version of “Romeo and Juliet.” I went back home, you know, there were all these kids visiting and so forth, and I told them, "You know what, you just stand still, I’m going to — we’re going to put on 'Romeo and Juliet.'"

LAUREN GILGER: You directed it.

GUILLERMO REYES: That was the very first time that I had an instinct that I needed to write it down. But why did I need to write down "Romeo and Juliet" at that point? It was already written, but I didn’t know that as an eight-year-old. I thought I could just write my own, you know.

LAUREN GILGER: Just need to write your own Romeo and Juliet. Direct all the kids to do it. That’s the best. I want to talk about Teatro Bravo, which you founded in 2000 with some other folks in town because it sounds like at the time in Phoenix there was this big Latino population here, but no Latino theater company, right?

GUILLERMO REYES: Well, you know, similar to what I just described, the instinct of an 8-year-old of saying, "Let’s just do it," because because there wasn’t a lot of theater. We had, you know, people who spoke Spanish for instance so we could do plays in Spanish; that was one instinct.

But the other, because we’re bilingual also, the two partners that I was working with were all bilingual, we would do plays in English and in Spanish because we wanted to reach both communities at the same time. In actually there were three communities we found out, you know, there were those who spoke English, those who spoke Spanish, and then there were people who are bilingual who go to both, you know. So we felt that that’s a good way of reaching out to everybody.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And the goal, it sounds like from the very beginning, was to tap into those communities but to do it in a bilingual way?

GUILLERMO REYES: Right, right. And there were some people trying to do Latino plays but in translation or, I mean, if they were coming from, let’s say, Mexican place or other Latin American place, but there weren’t a lot of people doing it in a bilingual manner. So definitely trying to find the right place that that could be maybe translated or vice versa, translating into one or the other language. Or sometimes just writing it, right? ’Cause that was my own instinct: "Let’s, let’s write the play." So.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, that’s been around for a long time, it’s still around now, although in a different kind of fashion under someone new. But I wonder, you know, what do you think the impact of that has been? Like do you think today there are, you know, more Latinos in theater here doing this kind of stuff and and stressing the importance of doing it in both languages?

GUILLERMO REYES: I don’t know, that’s one thing that I’ve noticed is I feel that there haven’t been enough of those productions. Occasionally you hear somebody, you know, putting on a play that would be bilingual. But it seems like the community is out there, but our theatrical makers, the actors, directors, get an opportunity to do one and then they go away. And if you’re not doing it consistently, it seems like, you know, people go on with their lives and do other things. It takes, it takes a lot of effort, you know, to do that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I know you’ve written many plays that have addressed sort of political issues, immigration issues often, but others as well, kind of cross those lines, pushed into that realm in the past, many comedies, some dramas, right? Like on all sides. Where do you think the role of theater is when it comes to activism?

GUILLERMO REYES: Well, I mean, great question because I think we have dealt with this from the very beginning. Whenever I meet artistic directors both here and in other places, a lot of them, you know, want to be safe, you know, like they’ll do a play that could be controversial like “Angels in America,” which is playing right now.

LAUREN GILGER: Yes, it is.

GUILLERMO REYES: And, you know, they might do that. It won the Pulitzer, it’s, you know, was done as a movie, it to me it’s safer because of that. But if they want to do a play about immigration, that might be too much. I’ve been told about “That Day in Tucson” that, you know, it has gun issues and the community might not feel comfortable discussing that in the theater, you know, I’ve been told those things through the years.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. This is the play you wrote about Daniel Hernandez Jr., right, who was there when Gabby Giffords was shot.

GUILLERMO REYES: Right, right. So you know there’s that element of safety among a lot of artistic directors. Now, I don’t blame them; they get corporate funding, that type of thing, and to me that, it’s understandable because they want to pay their actors and so forth; they got to stay afloat.

But in a small theater like this one, you do plays that maybe some people won’t like. I mean, when we did the play “Los Illegals,” it sounds, you know, precisely what it sounds like, right. It was a play that was done in L.A. about day laborers and then we brought it here, I mean we did our own version of it, and that’s a play that I don’t think anybody else would have touched.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, do you think that that’s a missed opportunity in the theater world? Like do you think that if people were quote-unquote more brave, they’d draw more attention, make more money?

GUILLERMO REYES: Right, right. You know, our biggest hit at Teatro Bravo was a play about the femicide that was going on at Juarez at the time in the early 2000s, you know, all these women who were disappearing and their bodies were found in the desert. Really tough stuff. When we looked at the play, we thought, "Is anybody going to come see this? It sounds depressing."

But when we did it, I tell you, people came out of everywhere. So it just tells me that sometimes people are not afraid of these tough subject matter. So, you know, I get the feeling that it is a missed opportunity for some of the more mainstream theaters because they want to put on happy musicals a lot, in are afraid of this other subject matter.

LAUREN GILGER: I wonder. So I mean, like, tell me about a moment in your long career in which you feel like the theater, whether it was a show you brought in or wrote, when it when you felt like it was the voice of the community, when it when you felt like it was effective and cut through.

GUILLERMO REYES: I mean, in terms of my career, I would say the play “Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown” has had the most productions of my plays. So I’ve seen it in many different ways. You know, that did well and I think that play because it had an unusual take, I think, on immigration and all of those things. So it had its effect and it had great reviews and it was published and then was done across the country by other people. I didn’t get a chance to see all of them. I did have a chance to see one very peculiar production.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell me about it. Let’s hear it.

GUILLERMO REYES: Well, in Miami I went to see it and I went on opening night and the artistic director picked me up at the airport and we were headed directly to the theater. He surprised me later when we arrived there, he said, "But tonight is — the show is sold out to the gay nudists of Miami."

LAUREN GILGER: Oh wow.

GUILLERMO REYES: So when I walked into the theater, everybody was naked.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s amazing.

GUILLERMO REYES: And a gentleman who saw me walk in and say, "Why are you dressed?" And you know, it’s like, "I’m just here to watch the show, I’m not one of you." Anyways.

LAUREN GILGER: The places a play can go after you write it, right?

GUILLERMO REYES: Exactly. It was a very interesting interesting production.

LAUREN GILGER: Guillermo Reyes, a playwright and ASU professor of theater joining us to talk about his long and storied career in theater here in Phoenix and across the country. Reyes is retiring after 30 years at ASU, though not from the theater.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban. Our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

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