Ella Talerico, Studio’s Artistic Producing Fellow, interviewed Fernanda Coppel, playwright of Aya, which will be featured in the inaugural New Pages, New Stages Festival.
ELLA: How did you fall in love with playwriting?
FERNANDA: I went to college telling my family, “I’m going to be a lawyer,” which made them very happy—it’s a Mexican immigrant family, and they liked not having to worry about me. But in my first quarter at UC Santa Cruz, I saw my first play. It was a comedy about identity and how silly, awkward, and weird it is to be a Latinx person. I’d never seen Latinx stories done in such a funny, theatrical, and human way. It felt like falling in love.
I had an epiphany. I thought, “What is that? I want to do that.” I skipped the after-party, went back to my dorm, and—having never read one—wrote a play. I never changed my major; playwriting was like my secret mistress. Then my mentor told me, “You should apply for MFAs.” I said, “I’m supposed to go to law school. This is just my hobby.” And she said, “No, I think you should apply.”
I got a full scholarship to NYU and theater became my life.
ELLA: Why are you a playwright? Why theater?
FERNANDA: I love theater’s focus on detail and confrontation. It’s about two people in a room hashing it out—you can’t fake it. It’s about raw confrontation. Authentic conversation. In novels, TV, or films, that kind of raw authenticity can be glossed over. In theater, the goal isn’t just to entertain or sustain a long arc—it’s to make people feel something. That challenge is incredibly compelling to me.
ELLA: What would be different about the world if everyone knew and responded to your work?
FERNANDA: I hope there’d be less gendered bias, more compassion for people who feel like they don’t belong, and more willingness to step into someone else’s shoes. And a deep respect for women.
ELLA: What inspired you to write Aya?
FERNANDA: Aya has been a ten-year journey—the longest I’ve ever worked on a play. It started intellectually. In 2014, I read a New York Times article about ayahuasca and thought, “What a beautiful idea—that you could drink this tea and become better.” My ancestors had the formula for an antidepressant from the earth. The question with Aya was, how do I dramatize these thoughts? Healing has always fascinated me. It’s silly. It’s awkward. It’s weird. It’s hard. Are we ever healed?
When I began writing, I hadn’t yet experienced major loss. Over the years, I went through divorces, deaths, COVID, and became a parent—which is its own kind of identity death. Aya evolved with me. What began as an intellectual exercise is now deeply emotional. My central question has become: who are these characters, and how do they express healing?
ELLA: Where is the play in its development now?
FERNANDA: I’m fine-tuning—sanding down the edges. Each reading or workshop, with different people, at different times, in different places, reshapes Aya in my mind. Aya is about love and loss, which is universal, but the specific discoveries that come out of these rooms always push the play further.
ELLA: What questions do you keep returning to as an artist?
FERNANDA: There’s a common idea that every playwright is always writing the same play. I agree and disagree with this notion. I used to write plays about childhood wounds, about being misunderstood and finding my place and identity as a queer person of color. Now that I’ve found my place, the question of my plays has become: how do I continue in a world that’s painful to live in?
ELLA: Anything else you’d like to share?
FERNANDA: On the surface, Aya is about a man in pain who falls into an unexpected abyss of healing. Hang on for the ride. Ultimately, Aya is a meditation on grief—and how our minds even begin to process gigantic loss.