“Wipeout is a coming-of-age story about coming into one’s final age. Our world obsesses over what women lose as they grow older: youth, beauty, sex drive, strength. Few people discuss what women gain—the self-knowledge that comes with growing into one’s true self.”—Aurora Real de Asua, on Wipeout
When Aurora Real de Asua sat down to write Wipeout, she’d just written a play about surfing that was so bad her college playwriting professor told her she had to come up with a new play if she wanted to stay in the class. (“It was so bad that my mom told me it was bad,” Real de Asua says.) So she sat down in a Chicago cafe on a Saturday morning and she wrote. Two days later, she had a play that followed three women in their 70s taking their first surf lesson.
Real de Asua looks at those two days of writing as something outside of herself. “These characters truly came to me. I didn't know what the plot was; I didn’t know how it was going to resolve. And I didn’t know until I was writing the last scene what Blaze’s role was going to be.”
But for all that the play arrived like a gift, it was also ground in a setting and relationships that Real de Asua knows well. She’d grown up surfing off the coast of Northern California and spending many summers with her grandmother—and her grandmother’s extended group of friends—in the Basque country of Northern Spain. These summers watching the lives and complex friendships of older women unfold gave her quick access to the particularities of the friend group that developed Wipeout, the fearlessness of women growing away from the pressures of courtship, parenting, or workplaces that often underestimated them. These insights lived alongside her own experiences on the water: “I learned how to surf in Santa Cruz, California,” Real de Asua says. “Hands down the best surfers I encountered were women over the age of seventy. They were fearless. They went for everything. Small waves, big waves, my waves. If it moved, there they were, hanging ten, shredding. They didn’t have time to waste. That ferocity—that hunger to go, to live without regret or apology—inspired Wipeout.”
After a weekend of writing—and keeping her place in her writing class—Real de Asua worked intermittently on Wipeout for five years, re-crafting scenes, taking out a kiss between two characters, honing the play into a more action-forward, character-specific piece. The play was produced in a five-way rolling world premiere in 2024 through the National New Play Network. Five different casts, directors, and production teams produced the play, at Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo, NY; B Street Theatre in Sacramento, CA; Constellation Stage & Screen in Bloomington, IN; Gloucester Stage Company in Massachusetts; and Rivendell Theatre Ensemble in Chicago. Each of those production staged the play as the stage directions suggest: Set on surfboards off the coast of Santa Cruz, California, with actors in wetsuits and often on modified office chairs to allow for an approximation of the fluid movement of floating or swimming.
Director Danilo Gambini first encountered the play, and playwright Real de Asua, at a 2023 reading in San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre before he joined Studio Theatre as its Associate Artistic Director. In bringing the play to Studio, he has conceptualized a production that activates the reality of the Pacific Ocean, where the play is set, as well as these women’s longstanding friendships and the memories of one of its characters, who is undergoing her own unmooring. (No spoilers here, but Gambini and his design team talk about the play in terms of its “dual reality”—showing one reality while the characters experience another.)
It all adds up to a theatrical experience that places its characters and audience in relationship with the horizon line of four lives in different stages, in a play about the deep pleasures and pain of being known for who you truly are. (It is also, as Artistic David Muse reminds us in his welcome letter to this production, one of the very few surf comedies that Studio has produced, and I hope it brings you both laughs and some insights.)