(Mark E. Bender)Gabriel Diego Hernandez is a hip hop artist, actor, poet, educator and playwright who lives in New Jersey. His play “Quarter Rican” premiered in 2023 and then moved to Off-Broadway. The play explores his worldview as a mixed-race Puerto Rican man and as a father.In an interview f or the latest season of the award-winning LPM podcast “Race Unwrapped,” hosted and produced by Michelle Tyrene Johnson, Hernandez talks to Johnson about the invitation of live theatre. This season’s theme is the power of art as protest. You can listen to the whole interview with Hernandez here.This excerpt of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Michelle Tyrene Johnson: Could you tell me a little bit about your life as a playwright and as a theater artist?Gabriel Diego Hernandez: I came to it relatively late. I always did school plays as an actor when I was a child, but in college I stepped away from it. I was also focused on hip hop, recording and performing, so I was creatively occupied. But there also was a fear piece around the theater world. But then I was still working with students. I worked at this summer stock theater camp for like 13 straight years. I was always making stuff even though it wasn't my career. I was a high school history teacher. Then at a certain point, I transitioned out of schools and into my own work as a performing artist, and never would have dreamed that I could make a play.MTJ: What do you think is so unique about stage play work as a way to show your worldview?GDH: I feel like you can kind of bend time and space, in a fresh way when you're creating live work. People like to talk about the rules. What are the rules of the play, right? You let the audience know, hey, for these next, you know, 90 minutes or whatever, here's the world you're stepping into. You're the playwright, you cook the rules. It's your rule book, so that feels really fun for me. We can say, we're gonna jump around in time, it doesn't necessarily need to be all that coherent, as long as I've established that it's incoherent from the beginning, it’s a memory play, or a dream world or has magical elements. You’re not as hamstrung by realism, or by math.MTJ: What do you think are the advantages of telling a story in an intimate space, like a theater, versus an anonymous space, like telling a story through the screen or through a book?GDH: There's just something really, really sacred and personal about that performer-audience relationship. You can't fake the funk. Y’all are in the room, sort of each other's captives, and it kind of heightens things.MTJ: Do you think writing about representation is a form of protest or a form of social justice?GDH: I think art can and should be a tool of that kind of resistance. In terms of what I was trying to accomplish, in my play “Quarter Rican”, I feel like I saw an opportunity for comedy, these like American racial neuroses and my own kind of cultural anxieties about being mixed. I was like, let's get in there and explode these little moments for the sake of laughs.MTJ: Theater, like a lot of live art, has still been trying to find its footing since the height of COVID. Do you still think that theater is still this great place to engage with audiences similar to what you were just talking about?GDH: I think it is. It's just, it's just hard out here. These theaters are broke, and there's a funding crisis, and our federal government isn't helping, and the pandemic set audiences back where we built new habits and lost certain routines. And there's a generation of people coming up who are only engaged with content for 15 seconds at a time.There's a lot of barriers, but you know, if things break right, I don't feel like it's any more challenging once you're in the room. It's harder to get in that damn room, but once you're there, it doesn't feel any more challenging to have a meaningful, beautiful and memorable connection than it did in 2019. It feels the same once you're there. It just feels so much harder to get there, but once you do, that magic takes over.MTJ: You've taught a lot of young audiences. What unique power do you think the dramatic arts have to teach the youth in how to empower themselves to fight injustice?GDH: When you see when young people get that first taste of theater, and the way it empowers them in their own instruments, when you add revolution on top of that, it's kind of limitless, right? Like, we can imagine better worlds. ...read more read less