Meet the Brown senior who’s written and directed her own play

Nika Salazar’s The Red Paint premieres this week

We sat down with Nika Salazar ’16, a TAPS concentrator and the student writer/director of The Red Paint, an upcoming play with Sock & Buskin.

Nika gave us some insight on the show, her life and the racial climate today.

Senior Nika Salazar. Photo credit: Rebecca Carrol

Give us a brief summary of The Red Paint.

The Red Paint is a story about family and understanding and a collective history from one generation to the next, especially in multi-racial families, and a father and daughter understanding this. When they understand it, they can break domestic violence, institutional violence, emotional abuse and self-harm, which is really prevalent in Chicano communities.

Where did this idea come from?

I took Elmo Terry-Morgan’s Playwriting I class, and he really helped me parse through my own identity, which I was already comfortable with. I had a recent death in my family, so I was kind of in this death-shaken world, and it did help me write. Obviously, The Red Paint is a dramatization of my own life, but, yeah, some of it is real. My father is turning 68, and he was subject to a lot of police brutality and violence. I was in an abusive relationship – I’m not just a statistic, and I think the play brings visibility to the invisible.

How long did it take to write?

I started in the fall semester of 2013, right after the Trayvon Martin case, and I finished over the summer of 2015, and workshopped it for a few weeks in the Playwriting II class.

Explain the dynamic of student writer/director and Sock & Buskin.

Interesting. (Laughs ) I wasn’t used to being a student director with such a big budget. On the Sock & Buskin board, I worked on a lot of student shows, but it’s really a different standard.

What do you usually read?

My favorite writer is José Rivera, a Puerto Rican playwright, especially References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot. I read a lot of plays about people of color, stories that I haven’t heard before because their voices are suppressed.

How do you view this torrent of racially charged action on campus through the lens of The Red Paint?

Events of late have been really heavy. The process has been very real for the actors and the team. It’s simultaneously scary to put on a show like this, but it’s also exciting to see why a lot of people haven’t confronted these issues before. I think, especially in this show, there’s always something deeper. Abusers are abused, and the cycle has always been real for people of color. A lot of people in America have never been able to feel removed from it, but that goes unrecognized sometimes.

The Red Paint will run from Thursday, December 3rd to Sunday, December 6th in Leeds Theater.

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