July Play: Deep Dive On Trambley

Thursday: join us at INTAR

July 16, 2024

This month’s feature

 Day of the Swallows (1971)

by Estela Portillo Trambley

Join us at INTAR on July 18th @ 7pm for a reading of this month’s featured play! Day of the Swallows is a lush, poetic drama with a powerhouse queer heroine and an intersectional view of indigeneity. Hear this harrowing, verdant exploration of the creation and keeping of a queer utopia THIS WEEK!

An in-depth bio of Estela Portillo Trambley:

The Trambley family celebrates the unveiling of Estela’s historic marker in Feb. 2018 in El Paso, TX

Estela Portillo Trambley was a writer, teacher, and talk-show host known for female-led stories and her involvement in the Chicana literary renaissance of the 1970s. Born on January 16th, 1926, Portillo spent her early life in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso, Texas with her grandparents, Julian and Luz Fierro.

She attended El Paso High School, developing an early love for literature, and married Robert Trambley shortly after she graduated. She would go on to have six children with Trambley throughout the course of her life. In 1956 she graduated from what is now known as University of Texas at El Paso. After graduating she would teach English throughout El Paso public schools, serving as the chair of the English department at El Paso Technical High School for six years.

Portillo took a two-year break from teaching in 1972 to host a talk show, Stella Says, on radio station KIZZ In El Paso. The show’s content was wide-reaching, frequently addressing political and controversial matters of the time. She was subsequently asked to write for a local culture television program on KROD-TV. After her tenure at the station, Portillo would return primarily to teaching.

In 1968, Portillo helped establish the first bilingual theater in El Paso, Los Pobres Bilingual Theater. It is with this company she discovered her love of playwriting.Her first play, The Day of the Swallows, was published in literary journal El Grito in 1971, after being submitted by a friend. The play was well received, and Portillo would go on to write eleven more plays, publishing Sor Juana, Puente Negro, and Autumn Gold in her 1983 collection Sor Juana and Other Plays.

In 1975, Portillo would publish a novella and collection of stories entitled Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings. The work would earn her the Premio Quinto Sol Award the same year, making her the first woman to ever receive it. Porillo obtained her masters in English from University of Texas at El Paso in 1977, and went on to publish her first novel, Trini, in 1986. She would continue writing and teaching until her death in 1998.

Bio & dramaturgy by James La Bella

This month, NYC! Next month, Chicago!

Thursday, July 18

Reading: Day of the Swallows at INTAR  Theatre

Tell your Chicago friends: Monday, August 12

Reading: The Favorite by Marie-Catherines Desjardins – translated by Hedgepig regular James Hyett!

Expand the Canon is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYSCA-A.R.T./New York Creative Opportunity Fund (A Statewide Theatre Regrant Program), and the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).

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