I call him Garcés. His dedication to theatre is of a degree some might deem masochistic, and my first encounter with his work did absolutely nothing to contradict that impression. In 1997, during a performance art marathon curated by Peculiar Works at New York's historic Judson Church space, I toured the venue to see what else was going on besides the music-text piece I was acting in. After passing through various installations and video projections, I turned into a stairway. Inside a turret, in the dark, sat a man in a chair, almost chanting a monologue more remarkable for its music than its denotative meaning. I was transfixed. I watched as long as I could before my next performance, but I later learned that he had done this 45-minute piece on a continuous loop six times without ever leaving his chair. We didn't actually meet until 2001, when he was recommended to direct the reading of a play of mine. From that first day in the rehearsal room with him, I was struck by his eloquence, generosity, and uncanny ability to intuit exactly what a playwright intends, even if the text has not yet revealed it. His experience as an actor, director, and writer is deep and wide, generating a fluency between all of these arts that makes him the MVP you want on your dramatic team.

After years of fruitful collaborations, Garcés and I sat down to talk at New Dramatists, in Manhattan, where we are both member playwrights. He's shifting gears this spring, transforming a successful if breakneck career as an Off-Broadway and regional director into an artistic directorship at Los Angeles's truly progressive Cornerstone Theatre. And two of his full-length plays, Acts of Mercy and points of departure, are premiering in New York. This conversation catches him at the moment where he's finally getting out of that chair, abandoning freelance masochism for an institutional structure that allows him to be generous not only to the communities he'll serve with Cornerstone but also to himself as a writer. So ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce a prolific, omnivorous, beautiful motherfucker, my dear friend Michael John Garcés. -Eisa Davis

Loggernaut Reading Series: Is there anything that occurred to you after our last talk? Before I realized my iPod wasn't recording? We were talking about the significance of place, how that's changed in your work over time or at least your consciousness of it.

Michael John Garcés: Without your having asked me the question I would not have said place is really important to me. Even more so, I think, are these imagined places, like this imagined Miami that I've written about a couple of times—which corresponds, I suppose, to some possible real Miami, but I think more has to do with the lives I didn't have in Miami, or I could imagine having had, if I had never moved to Colombia as a child. Or if I had never left Miami after graduating from college.

There's a Mario Vargas Llosa novel called Conversation in the Cathedral. It's a long novel, it's an early novel of his, really big and sort of humorless in the sense that he started writing funnier novels later purposefully using humor as a tactic. But I've always loved it. And one of the reasons I think I love it is because it's kind of how I imagine what my life might have been like if I had stayed in Colombia—or, more to the point, stayed in Medellín, where I first moved to and lived until I was in 8th grade.

LRS: Moved from where?

Garcés: From Miami. I was born in Miami, grew up in Colombia, moved there when I was five or six. My dad's Cuban and my mom's Anglo.

When I was in Medellín I was becoming really, really Colombian of a certain type. We moved to Bogotá, a more cosmopolitan city, so it was a little different, right? But I could have imagined staying in Colombia, going to college there and living there.

That novel really evokes in me what it would have been like to be a young journalist, which was something I could easily have imagined myself getting into, and the dangers of being a journalist in South America, and the sordidness of it, and the day-to-day banal life of it in the context of a Latin American city. I powerfully identify with the novel in the sense of, wow, that's an alternate life I could have had. And when I write, I think place sometimes becomes very significant to me in that sense. I write about my conception of suburban America. My parents lived in the suburbs, and I think they would have stayed in the suburbs. That would have been my life growing up. I could imagine it easily. So I write about that, or about Miami, in the case of several plays. For some reason Miami, because I have a complicated relationship with it—my family is from there, it drives me crazy, but it's interesting, it's fascinating—it tends to come up. Having that sense of place I think really does help—it grounds the plays in my imagination.

I write about New York a lot too. And now that I'm moving from New York, at least for a while, I think I'll probably write more about New York. Because I tend to write about a place when I'm not there. So place is important in that way, I think.

LRS: And then how does that translate into your work with actors? Do you feel that place is really important to establish with your actors when you're in a production or is it something that you feel you want to leave more to them in terms of imagination?

Garcés: As a writer, I think I leave it more to them. I tend not to put in any stage directions or really much in the plays to evoke place other than dialogue. We just did a one-act of mine, audiovideo, that takes place ostensibly in a basement—which suggests not South but North in the United States, at least in my experience of Miami and Florida, where you

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