I interviewed award-winning playwright and screenwriter José Rivera in June while he was participating in the Writers Guild of America strike. Rivera has two plays running in the Washington area this summer, Sonnets for an Old Century at Spooky Action Theater in DC (through June 25) and the world premiere of Your Name Means Dream at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia (July 7–29). In Sonnets, characters in the afterlife share important, sometimes secretive, stories about their lives; Your Name Means Dream charts the relationship between an aging woman and her caregiver, an AI entity in search of a soul.
