{"id":671795,"date":"2026-03-21T15:47:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T15:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/671795\/"},"modified":"2026-03-21T15:47:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T15:47:21","slug":"playwright-heather-raffo-debuts-production-at-carver-center-on-relocation-and-survival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/671795\/","title":{"rendered":"Playwright Heather Raffo debuts production at Carver Center on relocation and survival\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"HeatherHeather Raffo, who was born in the Midwest to an Iraqi immigrant father, gained global recognition for her play 9 Parts of Desire, which examines the lives of a diverse group of Iraqi women. Credit: Courtesy Photo \/ Carver Community Cultural Center<\/p>\n

Acclaimed playwright Heather Raffo will stage a community-driven production this month at the Carver Community Cultural Center that examines the reasons humans move and the costs they pay as they do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tomorrow Will Be Sunday is part of a larger \u201cMigration Cycle\u201d of plays Raffo is developing across multiple cities. Roughly a third of the 90-minute play is built from material Raffo wrote after a series of listening visits to San Antonio.<\/p>\n

The performances, scheduled for Thursday through Saturday, March 26-28, will include live music and song along with a cast of local and international artists. Raffo hopes the work sparks dialogue about relocation, survival and belonging.<\/p>\n

Raffo, who was born in the Midwest to an Iraqi immigrant father, gained global recognition for her play 9 Parts of Desire, which examines the lives of a diverse group of Iraqi women. She also wrote the libretto to Fallujah, an opera about soldiers\u2019 experiences in the Iraq war.<\/p>\n

We caught up with the New York-based playwright by phone to discuss Tomorrow Will Be Sunday, what she learned about the Alamo City and common themes she\u2019s experienced presenting new iterations of the play in other cities. \u00a0<\/p>\n

You\u2019re doing a play where a third or more is related directly back to San Antonio, which sounds like a major undertaking. How do you make that work?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s lots of different ways to mount something that\u2019s iterative like this, but I think that the San Antonio experiment feels really particularly beautiful to me because the Carver has given me such a warm welcome and introduced me to so many really interesting people and artists. And I\u2019m very proud that the artistic team is almost entirely from San Antonio. It\u2019s really like San Antonio\u2019s picking up my work and interpreting it for themselves.<\/p>\n

Could you talk about common themes you\u2019re seeing as you travel between cities? Also, what things have you learned about San Antonio that feel different from what you encountered elsewhere?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Something that\u2019s common and that won\u2019t surprise you at all is that affordability is just on everybody\u2019s mind all the time. And the feeling that so many people can\u2019t get out of having to just look after themselves or their family \u2014\u00a0because that\u2019s hard enough \u2014 let alone being able to look across town, across the nation, across the world. What it takes to get through the day is a lot. \u2026<\/p>\n

What is particularly interesting to me about San Antonio was this mix of being the largest military city in the U.S., a city in close proximity to the border, a city that, in \u201922 or \u201923, had the largest incoming migration of any city in the U.S. And I don\u2019t mean cross-border migration, I mean across the nation, like people were moving to San Antonio. And then it\u2019s also a Latin-majority city.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, all those things add up to being a particular way that people look at how they belong. If I say the play is about why we move and what it costs to survive, the underbelly of that is how do we find belonging? Because that\u2019s really what\u2019s driving so much of this.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Honestly, what surprised me the most about San Antonio, and I mean every Uber driver I was talking to, people I met at a cafe, just on-the-fly conversations \u2014\u00a0not deep conversations with historians\u00a0\u2014\u00a0was how people held history here. \u2026 Because in so many places in the U.S., we might know the history of our city, we might know things, but we\u2019re not talking about hundreds of years of history. And here, because of the [Spanish Missions], probably because of the Alamo, definitely because of where the border was \u2014\u00a0and that it\u2019s been Mexico and it\u2019s now the USA \u2014\u00a0people talk in hundreds of years of history. You say, \u201cTell me about San Antonio,\u201d and then suddenly you\u2019re in a 500-year story.<\/p>\n

And so many times people mentioned the river, and the river is tens of thousands of years old, and indigenous populations lived here. So, I couldn\u2019t quite believe that that was coming up in conversation so often. And so it made me feel like the way people hold place here is with the knowledge of just how long San Antonio has been here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And that really resonated with me as an Iraqi American, because Iraqis do the same thing. I would tease my uncle, because I\u2019d ask him \u2014\u00a0this was 2006 in the height of the civil strife \u2014\u00a0and I\u2019m like, \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d And he\u2019d be like, \u201cOh, this and this because of the invasion and this and this because of Saddam and this and this because of the British.\u201d And then you\u2019d get back to Nebuchadnezzar in a five-minute conversation that started with, \u201cHow are you today?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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Getting back to affordability, this is one of the poorest big cities in the United States and has been for quite some time. Did that element become apparent as you did your research?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Huge. The scene that I wrote for San Antonio is about housing. It\u2019s about a woman renting a room to be able to afford to keep her house, and the amount of people that need a room and who she takes in. \u2026 She\u2019s renting the room to a boy who\u2019s having to navigate, let\u2019s say, the tensions that our nation that any community might be going through, but it\u2019s in the house now. It\u2019s not outside the house. It\u2019s come in, because we have to live together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, yeah, affordability, particularly the housing crisis was top of mind. Also, as you know, the Carver Center\u2019s on the East Side, and I heard so many stories about historic homes either being torn down for townhouses or houses being flipped. It\u2019s a story that\u2019s happening across America of just how deeply cities are changing, and who can even afford to live there or purchase a home. I heard a ton of stories here about what happened in Austin and how people don\u2019t want that to happen here.<\/p>\n

$30, 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, March 26-28, Carver Community Cultural Center, Little Carver Theatre, 226 N. Hackberry St., (210) 207-7211, thecarver.org.<\/p>\n

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