Rogelio Martinez (born 1971) is an American playwright, screenwriter, translator, actor, theater educator, and arts advocate, best known for his Cold War trilogy of plays. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors.[1][2] His plays have been workshopped, produced, and commissioned in theaters across the United States and worldwide.
Martinez, who describes himself as a “child of the Cold War,” has made a study of that era.[9] He wrote When Tang Met Laika, about space exploration in the post-Cold War period, after being awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation New Science and Technology Initiative Grant by the Denver Center Theatre Company, which later produced the play.[10]
He followed that up with a three-play cycle about the Cold War itself.[5]
Ping Pong, the trilogy’s first play, examines U.S.-Chinese relations during the early 1970s. Presented at New York City’s Public Theater, it was later published by Broadway Play Publishing.[11][12]
Born in East Berlin, the cycle’s second play, is set in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and looks at the cultural impact of a Bruce Springsteen concert there. The play, which was workshopped at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, had its world premiere at the San Francisco Playhouse and was performed in both English and German at Berlin’s Stasi Museum. It was also translated into Hungarian and Romanian.[8]
Blind Date, the trilogy’s final play, reenacts the first meeting of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the 1985 Geneva Summit.[13] Originally commissioned by the Denver Center Theatre Company, the play was featured at the Colorado New Play Summit in 2017. The play was produced at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, where it was directed by Tony Award nominee Robert Falls and starred Tony Award-winning actress Deanna Dunagan, who received a Joseph Jefferson Award nomination for her performance.[14]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Martinez worked on The Seven Deadly Sins, a project created and directed by Miami New Drama Artistic Director Michel Hausmann, which won the Drama League Award for Outstanding Interactive or Socially Distanced Theater. It was the largest theater production permitted by the Actors’ Equity Association during the pandemic.[15]
Martinez was commissioned by Miami New Drama to write the play Elian, about Elian Gonzalez, who at age six was the subject of an international immigration controversy.[16]
Other television credits include working as a screenwriter on a project involving producer Tom Fontana’s adaptation of Nicholas Griffin’s nonfiction book The Year of Dangerous Days: Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980. Martinez has also worked as a screenwriter for children’s programming on Nickelodeon.[18]
