By Melissa Savignano

Most Southern California natives who want to get into the arts don’t have to go too far, with Hollywood only a drive away. There they can find the creative infrastructure and spirit a lot of young upstarts crave. After spending countless childhood hours immersed in theater and the arts nonprofits in Los Angeles, however, Eliana Pipes followed her own compass and sprang for the East Coast.

She earned her BA in English at Columbia University in New York City, another creative hotbed. Still on the East Coast a few years later, she’s now an actor, writer, and playwright, studying her craft in the College of Arts & Sciences’ MFA program. But, once again, she’s not following the prescribed path, as Pipes also has her feet planted in the film world. She recently traveled back to California to accept the Academy Gold Fellowship for Women from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (yes, that Academy), partially for her first feature film Fauxricua.

Young, scrappy, and hungry

While she is young, Pipes started on the path to Academy gold years ago. In 2017, she was part of the first class for the Academy Gold Diversity Internship Enhancement Program, which provided a fast-track industry education to “the people who needed it most, those underrepresented in film.” She interned at HBO and at night would go to Academy panels, hearing from everyone from actors to publicists to lawyers. “It was a nice, warm, happy version of a bootcamp!” she recalls.

Her immersion in the arts started early. Since she turned 16, she has been carrying around a notebook that is solely for random thoughts, to help her write. She got her start in acting even earlier.

The West Coast energy raised her, as Pipes credits three Los Angeles nonprofits for stewarding and fostering her young love of performing. The first was Young Storytellers, a mentorship program that came to her elementary school and allowed her to write and perform her own scripts. Pipes loved it so much that she started a chapter at Columbia, and she has worked as a student, mentor, and chapter leader with the program. She also cites Center Theatre Group, where she saw free shows almost once a month growing up, and the Actors’ Gang. With the latter, she performed in a summer park shows through middle and high school.

“As someone with a summer birthday, I think I spent every birthday with them from the ages 11 to 16,” Pipes says of the Actors’ Gang. “It was a lot, but that’s theater! Theater people are just unbeatable.” New England shouldn’t be too jealous, as Pipes calls the Boston theater and acting scene “magical.” And she has high praise for the mentorship from Artistic Director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre Kate Snodgrass, fellow writer/actor and Adjunct Assistant Professor Melinda Lopez, and others in the MFA program. The tuition for the MFA in Playwriting program, which accepts five new students biannually, is fully funded and includes a living stipend, a fact Pipes credits for making graduate school possible for her.

Forging her own path

As she went through primary and secondary schools, Pipes, who identifies as white, black, and Puerto Rican, branched out into writing because of the kind of roles she received as an actress.

“There was a year in high school where I was cast as a silent maid three times in one calendar year,” she says. “I was bucking up against the roles being offered to young women and specifically young women of color.”

She wanted to change the roles available to her and her friends and started writing her own work. She wrote a play her senior year of high school and cast the people generally neglected by the casting system at the high school. She continues to perform in her own work and calls fellow writer/creators Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge inspirations for the way they experiment with form and bring new identities and experiences to audiences.

Creating your own work comes with some logistical questions, about how personal to make it and how to create for an audience that may not be in the room. “My dirty secret is that all of it is so personal,” she says. She doesn’t mean in an autobiographical sense, necessarily, but in that all of the feelings they grapple with are “hers.”

Her 2018 play DREAM HOU$E, which won her a Leah Ryan Fund Prize for Emerging Women Writers in 2019, is the story of two Latinx sisters who go on an HGTV-esque reality TV show to sell their childhood home that is now in a gentrified neighborhood.

“One sister is interested in the idea of money bringing them progress and bringing them a better future, and one is really attached to the house and to their history and culture, and both of them are me,” she says. “The reality TV show is manipulating them and pitting them against each other, and as the playwright that was what I was doing. It was also me!”

She’s also aware of how white a general theater audience and theater subscribers are. When she’s writing a play about a diverse experience, the people whom she is writing the piece for may not even be in the room to see it.

“There’s something complicated about this new appetite for work from writers of color, which I agree with and is wonderful. But this appetite is for work to be consumed by an exclusively white audience. It creates a dilemma for the audience and the writer and the theater itself,” Pipes says. To combat this, she aims to write stories that aren’t about defending the humanity of her characters of color to a white audience but that also speak to the people of color in the room. It also involves working with theaters who will get diverse audiences into the room.

Theater as a civic duty

While her work over the last few years touches on heavy topics such as gentrification, addiction, racism, and immigration, she doesn’t expect her work to solve the world’s problems. She does hope, however, it inspires people to not accept the status quo. “Something that’s so wonderful about theater and the arts is it’s for people to ask questions but not necessarily give answers,” she says. “People don’t walk away from DREAM HOU$E going, ‘Yes, gentrification is solved!’ But I do hope it equips people with new questions to ask of themselves and their communities. The dialogue-starting part of theater is where the activist power lives.”

What’s next is mostly up to her, but also a little bit the world, as the entertainment industry is on hold. She’s currently using some of her Academy funds to pay for basic necessities during the COVID-19 pandemic and has a few proposals out for how to use the funds. Her next play is currently a naturalistic two-parter, a change in form from her previous work. Whatever it becomes, it will come from the personal and socially minded core all her work—since elementary school—has sprung from.

“It feels like a civic thing to do to write a play,” she says. “Artists create culture, and personally knowing how important those plays were when I was in elementary school and the impact those plays had on me, art absolutely is part of bringing culture forward.” And you can count on Eliana Pipes to be part of the creative culture for a long time.

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