{"id":62462,"date":"2022-03-30T10:08:09","date_gmt":"2022-03-30T16:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=62462"},"modified":"2022-04-01T13:05:20","modified_gmt":"2022-04-01T19:05:20","slug":"aftershock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/aftershock\/","title":{"rendered":"Iris Salazar’s New Play Explores the Tremors of the Single Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/h4>\n

Let\u2019s say you\u2019re a single, 45-year-old woman in a religion where people marry young and procreate often. Now you\u2019re about to age out of your LDS \u201cmid-singles\u201d ward, and on top of that you\u2019re still haunted by an earthquake that compounded the isolation you felt during a global pandemic.<\/h4>\n

That\u2019s the backdrop for Iris Salazar\u2019s Aftershock<\/em>, a play that might or might not be about loneliness.\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

\u201cAnd when did you start feeling lonely?\u201d asks Dr. Love Dearest, the therapist\/reality TV host who shares the stage with Teah, a \u201cnon-conservative, full-figured, Morena Mexican who happens to be a virgin.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cMe?\u201d answers Teah. \u201cI\u2019m not talking about me.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Teah is the not-always-reliable narrator of Aftershock<\/em>, which opens April 7 and runs through April 17 at Plan-B Theatre (with streaming April 13-17).<\/h4>\n

Playwright Salazar is also a full-figured, Mexican, celibate LDS woman, who will turn 43 this month. But the play \u2014 its details and its occasional feeling of panic \u2014 is not autobiographical, she says.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cIt\u2019s 50 percent my life, 50 percent embellished.\u201d<\/h4>\n

She was inspired to write Aftershock<\/em> in part by social media posts by unmarried LDS men and women who felt isolated during the pandemic. It\u2019s also a response to statements at church from women who wondered if they were still single because they\u2019d \u201cmessed up something\u201d in their lives \u2014 a sentiment Salazar disagrees with. Her own life, she says, is rich with family, work and friends.\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

In a theater community that at best is often dismissive of the LDS Church, Salazar says she wanted to show what it\u2019s like to be a woman with solid religious beliefs.\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

Aftershock<\/em> begins with Teah \u2014 Dorotea Angelica Maria Garza Gonzalez \u2014 arriving for her very first therapist appointment with Dr. Dearest, only to discover that the doctor has been delayed. As a metronome ticks away, Teah falls into a trance in which she suddenly finds herself on a reality TV show called The Bachelor\u2019s Matchmaker, where she is encouraged to audition by telling the story of her life.<\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Iris Salazar (courtesy Plan-B Theatre)<\/p><\/div>\n

In her actual life, Salazar has never been to a therapist and has only watched a couple of episodes of any bachelor\/bachelorette shows, and in fact prefers true crime podcasts (which, she laughs, is one reason she stays away from dating sites). She did once work in a building where to get to the elevator each morning she had to walk by a matchmaker\u2019s office, but she was never tempted to go in. In 2019 ,she sent an application to the man who posted those \u201cLDS Millionaire looking for his wife\u201d billboards along I-15, but noted in her resume that she is a \u201cliberal Mormon who doesn\u2019t want to have kids.\u201d She says she knew there would be plenty of \u201ccute, blonde, very stereotypical Mormon women\u201d in the applicant pool. \u201cI just did it for the heck of it. I was fully aware I wasn\u2019t the right type.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Salazar wrote her first play \u2014 about a man looking for a trophy wife \u2014 when she was a student at East High in the 1990s, and eventually got a degree in performing arts set design at the University of Utah. She worked for a decade at a juvenile detention center, and currently manages client relations at a local bank.<\/h4>\n

As a member of Plan-B\u2019s Playwrights of Color Writing Workshop, she wrote American Pride<\/em>, which was part of Plan-B’s 2019 \u201c. . . Of Color\u201d collection of short plays. Her first iteration of the play that has turned into Aftershock<\/em> was a light-hearted piece called \u201cSingle Sisters Society,\u201d critiqued by one of her colleagues as \u201ccute in a Jane Austen kind of way\u201d \u2014 so in rewrites Salazar says she tried to veer away from \u201chappy and perky.\u201d When she eventually realized that her main character had made an appointment with a therapist, she thought \u201cUh-oh, now I have to get personal.\u201d The resulting script is a straightforward recitation of recollections that include drunken roommates and a sexual assault. And the memory of an earthquake.\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

\u201cI was home, sleeping when the earthquake started,\u201d Teah tells Dr. Dearest near the end of Aftershock<\/em>. \u201cI really thought I was going to die that day, all alone in a king-sized bed. The quake was strong and fast, but in those six seconds I felt so alone, and all the loneliness that came with that filled me. I imagined that if I died, it would be days before anyone found my body.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Estephani Cerros as Teah in Iris Salazar’s Aftershock at Plan-B Theatre (photo by Sharah Meservy)<\/p><\/div>\n

In Salazar\u2019s real life, she confesses with her easy laugh, she slept through the Salt Lake valley 5.7 magnitude quake of 2020, woke up when she heard her mother screaming, heard her brother taking care of the situation, checked in with her siblings by video, and went right back to sleep.<\/h4>\n

World premiere of Aftershock<\/em> by Iris Salazar, Plan-B Theatre<\/a>, Salt Lake City, Apr. 7-22.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s say you\u2019re a single, 45-year-old woman in a religion where people marry young and procreate often. Now you\u2019re about to age out of your LDS \u201cmid-singles\u201d ward, and on top of that you\u2019re still haunted by an earthquake that compounded the isolation you felt during a global […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1705,"featured_media":62695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[4123,1624],"class_list":["post-62462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theatre","tag-iris-salazar","tag-plan-b-theatre-company"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/iris_salazar.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-13 19:47:29","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1705"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62462"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62885,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62462\/revisions\/62885"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}