Carlos Murillo and Lisa Portes didn’t quite get off on the right foot. “We disliked each other intensely,” says Murillo, a playwright, “for no reason other than we’d heard so many things through mutual friends and the New York theater grapevine and each assumed the other was the most unbearable, pretentious ass on earth.”
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Then in his mid-20s, Murillo, the 1996 winner of the National Latino Playwrighting Award, had just been commissioned by the Joseph Papp Public Theater and New York Shakespeare Festival to write a new play. He set out to create something small—a three-character, one-set drama—and as he sketched out the characters he would often call Portes up on the phone and read her bits of the script. As she gave him feedback, Portes fell in love with the story. “I always thought that if we did decide to work together, this would be the script that made the most sense.”
They got married in 1999. Offspring, which was workshopped that year at the Public (twice) and at the Sundance Theater Lab, drifted to the back burner after a stream of polite rejections from various producers. In 2000 the couple moved to Chicago when Portes was offered a position at DePaul; while she taught and worked on student productions, Murillo founded his own peripatetic theater company and saw another play, Schadenfreude, produced in Los Angeles.
“It’s a bit,” says Murillo, “like staging a Cecil B. De Mille epic with a few rolls of gaffer tape and a gallon of glue.”
