Mirror, Mirror: Toward Meaningful TYA Representation

AMERICAN THEATRE: Sarah Bellamy wanted mirrors. At the Theatre Communications Group conference last June, the Penumbra Theatre president invoked Junot Díaz’s notion that vampires don’t have reflections. “If you want to make a human being into a monster,” Díaz once said, “deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” In turn, what inspired his writing “was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”