Class of 1986

Playwright MELINDA LOPEZ seizes a chance to fly.

Set in 1961 Cuba and post-9/11 America, Lopez's Sonia Flew is a tale of two different nations in two different eras, bridged by the often-wrenching choices made by parents and children in perilous times. "Sonia Flew is something special," raves Boston Globe critic Ed Siegel. "It is a play for our age."

It's also the latest offering by the award-winning playwright, who was the first recipient of the Charlotte Woolard Award, given by the Kennedy Center to a "promising new voice in American theater and creator of MidnightSandwich/Medianoche, The Order of Things and God Smells Like a Roast Pig (which she performed as an artist-in-residence in Hanover in 1999). The story was inspired by Lopez's own family: Her cousin was a Pedro Pan child, one of 14,000 sent to Miami from Cuba on fake American visas and visa waivers to be cared for until their parents could join them. Some families never reunited, and those children were placed in foster homes around the country. "It was the idea that you could have a normal life and never think you had anything buried that would sneak up on you and slap you upside the head," she told the BostonGlobe, that propelled her to write a play about the repercussions of the exodus of Pedro Pans later in life.

Sonia Flew will be at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida, in April 2006.