About
El Chelito—Salvadoran slang for little little white boy—is the artistic name of Eric Swartz, a queer, Salvadoran-American theatermaker. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he is currently based in Los Angeles pursuing an MFA in Directing at UCLA’s School for Theater, Film, and Television and working as the Production Manager for Boston Court in Pasadena.
He is a former Artistic Associate with GALA Hispanic and Associate Artistic Director at Theater Alliance in DC. Additional DMV area collaborators include The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 1st Stage, Extreme Lengths, Imagination Stage, Young Playwrights’, and Pointless Theatre Co., where he is a Company Member. From 2021-2023 he received an Artist Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Adaptation in 2019. Beyond the DMV, he has worked with the Latino Theater Company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, and serves on the Steering Committee of the Latinx Theatre Commons. He graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College with BA in Theater and Dance.
UPCOMING: Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill (Director, UCLA).
artistic statement
Theater is the practice of freedom. Theater invites our independent and collective imaginations to flourish, encouraging audiences towards new dreams, ideas, and realities. Live unmediated performance immediately transmutes the infinite possibilities available to the human form and soul. Gathering is increasingly rare and risky in our technologically integrated contemporary world. Where screens isolate, theater intervenes. My theater is multilingual, physically driven, and environmental, cultivating a space that challenges the world as it is and ushers in the world that could be. My theater is cheeky, punchy, and deliberately ambiguous. My theater increasingly interrogates what it means to be a globally-minded, hyphenated-American in our age of environmental calamity. My theater is curious about how to materialize the transparent lines that connect us through time, space, and vibrations. My practice interrogates the systems and modes of making theater to prioritize the people who make the work over the profits of corporations. My practice draws from my quilt of theater-making experiences—as a performer, stage manager, producer, designer, technician, writer, and director—to alchemize exuberant events that harness theater’s political promise.
Ideas I’m developing…
KELLY!!!
A homemaker in suburban New England hunts down her dog’s murderer. A campy whodunit.
Para Llevar (To Go)
North American refugees working in a bakery in an unnamed Latin American country must decide whether or not to renounce their US citizenship in order to stay in their new country. A bilingual reverse migration play.
PERRAS
A raunchy, rhyming comedy about Gay and Gay4Pay pornstars, and how the OF and JFF revolution radically changed an industry. Inspired by the plays of Lope de Vega and Charles Ludlam.
A Long Table
Obama has just been elected, the 1st iPhone was just released, and the house next door is finally for sale. Thanksgiving 2008 devolves into chaos as longtime friends debate the true meaning of family and cohabitation. A comedy and jazzy jam session.
Tanda (working title)
Latin American women from different countries and social classes discover the limits of assimilating into US culture and society. A bilingual drama inspired by true events.
Coffea Arabica
Form meets content meets kaffee/café/coffee in this trilingual, three-act play about the global coffee trade inspired by my family’s migration from Germany to El Salvador to the United States.
…
Artists who inspire me…
Federico García Lorca
Caryl Churchill
Jean Genet
Pedro Almodovar
James Baldwin
Leonora Carrington
Lady Gaga
Ariane Mnouchkine
Michel Gondry
Lope de Vega
Perfume Genius
Complicité
Ingmar Bergman
Suzan-Lori Parks
Diego Rivera
Walt Whitman
Harry Kondoleon
Rosalía
David Sedaris
Griselda Gambaro
Young Jean Lee
Maria Irene Fornes
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Plays I’d LOVE to direct…
The Balcony by Jean Genet
Fen by Caryl Churchill
Botticelli in the Fire by Jordan Tannahill
Sanctuary City by Martyna Majok
Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega
Bodas de Sangre by Federico García Lorca
Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn
pool (no water) by Mark Ravenhill
Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen
The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks
Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco
Information for Foreigners by Griselda Gambaro
A Number by Caryl Churchill
The Maids by Jean Genet
References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot by José Rivera
Kiss by Guillermo Calderón
The Danube by Maria Irene Fornes
Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
Gross Indecency by Moisés Kaufman
El Público by Federico García Lorca
Night Sweat by Robert Chesley
Cabaret by John Kander, Fred Ebb & Joe Masteroff
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