Shouldering my way through the crowd, I could finally reach the entrance to the performance hall and meet Celia Zubiri. In the middle of the hubbub of the theater hall, this versatile creator was busily handling plenty of students and teachers who were anxious to watch the play. Shortly after the audience was established and Celia gave her welcoming speech, the curtain was raised and the action began. With a deep sigh, Celia invited me to sit at a cozy rounded table, where she relaxed in a surprising readiness for a short chat, and tried to define herself:

I'm a teacher of English, but I always say I'm a writer; …a playwright and a writer of textbooks and fairy tales for children. I have published 16 books and I've written and staged around 60 plays. I've got a membership in Argentores, which is something very important for me, and for the ELT community, because I'm the first playwright who has received this sort of special reward, let's say… because it is not a prize,… I'm the first person in Argentina to receive a membership by writing in English… which is not a usual thing. I was surprised because I never took into account the number of plays I wrote and I became aware of this when I received the membership letter with all the congratulations, and I read about the number of plays written and staged, the number of performances, of audience… and it was quite an interesting experience.

What prompted you to become a scriptwriter?
I think that I was born with that… it's something genetic… I would say. My grandfather was the owner of a bookshop, plus records and cigarettes…the old style, in a small town in Córdoba,…I'm Cordobesa, and I loved playing with the books and I loved reading what I shouldn't have read at that age, when I was seven or nine or ten. So during the long “siestas cordobesas,” instead of sleeping, I went to the store, because the shop was at the front and the house was at the back. I took the key to the door and tiptoed, because everybody was sleeping, and read all the books I could, and then I put them on the shelf as they were. I began reading as soon as I could read and I could understand what I was reading. I think that was how my passion for discovering the mysteries of characters started. Today, whenever I walk along the street and meet people, I unconsciously think of a character. I think to myself, “ Oh! This is beautiful… the way he or she walks, speaks or smiles or laughs…” The thing is I really enjoy reading, and my other passion was to study ballet but my parents didn't let me do so. I wanted to study at the Colón Theatre but my parents would say that that was not well seen and that I had to study English. It took me a long time to join everything: English with music with dancing and theatre. My father made things really difficult for me. In the end, I could get it, but it was a long way…

What's the work behind moving from the story to the script and then to the stage?
It's not very easy but… as everything in life, it's a process. As I was telling you, once I spot characters, I start thinking about the story for that character. Sometimes “things” inspire me to start writing. For example, there's a nice statue of an angel in Buenos Aires. It's very delicate and lovely. I was once driving my car and when I stopped at the traffic light, I saw the statue there and I thought, “this could be an angel to help adolescents,” and there “Teenangel”, one of my plays, was born. Sometimes it's the movie I see or something I read. For instance, in one of my plays for kids, there's a cow that goes to the city to receive a medal and the story is about all the adventures of the cow in the city. My inspiration was La Rural, because there was a cow that was very sad and nobody could cheer her up. She was one of the champions but she was so miserable that she had to be taken to the countryside before she could receive her award. And I thought, “This is lovely, this is a good story: a cow that is sad because she is in the city.” And this is how things happen. I store ideas in my mind, then I write, then I read and reread the stories several times. I write the script and then I present the play to the directors, to the ones who are going to direct the play…we are four directors in The Buenos Aires Players. I then trust in their critical thinking and in their honest opinion about what they have read. Sometimes they say, “This is lovely,” sometimes they don't like it that much, but then I say, “We should change this scene…” We have to defend our positions and ideas because we sometimes disagree,… I'm a bit stubborn…and the other directors are stubborn as well, but this is creation. When we finally come to an agreement, we give the script to the actors, who have their own interpretation of what I have written, so there is when the play starts growing. And it grows in a beautiful way when they start rehearsing, because the characters that I've pictured in my mind come to life.

Are actors endowed with a special talent?
Definitely….I think you need a special gift. In some occasions, I have accepted excellent actors that were very bad singers or that they couldn't dance,… that were so clumsy on stage , and I think actors must develop these abilities.

Are your actors selected or trained in Breakthrough?
No. They are selected through an audition. We don't train actors in Breakthrough. It's a drama school for personal growth, it's a place for English teachers that want to enhance their classes, for people that would like to brush up their English with excellent drama teachers or simply for the ones that can't afford a psychologist… Breakthrough is an informal drama school. It's very nice, very funny and people like it very much.
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