Pepperoni pizza.

Ma'am?

Can you stop ringing the doorbell?

You're gonna wake up my Good.

Can we just go back to the bakery scene at the beginning?

[Richard] This play might help its audiences sort of reach some kind of different understanding about Miami, about where they live, about what they, where they'd like to live, what is home to them, about their own family and their past, 'cause this play also has a very human story about forgiveness and generational differences.

The heart of the main character belongs to Miami.

It was born here, it was created here and it was, you know, baked here.

It's too sweet.

I told you, .

What can I say?

Cubans love their sugar.

Good.

I'm Richard Blanco, also known as Ricardo de Jesus Blanco.

My name is Vanessa Garcia and I'm the cowriter with Richard Blanco And I'm cowriter with Vanessa, the wonderful Vanessa Garcia on "Sweet Goats & Blueberry Senoritas."

I mean, I think we were an amazing team, you know, on this and it was really, really fun to do.

It's a story that, of course, is very near and dear to her heart, as well as a Miamian, right.

We first took individual characters each I would write a scene and then she'd write the next scene.

And then, eventually, we were writing over each other.

And I'd bounce off of that and then she'd bounce off what I had.

So it became very much one piece.

So it didn't feel like he was writing one thing and I was writing another.

We were just writing one piece, which was really, really great.

It was inspired by questions of home, belonging and identity that have always been part of my work, of my poetry and my memoirs.

Having moved to Maine for 15 years and thinking about that landscape versus the Miami I grew up in, and really just thinking about how we negotiate home.

What did that mean for us?

But also in a sense, the families that we make and the communities that we make in unexpected places.

The play is about a Cuban American woman who has moved to Maine.

She has an estranged relationship with her mom and she's in this place of deciding whether she's gonna go back to Miami or not.

Involved in all of that, is a great big sort of need for forgiveness.

And so the play at the end of the day, is really about family and found family, and what all of that means.

The premiere, the original commission was from Portland Stage in Portland, Maine.

Getting a second production is so important and that Miami is doing that second production is so important.

So it gets to this sort of like come home before it goes out into the world and it's just this great thing 'cause it's sort of like all of us, you know.

It's definitely me and Richard.

I think for such a big immigrant population that we have here, but also myself.

I mean, even if you're a child of immigrants, we still struggle with so many different questions, and so many different joys as well of our cultures.

But there's always a journey involved of what does that mean.

And so to have this in Miami, it's really interesting because Miami is like reverse acclimation.

It actually gets more and more diverse and more and more complex, versus the whole idea of the melting pot where everybody settles into like, you know, a status quo.

Being part of this theater is very, very exciting.

It's a visual and sort of like heartfelt staple of our lives, you know.

I have very personal connections to the space.

I mean, I have so many stories in here from when it was a movie theater.

So I have memories of actually being a little kid here.

But the fact that there's this landmark place that still has that connection to home, right, to memory.

Memory is home, right.

And so to have the physical place there also is doubly special because you can actually just walk back into that memory.

I mean, one of the most exciting things is to have, you know, our play out there on the marquee, which is so beautiful and historic.

And I'm so, you know, it's like one of those things that thank God it still exists and it looks like that, you know.

And it's very much a part of our Miami history.

So it is very exciting to have it here.

People feel very special when they come here.

They have memories of coming here in their youth or bringing their children here.

And it's just something that's fun to hear people say, you know, I remember being here for, I remember being here for.

And now I'd hear them say, oh yeah, I've been here for three, four, five, six of your shows.

Professional regional theater is a theater where everyone on our stage is either aspiring to be a professional and or already are, whether they're union members or nonunion members, whether they're just outta college, whether they've been a veteran for years and years and years.

So you're putting a whole bunch of pros together.

It's also self-produced.

And it kind of speaks to the community that you live in, the town and the area that you live in, the types of shows you do.

I always like to say we're a regional professional theater in your community, instead of a community theater.

We're celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Miracle Theatre this year.

And that's another story unto its own because had we not created that partnership with the city of Coral Gables right after the hurricane, this building would've been sold to discount retail.

We came upon the Miracle Theatre in 1994.

And in 1995, we created a 45year lease.

And it was Actors' Playhouse obligation to build and restore the theater, which was an old movie palace in four stages.

And we had to demolition and rebuild it into the beautiful three stage auditorium it is right now.

When we came in here in 1995, this room that we're sitting in right now, this stage didn't exist.

The movie screen was actually further back.

Where we are right now was actually seats.

There were yellow and red burlap curtains on the side walls.

You didn't even see any of the plaster work.

That plaster work we discovered by finding the blueprints from the 1948 build.

We felt very strongly that as much as we could keep the historic elements of the original 1948 Miracle Theatre movie palace, even though we're turning it into a performing arts center, the better we were.

So the lobby and the sidewalls, the curves and the columns, and just the feel of the place, it was very exciting to restore.

I remember when I was first working on this, I felt like we were breathing new life back into the building.

Like recreating, but building anew also.

We do training all year-round for children from five years up to the golden years.

And all kinds of training, film and acting and musical theater.

All developmental and a lot of fun.

And then we have a conservatory.

And then seeing some of those kids go on to performing arts colleges.

And then seeing those kids go on to Broadway, and film, and television.

And if they go into other careers, they're just better at what they do from the experience in theater.

It's a great feeling to be able to make that difference in the community and people's lives.

We are dedicated to the honor of what has been given to us all these years, as a nonprofit, it's very important as a founder of this organization, as a donor, and a hard worker.

And that, you know, we see the success of this long range.

A jewel like this, you know, needs to be appreciated by the community and supported.

When you sit down and talk about it, that's the legacy.

Talk about the legacy that other people are going to have such wonderful full lives because they came and saw a play that meant something to them.

That's the legacy.

We're really proud that we're doing "Sweet Goats & Blueberry Senoritas."

We have two very talented authors and this is their hometown.

It's a beautiful story.

It has so many of the elements of great theater because it is funny, and it is dramatic, and it is heartfelt.

I don't want to call it a tearjerker, but there are those moments also.

But it's really just about so much discovery, you know.

Good, keep moving, keep moving, keep moving.

Everyone in this town knows someone who has gone through the kind of things that happen in this play.

So it can be that they're hearing something that happened to their neighbor or to a friend.

[David] Here comes bad.

Time of my life.

Wondering why things feel so good.

What is wrong with me?

For me it was so important to be able to play this Cuban character and to dip into my roots, which is so familiar to me, and open my heart and share it with the theater world.

And just knowing that we're all from everywhere now.

It's always an honor and a pleasure to tell the story of my roots and my culture.

It's a universal theme, separation of families and the pain that that causes.

In this case, we see it through the prism of the Cuban diaspora.

So it's particularly moving for me to help tell the story because I'm a Cuban American myself, and I'm an immigrant.

I came from Cuba, I was born in Cuba.

From the beginning of the play, our main characters sort of struggles with, you know, always there, is there, if only there were a place I could sort of be all of me, you know.

And she sort of finds this moment where in the baking of the sweet goat, it's sort of not a place, but this thing that she's making in reconnecting through the food with who she is.

It sort of all comes together in this wonderful way.

It's like, here we have who we are and who we really are, and we can just sort of be together.

And this brings me back to Miami because I feel like having been raised here, that's how I was raised.

You know, it feels very American to me in the best way possible.

So I feel like this play is an American play.

It's not a Cuban American play, it's an American play.

And that is very important to me because I feel that that's who we are.

And I think that when we can get there, that'll feel like success.

You know, if we're like, this is an American play, "Sweet Goats & Blueberry Senoritas" with senoritas in the title is an American play.