Photo courtesy of Daysha Veronica's Instagram.

It all started in high school. Daysha Veronica wanted to audition for Madge in Picnic by William Inge, but when she started reading the sides and learning more about the character, she realized how the part was made for a white woman. Veronica did not see herself in the role and that’s the moment she first understood the impact the playwright has.

“I feel like that was the first experience that really impacted me,” she says, “realizing that playwrights set the image for directors and others to follow. So if a playwright is writing in a particular way that only describes white people, then people like myself are never going to be part of these works.” 

Veronica’s experience altered the way she viewed the trajectory of her career in theatre, ultimately focusing on elevating stories about Black women in her work.

While she attended Scripps College for undergrad, Veronica got to do just that when she participated in the National Dr. Floyd Gaffney Competition at UC San Diego during her senior year. The competition that allowed students to submit unpublished plays on the African American experience awarded the writer of the winning script an honorarium and the opportunity to have a staged reading of their play. 

“I took that as the challenge that I needed to finally jump into this field that I always wanted to get into, but for whatever reason, didn't find the time,” Veronica says of the competition.

Veronica's play Sisters/Sistahz won, providing her an experience that cemented her love for playwriting. As she heard people read the words she wrote, she realized that it was the feeling she’d been craving.

“For me, as an artist, I enjoy fields that give me a sense of creative freedom to really talk about things that we don't talk about,” she explains.

While at UC San Diego for the competition, she got to see the world of playwriting up close and later attended UCLA to get her MFA in playwriting after spending four years working at BuzzFeed. However, grad school wasn’t what she imagined. 

“It was just really challenging to want to tell the stories I wanted to tell that were primarily around Black female stories, and constantly having to explain yourself or people invalidating things just because they don't understand. Am I a better writer for going to grad school? Yes,” she continues. “But am I happy that I went through what I had to go through? No.” 

Her experience brought her to coaching as she desired to help others who went through the same struggles in grad school. In the process, she learned along with the people she taught.

“I wanted to provide an environment for Black women, in particular, to be able to just work on what they want to work on and not have to deal with all the BS that I had to deal with,” she says. 

In her own work, Veronica realized that she was writing specifically for Black women and her struggles in grad school stemmed from the fact that her program had little to no other Black women who would understand her work.

“I write to give Black women catharsis,” Veronica says. “I write to give Black women the ability to just exist, whether that is as a messy protagonist, or a villain—all of the facets of being a complex person in the world.”

She explains that as long as Black women in the audience “feel that catharsis or they feel like they’re being seen, then that’s all that matters.”

Since grad school, Veronica has found new spaces and places that have welcomed her work. One of those being Playground, a playwriting incubator where writers create a 10-minute play each month for six months in their PlayGround-LA’s Writers Pool. The play titled The Deliverance (previously titled Mother Earth Day) was later commissioned to be developed into a full-length production through the organization’s New Play Commission. There is soon to be a developmental production of the play this Spring.

“Seeing this play evolve from a little 10-minute [thing] that I didn't think was going to be anything into this thing that so many people are championing and that I've gotten so much support on—that's been huge for me,” Veronica says.

Now Veronica is part of IAMA Theatre Company’s Under 30 Playwrights Lab, a one-year residency with the company that allows everyone in the cohort to workshop and develop their work. 

“That [IAMA Under 20 Playwrights Lab] has been a huge resource for me,” she says. “When I applied, I was just like, I am really looking for BIPOC. Community. I feel like I'm never really able to work on my work with my folks, and that's just huge for me.”

Veronica wants to write things that are outside of the typical three-act structure and the typical ideas of what theatre is. She recalls a reading from grad school by Suzan-Lori Parks: “I have no qualms with like Lorraine Hansberry—I think her work is beautiful—however, when I think about my own work, I just felt like that naturalistic structure couldn't house the figures that were living inside of me.”

Similarly, Veronica approaches her work by creating complex characters and watching their stories mingle in a single space. She specifically thinks about plays like Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play which just concluded its run at the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles.

“I love theatre that’s able to produce an experience out of you rather than just hitting you over the head with information,” she explains. “It’s the circumstances of what is happening that can produce that feeling of anxiety or produce that feeling of anger or stress or whatever it is.”

While she has productions and plays coming along in 2022, Veronica is dedicated to making every new and existing opportunity evolve and impact her career. No matter what, she is dedicated to making her words heard.

“I'm going to get where I'm gonna get whether it's here or somewhere else,” she says, “but you're not going to leave me hanging.”