By Erik Kvarnberg
FAU Theatre Lab wants everyone possible to get to know playwright, actor, and stand-up comic Joanna Castle Miller, and this starts with Conversa.
Conversa is an autobiographical play written and performed by Castle Miller, directed by FAU Theatre Lab’s Producing Artistic Director Matt Stabile, and accompanied by live music from Theatre Lab veteran Paul Curtis. Conversa (whose title Castle Miller styles in all capital letters) is about identity, migration, and Castle Miller’s relationship with her ancestors.
“I knew that I wanted to tell a story about my mother and about her journey and about my journey and how those two things relate to each other,” Castle Miller said. “And then as I was writing it, it sort of became clear to me that it was really about the ability, the right of people to go on journeys.”
The chance to work with Stabile and the whole crew at Theatre Lab has opened up the idea for Castle Miller. One of the biggest additions was the addition of multi-instrumentalist Curtis, whose fifth show at Theatre Lab will be Conversa. Curtis will bring a menagerie of instruments and songs to the stage, as Conversa’s plot intertwines with the story of the Sephardic Jewish people, descendants of the ancient Jewish population on the Iberian peninsula.
“It’s been a really steep learning curve, because it’s music that was not necessarily in my vernacular, but that’s part of the fun,” Curtis said. About half of the play’s score will be original compositions by Curtis; the rest will be arrangements of other songs.
Through the rehearsal process with Curtis, Stabile, and Theatre Lab’s team of professionals, Castle Miller is looking at this play with new light, as both the playwright and the sole actor of the show. This includes modification of the script, but also opens up possibilities for set design and the incorporation of music that can change all the way up to opening day.
The origins of Conversa started years ago, with the initial freedom of being able to write as if she had institutional support. What she had written first was a play called Inferna, part of the trilogy that Conversa belongs to. During Inferna, Castle Miller knew there was another story that she couldn’t include in Inferna alone. And so Conversa was written, and will have its debut before Inferna.
To Castle Miller, this story is more than something that happened to her. “This trilogy is about starting out as someone who is deeply close-minded, thinks in a binary, very fundamentalist, very closed-off and insulated way,” she said. “And the transition of that person who I am now is what inspired the story, but then as I was writing it, [I realized] ‘this is something that a lot of us are going through right now.’”
“I think my hope, especially with ‘Conversa,’ more than any other play I’ve written, is that we all start somewhere together, and then we end up somewhere totally different at the end.”
Stabile believes this play will be a favorite for the community, for both its subject and its comedy. “I think audiences are going to be very surprised at how often they are laughing and then, you know, two pages later, like, oh, that just broke my heart a little bit there.”
This set of plays are emblematic of Theatre Lab’s purpose of supporting modern works for the community. “You don’t have to work nearly as hard in new work to find things that you are experiencing right now in your own life,” he said. “The playwrights are living and working and existing in the same exact soup that you’re in.”
Conversa, which opens Friday, and Inferna, which will run from April 11-26, are going to be the final two shows in the current FAU Theatre Lab space in Parliament Hall on the school’s Boca Raton campus, before moving to the Marleen Forkas Studio One Theatre for the 2026-27 season.
If you go
What: Conversa
When: Feb. 6 through Feb. 22. Preview performance is set for 7:30 pm Feb. 6. The regular run starts Feb. 7. Shows are set for Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 pm, and Saturdays and Sundays at 3 pm. Where: Parliament Hall, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton
Tickets: www.fau.edu/artsandletters/theatrelab/venue/, or call 561-297-6124.