About the Play

Waiting for Guacamole is set in and around an antebellum house on the southern Gulf coast of Florida. Most scenes take place under a mammoth, 40-foot avocado tree growing in the house’s back yard.

Waiting for Guacamole was inspired by Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot (1948). Written over five decades later, Waiting for Guacamole is not a modern retelling of the Beckett play, but rather a comedic drama inspired by and loosely based upon the literary classic.

The protagonist—Ezmeralda—is a broke artist. She pays a visit to her former lavish home and tells her successful, remarried ex-husband—Xavier—that she is no longer able to contribute to their son’s finances. Xavier lets Ezmeralda know that she should have no problem making money: “There’s just one thing that you’re good for—labor!”

Exhausted from struggling in life, and tired of waiting for something good to happen, Ezmeralda gives in to Xavier’s notion that she “thinks too big” and that small paintings can fetch money. He insists, “Just pick something. Anything! Paint a tree, or paint those avocados in my yard.” When her artistic vision takes over, painting avocados becomes Ezmeralda’s obsession. She begins to feel a “connection with the botanical,” and plants herself in Xavier’s yard every morning.

A hurricane looms in the Gulf while conflicts—old and new—inch towards the surface, pushing Ezmeralda’s ex, his new wife Hyacinth, and their children—Hunter and Zelda—to the brink.

Author’s Note

Waiting for Guacamole explores a shift away from existential philosophy of the 1950s and Christian lore of the present. It is an attempt to mirror and grasp an existence that embraces layers of meaning, dialectical cycles of redemption, justice and forgiveness, a twist of new age science—and the act of creativity itself.

—Elizabeth Indianos

© Elizabeth Indianos

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