Film Adaptation of Sanchez Play in Production

A film adaptation of Associate Professor of Theater Edwin Sanchez’s play Unmerciful Good Fortune has begun production with Concord Studio. Actress Rosario Dawson will play a lead role and is a producer on the project, according to Deadline.

“I think it’s about the quality of life versus the quantity of life and who gets to decide that,” Sanchez said. “And how sometimes the people we love need more from us than maybe we’re ready to give.”

Unmerciful Good Fortune is a story about a high-profile lawyer, Maritza Cruz, who is pulled into a peculiar case of a young waitress, Fatima, accused of killing 28 people. Fatima claims to be a psychic who can see how someone will die when she touches them and attempts to save her victims from a worse fate by mercy killing them first.

“Unmerciful Good Fortune is one of those truly rare projects that grabs you out of the gate and just doesn’t let go. It’s smart, scary, original and heartbreaking. From the drop, it struck me and I knew I had to come onboard to produce it as well because I simply couldn’t risk it never seeing the light of day because it—it’s not that it doesn’t fit into a box—it simply defies boxes,” Dawson told Deadline.

Sanchez said he was presented with a treatment script by longtime film and television editor Tirsa Hacksaw, who will make her directorial debut with this film. He will not be involved in its production, but he said he hopes to visit the set and meet everyone involved.

“Tirsa did this amazing treatment script that made my jaw drop,” Sanchez said. “Because she respected the material, but she also made it her own in a really wonderful way.”

Before the play was published in 1996, Sanchez thought there was not going to be a market for it since it centers two Latina women in lead roles. When it was first in the workshop phase, he said actresses used to come up to him to express their gratitude.

“They said, ‘I’m not the girlfriend, I’m not the prostitute, and I’m not a gang member.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, sometimes you don’t see yourself represented,’” Sanchez said. “It’s so important to have representation, and if anything, that’s one of the things I really look forward to seeing in this, just it not being a big deal that the leads are Latina.”

The way he writes his characters is a little unusual. They are not perfect, he said. The villain does not always learn or pay for their crimes in the end. He doesn’t write role models—he doesn’t think role models exist. His characters are often confronted by situations and they don’t always make the right choice.

“I write plays with characters you don’t want to have dinner with, but hopefully by the end of the play you understand them,” Sanchez said.

He said he does not go into each character with a specific plan. Their personality, their occupation even, will reveal itself to him as he writes, he said.

“I find that writing is sort of like you have a file cabinet in your brain,” Sanchez said. “You start putting things in, and then all of a sudden, one trigger happens, and the file cabinet pops open, and things like fall into place.”

Sanchez has received acclaim for his work. He has received awards from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, three New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting/Screenwriting Fellowships, the Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship, the Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, and the AT&T On Stage New Play Award. Now he will get to see his work transition from the theatre to the theater.