Delivering guilty pleasures smartly

If as many as two billion people watch telenovelas, or a regional version of the episodic melodramas, as some reports suggest, then it can’t come as a surprise that so many of us have a story about, well, our “stories.” “My stories” — that’s how the beauticians on the Kearney Street storefront strip in the Park Hill neighborhood referred to their soaps, the cousin of the telenovelas.

Karen Zacarías, Playwright

“There was one with a girl who ran on the beach,” the award-winning playwright Karen Zacarías recounted recently of the telenovela she watched as a kid. “And every time we were on the beach, my sister and I would do that.” She stopped to imitate a slow-motion montage of the surf scene with mirth. Even at a tender age, she was tuned into the drama but also the pleasures of telenovelas.

When Zacarías returned to the genre as a playwright in the mid-2010s, it was with a different lens. As one of the cofounders of the Latinx Theatre Commons, a national network of theater-makers working to expand and deepen representation, she discovered that she was not alone in her frustration with the ways the word “telenovela” was often used by theater reviewers to describe performances and plays by Latiné artists. “It’s a shorthand. It’s always used in a kind of derogatory fashion. It’s never like, oh, this is wonderful.” A gauntlet was thrown.

“I remember thinking, I’m going write the best darn telenovela,” Zacarías said on a video call.  And so, she set about interrogating the genre, planning to make clear what it actually is, so that culturally clumsy critics couldn’t easily equate it with every other play performed or written by and about the boundless Latino experience.

Only a funny thing happened on the way to writing that play. Zacarías found she also had to question the discomfort she and her fellow creatives felt with the comparison. “Why do we get offended by being called a telenovela?” she recalled thinking. “What is it about us? Why are we so snobby?” As she watched anew, she made a discovery. “What happens with melodrama is that you sit there going, ‘oh, this is so stupid.’ And then suddenly you’re like [she feigns a gasp] ‘What’s going on!?’”

There will be gasps aplenty when the Castillo and Del Rio families of the fictional town of Bellarica, Mexico, take the stage in — cue the portentous music — Destiny of Desire. There will also be laughter. How could you not giggle at the disaster that befalls Fabiola Castillo, grasping second wife of casino owner Armando, when she asks Dr. Mendoza to switch her dying infant with the healthy newborn child of the wondrously compassionate Hortensia Del Rio (the Castillo’s housekeeper) and her hard-laboring husband Ernesto?

Non-spoiler alert: the baby does not die and 18 years later, Pilar Esperanza Castillo and Victoria María Del Río meet none the wiser. They will also meet love interests, for what is a telenovela if not a compendium of the ways romance can be vexed? And whatever you do, do not underestimate Sister Sonia, the nurse who knows all and conducts some of the action. Let’s hope that this nurse has better luck looking out for these star-crossed babies.

As playful as the script is, make no mistake Zacarías hasn’t written a spoof. “Oh, no, that’s not my intent at all,” she said. Instead, she teased and tested the question, “What does it mean if we try to make it feel like higher art?” Still, like any telenovela worth its salty tears, Destiny of Desire touches on class, on romance, on betrayal, on cultural even religious mores but with twists.

Zacarías subtitled the work, A Brechtian Telenovela in Two Acts. A disruptor of traditional theater, the 20^th-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht, liked to remind his audiences that they were watching something made-up, something performed. Fourth wall be breached. Yes, he would entertain but he rebuffed escapism. Actors carried placards and acknowledged that they were acting. Unlike their role in traditional musical theater, songs weren’t included to further emotions too big for the characters to express in words but arrived instead as yet another mode of interruption. Another nudge to think again. Thinking is part of the pleasure for Zacarías.

“With melodrama comes the idea of music, right? — melos is part of that,” Zacarías said about her own use of songs in the play. Indeed, Zacarías’ sense of the powerful influence of melody on storytelling may have been heightened at the time she spoke with Applause. She had just returned home to Washington, D.C. from the world premiere of Basura at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre. She’s written the book for the musical by mother-daughter duo Gloria and Emily Estefan, about an orchestra of Paraguayan children who made instruments of the detritus they found at the landfill near their homes. It’s based on the 2015 documentary Landfill Harmonic.

Destiny of Desire is the fourth Zacarías play produced by the Theatre Company. Mariela in the Desert, Native Gardens, and Just Like Us (her adaptation of the author Helen Thorpe’s nonfiction book about four friends on Denver’s Northside whose divergent immigration statuses become an issue as they prepare for college) found a home on the Denver Center’s stages. (Last spring, Zacarías’s trimmed down version had a lauded run at Su Teatro.) With this latest play, she becomes the most produced female playwright in the Theatre Company’s nearly 50-year history, appearing on all three main stages.

“I’m very excited that I’m getting to come back to Denver. I love Denver, it’s been home to me in many ways.” — Karen Zacarías, Playwright

For this mounting of Destiny of Desire, Zacarías and director Marcela Lorca asked themselves time and again, “How do we make it beautiful? It’s a really interesting experiment in tone,” she believes. “The word everyone keeps using is subversive. That it feels subversive.” Audiences laugh and gasp, but somewhere Brecht is grinning.

READ MORE

• Playwright’s Note: Karen Zacarías on Destiny of Desire

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