In Part 1 of our first Theatre in Community interview with Teatro de la Luna’s Nucky Walder and her daughter and fellow theater artist, Marcela Ferlito, we discuss Luna’s origin. Nucky and her husband Mario Marcel, from Paraguay and Argentina, respectively, wanted to create a theatre that addressed the needs of greater DC’s burgeoning Latino population. After working briefly with GALA Hispanic Theatre and the late Hugo Medrano and company, Mario and Nucky founded Teatro de la Luna. Luna combined productions from countries south of the border as well as acting classes, children’s theatre, an international theater festival, and poetry marathons to celebrate the language and culture of all things Latin American.
Part 2 focuses specifically on Luna’s work with young people and on the challenges and advantages of working in a theatrical family.
A quick note to listeners: On each episode of our Theatre in Community series, we include a glossary of theatre terms and names referenced in the interview.
Elizabeth: Welcome to the Theater and Community interview series of Creativists in Dialogue, a podcast embracing the creative life. I’m Elizabeth Bruce.
Michael: And I’m Michael Oliver.
Elizabeth: And our guests today are Nucky Walder and Marcela Ferlito of Teatro de la Luna. Teatro de la Luna was founded in 1991 as a 50(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose purpose is to provide the Washington capital area, both its Spanish-speaking community and its English-speaking community, with a source of high-quality theater as seen from a Latin American perspective. Their mission is to promote Hispanic culture and foster cross-cultural understanding between the Spanish- and English-speaking communities of our region via Spanish-language theater and bilingual performing arts. It forwards its mission by producing plays, by teaching theater workshops to adults and children, by organizing poetry marathons, and by producing international [00:01:00] festivals of Hispanic theater. All of these activities provided opportunities for community dialogue, participation, reflection, and support. Their vision is for a living, working theater with salaried actors that trains Hispanic and non-Hispanic actors and theater technicians, provides bilingual theater-related workshops and camps for children and teens, promotes the beauty of the Spanish language, and produces new and unique forms of Hispanic theater to the greater Washington area.
Nucky Walder, born in Paraguay, was a member of the 1970s group Tiempovillo, with which she acted throughout most of Latin America. She founded the Grupo Teatro Universitario and La Máscara, while participating in Teatro Arlequín as well. In 1984, she arrived in the USA where she first collaborated with GALA Hispanic Theatre. For three years the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities awarded her and Elizabeth Bruce funding for the “Bilingual Drama/Literary Workshops” program for students attending Bancroft Elementary School in Mount Pleasant. In 1991, Nucky Walder co-founded Teatro de la Luna where she participates as producer and has acted in more than 20 productions. Her most recent appearance onstage being in Heartstrings in 1999, together with Mario Marcel. Nucky Walder was recognized for her artistic work with the Tony Taylor Award from the Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington and last year she was presented the “Latino Woman Leadership 2009” award by Fiesta DC for her contribution to Latino culture and the arts.
Marcela Ferlito, also born in Paraguay, has been involved with theater since age six. She studied at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in DC and received an [00:03:00] Associate Arts from Montgomery College and a B.A. from the University of Maryland. She is currently an actor, teacher, and coordinator for Teatro de la Luna’s Experience Theater Program. Her nominations include Best Actress for Nuestra señora de las nubes, and, along with Mickey Thomas, they were awarded Best Production for that same production at the 7o Festival Internacional de Teatro Hispano Comisionando Dominicano de Cultura in New York in 2016. She was nominated as Best Actress for her Eyes Wide Open at the 7o Internacional Festival de Teatro Hispano in Kodokul, New York in 2017. And at the same festival in 2019, she performed What If We Stay In Love. Marcela has performed with GALA Hispanic Theater, Source Theatre, Horizons, Montgomery College, [00:04:00] and at various theater festivals in Las Vegas, Nevada; Pueblo, Mexico; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and New York. She is currently one of Teatro de la Luna’s Experience Theater teachers for adults, teenagers, and children. She tours metropolitan area schools with the bilingual productions, The Cat and the Seagull, Let’s Play Theater and Sing-Along with Gabo and Mate. Bienvenido, Nucky y Marcela.
Marcela: Gracias, Elizabeth y Michael. Thank you so much.
Michael: So we like to start at the beginning of a person’s creative life. So Nucky, can you share with our listening audience your first experiences of creativity, either as a witness or as a participant?
Nucky: As a participant, I will say. Yeah, because I used to take [00:05:00] recital classes, poetic interpretation classes, when I was seven, eight, nine years old. And the teachers also picked me to recite during the events, the commemorating the special dates in the school calendar. And I loved to do it. Oh, I love it, I love it! Also, I remember when I was eight years old, I performed, or we dramatized, really, a poem, and it was to collect funds for the church in our neighborhood in Asunción, Paraguay.
Michael: Oh, and do you remember the name of the poem?
Marcela: Mi muñeca enferma.
Elizabeth: Oh, “My Sick Doll.” Yes.
Nucky: “My Sick Doll.” I remember getting to the stage, which was the altar of the church, and I stepped down and, oh [00:06:00] my god, it was very theatrical for my age, and I really remember when I was eight years old, I was in third grade, I think. Yeah.
Michael: Now your husband and co-founder of Teatro de la Luna, Mario Marcel, do you have any knowledge of what his first experiences of creativity might have been?
Nucky: Oh, he started very early too, at the age of six, performing with his father, yeah, because his father was very involved.
Michael: Oh, so he comes from a theatrical family?
Nucky: His father was an opera director.
Elizabeth: Oh, an opera director!
Michael: Oh, okay.
Nucky: And he traveled with his father and accompanied him in every situation. So he started very early also. I remember myself being an hongo, a fungus, a [00:07:00] mushroom, and I remember the costume for it. And I was 4 years old.
Elizabeth: Oh, wow.
Nucky: I really remember that, what they prepared for me.
Michael: And Marcela, what about you? What are your earliest, sort of, experiences?
Marcela: So I—
Nucky: When she was in my tummy.
Marcela: My mom, actually, funny story, an ironic story, she was playing a nun while she was pregnant!
Michael: Oh, there we go. So you were born with a head full of contradictions.
Marcela: There you go. No, I performed when, so when we came here to the States we, my earliest memory is performing at GALA Hispanic Theater, actually, which is where I did my first little steps. And I remember I took it very seriously. I was six years old, and I was in The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife by Lorca. [00:08:00] And I just had, literally, I was supposed to be on stage like two minutes in a fight scene, and somebody was supposed to take me out, but I took it so seriously. I wanted to stay backstage, and then, after being on stage, I wanted to go backstage again until it was curtain call.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I can imagine. Curtain call for a young child.
Marcela: Exactly.
Elizabeth: So Nucky, can you tell our listeners how you and Mario, respectively, first got into performing in theater and traveling in theater? What was your first theater experience in Latin America?
Nucky: In Latin America—I met Mario because he used to be the director of the Arts and Humanities for the northern part of Argentina, in Jujuy. And he renovated a big theater, the first year in Salta, and he [00:09:00] used to go to Asunción, Paraguay with the company that he founded there in Ingenio La Esperanza, because the cane sugar, they, it’s a big empresa. How do you say “empresa?”
Marcela: A big company, a big sugar cane company.
Nucky: Sugar company. The owners actually were from London.
Marcela: Yeah.
Elizabeth: Oh, they were English?
Nucky: Ingleses. Yes. Yeah, from England. And I met, I saw him performing, but then when he came for the third or the fourth time, we asked him to direct El Grupo de Teatro Universitario. We couldn’t afford what he asked. When, after that, another troupe make a contract with him, and he offer [00:10:00] for free. That’s when I met Mario.
Elizabeth: It’s quite a bargain, really.
Nucky: So, and it was about 1980, ‘81, and then we got married, and then Marcela, and then were here.
Elizabeth: And the rest is history. Nucky, you and Mario both have professional training in theater. Can you tell us a little bit about your early university training?
Nucky: In my case, no, I am an experiential learning product. It’s just from my heart and my passion. But I did attend in many seminars and workshops in different countries. Remember I went to Rio de Janeiro, and I went to Buenos Aires. And then when we traveled, we participated in many workshops as well as sharing our experiences with other [00:11:00] people in Latin America.
Marcela: I think it’s also important to mention that when Nucky was in the university, she’s an architect by trade, in the ‘70s, doing theater and the arts was not something really well looked upon in Paraguay. Especially due to the political situation that was going on in Latin America, doing the arts was not well looked at, and it was very frowned upon. And so, it was very much under the covers. So she actually did have a theater company with the other architects that she was studying with, and all of that was done—I wouldn’t say in a clandestine way, but it wasn’t very much out in the open because it wasn’t very well looked upon. So, I think that they had many schools of learning with what was going on there.
Nucky: What I remember is one time we had to change or cut [00:12:00] the title of the play because at that time we have to submit the script to the—
Marcela: The festivals?
Nucky: No, to the Municipalidad de Asunción, Cultural Department.
Marcela: The Cultural Department of the Municipality of Asunción.
Nucky: Yeah.
Marcela: The Cultural Affairs Division, it would be.
Michael: Oh, you had to get permission from the government?
Nucky: Yes, and they will come and check.
Marcela: Because of the political situation. Yes.
Elizabeth: Check the content and see if it would be considered dissident or subversive or—
Marcela: Yes.
Nucky: For example, a play was written, the title was La tortura como una de las bellas artes. “The Torture as one of the…” bellas artes, beaux arts?
Marcela: Beaux arts, one of the the—
Elizabeth: Torture as fine art.
Marcela: Exactly.
Nucky: We cut “La Tortura”. We had to cut “la tortura” from the [00:13:00] script.
Elizabeth: So you had to cut the word “torture.”
Nucky: And we say, “Como una de las bellas artes.” Just like us!
Marcela: One of the fine arts!
Nucky: One of the fine arts!
Elizabeth: There’s no political content there, sure.
Nucky: Because I don’t know if reading the script, they understood what we wanted to say. They never understand.
Michael: So you and your fellow architects created a theater company, a theater group?
Nucky: Yes. And with other people also. It was, at that time, it was one that was studying medicine. Also another one that came from Brazil. Some other studying periodismo.
Marcela: Journalism.
Nucky: Journalism.
Nucky: The thing is that all my fellow architects, they ended in, just, in the path of theater. [00:14:00] Like Ricardo Miller is a great painter and Agustin Nuñez, and Teresa Gonzalez, many of them just ended doing theater. And architecture, behind.
Marcela: I think it was also, I think it was because of the time period and, probably you all know this very well also, they had to find a way to express themselves as humans. And they found that theater was something that was… the vehicle to do it with. They were dealing with dictatorships in Latin America in the ‘70s and so, they had to find a way. And building houses wasn’t really allowing them to get out what was inside, that visceral feeling of what’s going on in this country and in these countries. So, let’s try and do it through poetry, through dance, through [00:15:00] movement, through theater.
Michael: They didn’t know how to design a dissident building.
Marcela: Yes! Exactly.
Elizabeth: You probably have to get permission for that, too.
Marcela: Exactly.
Nucky: Remember, by that time we had the great dictatorship, Stroessner. Alfredo Stroessner. That was really tough. Yeah, we couldn’t meet more than two, three people on the streets.
Elizabeth: Oh.
Nucky: They would come and say, “Hey! Go away!”
Elizabeth: Oh, if you were assembling, yeah. If you had two or three people on the streets gathered together on the streets—
Nucky: The police will come and say—
Elizabeth: That would be a demonstration.
Nucky: Yes.
Elizabeth: And so they would come and arrest you or something.
Nucky: Yeah.
Michael: But you could have a theater performance with more than that, obviously.
Nucky: We had theater performances and, but we couldn’t know who was coming with severe intentions.
Michael: Sure.
Nucky: So we were very careful.
Elizabeth: So this must have informed your decision and Mario’s decision to come to the [00:16:00] United States.
Nucky: Plus the economic situation. Living for Mario was so hard, being a stranger in Asunción, Paraguay.
Elizabeth: Oh, for Mario, because Mario is from Argentina.
Nucky: From Argentina. And Argentina, it was like an intruso. ¿Cómo se dice “intruso?”
Marcela: An intruder.
Nucky: An intruder in the area. When he was invited to come to direct, great, but staying there in Paraguay was just so difficult. So we decided to look for other ways.
Elizabeth: Other ways. Bringing your journey back to the United States, I wanted to ask you, Marcela, about your training. You’re originally from Paraguay, but you’ve been in this country for most of your life. And you had early training both with Teatro de la Luna, obviously, and at Duke Ellington School of the Arts and then ultimately with the University of Maryland. [00:17:00] Can you tell us a little bit about your early training?
Marcela: Sure. Yeah, I was really—
Nucky: Domestic training.
Marcela: Yeah, exactly. A lot of domestic training.
Nucky: Home training.
Elizabeth: Homeschooled.
Marcela: Exactly! A lot of going to rehearsals. And then I do remember, since we all have known you for quite some time, I remember both Elizabeth and Michael saw my audition for Duke Ellington School of the Arts. My mom said, I think it was a day or two before, my mom said, “Go show them!” And so, we quickly went to Northeast and said, “Please look at my monologue. I have an audition in two days for Duke Ellington School of the Arts.” And yeah, at that time, it was, I remember, now Ellington has changed a lot and it looks wonderful. The programming is fabulous, and they’ve changed the school just architecturally and it’s wonderful. [00:18:00] I remember it was one monologue and I decided, even though my training, a lot of it was hands on here at La Luna with my parents, day in and day out, I said, why don’t I, this school is opening its doors, and it’s giving us this opportunity, why don’t I go ahead and take it? And so I decided to do my high school years there. So, I did 9th through 12th at Duke Ellington. And, as if that wasn’t enough, I said, I’m gonna study theater in college. And so, I then went on to getting the AA at Montgomery College and then the BA at University of Maryland.
Nucky: And then keep working.
Elizabeth: And then keep working. Continuing Escuela de la Luna. Oh my goodness.
Let me talk to you both to you Nucky first about Teatro de la Luna’s origin story. The theater was incorporated as a [00:19:00] 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 1991 by you and your husband Mario Marcel. Tell us more about the theater’s origin story. Why did you decide to start your own theater?
Nucky: We were really concerned about training our fellows, our community. Actors who didn’t have a place to receive acting preparation, no? So that was the main, the first step. Opening the Taller Actoral, the Acting Workshop, in Arlington. And then even—we were incorporated here, we were registered in Virginia. But the first step was prepare actors for the stage. And the first play was done by professional actors, Mario and Carlos. And I can’t remember the name—
Marcela: Clear. [00:20:00]
Nucky: Clear. In Catonsville also. Beause we wanted to go to Arlington, Catonsville, and DC, but it was too much. But then came the recession from Bush government and it was really awful. The, even the philosophy, I think, of the Department of Arts in Catonsville changed. Remember, the director was not working anymore. And we stay in Arlington. And that was a lot. Michael, you helped us with the lighting. But training those actors—
Elizabeth: These would be Spanish-speaking actors or bilingual actors.
Nucky: Spanish or bilingual, yeah. But mainly Spanish were at that time. We didn’t do the simultaneous interpretation at that time, at the very beginning. We did it later. But we saw the need. And Mario has a big quality about training actors, right? [00:21:00] Being by side with the actors, with the people that want to be on stage. So that’s the main contribution of Mario.
Preparing actors that then went to work at GALA, went to work somewhere else, many people that are in different jobs now has been at La Luna.
Michael: So how much time elapsed between doing the workshops to train actors and the founding of the theater itself and the doing of a production? Was there a gap? How many years?
Nucky: No, dear, months. Months.
Michael: Months, okay.
Nucky: Yeah, because it was started in 1991 in October where we were showing Yepeto. And then soon in March, I think, we already were—
Marcela: ¿Enrique … estás?
Nucky:¿Enrique … estás?
Michael: We had a conversation with Joy Zinoman at Studio and in ‘75 she establishes the Conservatory, and I think it was ‘78 that the theater—so she trains these actors [00:22:00] for three years and then—
Michael: Sure.
Nucky: Very familiar.
Marcela: Very familiar.
Elizabeth: Speaking of passion, we know that you were, that Teatro de la Luna and all of you were very close to the late Hugo Medrano, who was co-founder and artistic director of GALA Hispanic Theater, who died suddenly this past summer, and we know Rebecca Medrano, Abel López, and other leadership at GALA are renewing the theater’s commitment to moving forward, so we extend our deepest condolences to you for the loss of your longtime friend and colleague, Hugo. Can you tell our listeners briefly about your early collaborations and work with Hugo Medrano and Teatro GALA?
Nucky: Yeah. Mario was performing almost in every play [00:24:00] for about five years. Five and a half, I think. He couldn’t do one or two plays because he had a knee problem. Because he hurt—
Marcela: During a show.
Nucky: But he did such a good matching with Hugo. On stage.
Elizabeth: I remember.
Nucky: It was lovely. Lovely. Yeah. And they did plays with, two outdoor plays and it was really—
Marcela: Magical.
Nucky: Enjoyable. Magical.
Marcela: Yeah. It was very nice.
Nucky: Such a great complement for Mario’s abilities. And Mario was a nice complement to Hugo’s abilities too. Talent.
Marcela: We used to compare them to, not in the comedic sense, to Laurel and Hardy, because one was tall and thin, and the other one was short and fat. [00:25:00] It was like the number 10, or 01, as they say.
Elizabeth: That’s true. What was that show where they were all dressed in tuxedos?
Marcela: Matatangos! Yes!
Nucky: With Yayo Grassi, also a great actor.
Elizabeth: That was a great production.
Marcela: Matatangos.
Michael: You mentioned that a little while ago that, initially, it was pretty much a Spanish-only theater. Obviously, and then you mentioned that there was this influx of immigrants who were obviously not only Spanish-speaking, and you were working with that community, but then eventually you did bilingual productions or at least had simultaneous translations, etc. Can you talk us through that decision and how I assume it had something to do with the evolving community that you were playing to, etc.?
Marcela: Yes.
Nucky: Yeah. We feel that we have to share with our Anglo speaking friends what we do. [00:26:00] And they can know more about us through the theater, through our performances. So it’s an art of sharing in the community. Enjoying together, what we do.
Marcela: Yeah, I think that both GALA and Luna, we came to a point where we said we could also grow our audiences by providing simultaneous English interpretation. And so, we started doing that and we used to do that, I remember, each theater in their own way. But we, for example, would do it in a dressing room and we did it through a little monitor and we had the microphones and we had little radio sets that we would give people to listen to the translation and it wasn’t until years later, after 2000, we started doing the PowerPoint, the [00:27:00] simultaneous translation through PowerPoint.
Nucky: With the supertitles.
Marcela: With the supertitles, yeah.
Elizabeth: Subtitles?
Nucky: Supertitles.
Elizabeth: Super. Because they were above!
Marcela: And I think that’s—also we said, also to keep up with society, because that’s also what theater is about. You have to keep up with what’s going on.
Nucky: And unity.
Marcela: Also because everything, you know very well, everything now is electronic and so you have to keep up and so we said, okay, we’re gonna do the translation and that’s the way it was. And so is the same with, and you know this very well with teaching with my mom, Elizabeth, the theater for children, we decided to do it bilingual. We used to just perform in Spanish until we said we have to branch out and add some English because we have so many schools that there are students who are not understanding or schools that don’t have bilingual programming, [00:28:00] that don’t have a Spanish immersion program or a Spanish class. And we said, “We need to add some lines in English.” And that’s where we started doing bilingual theater programs and plays, especially for kids.
Elizabeth: Let me expand this conversation into the different facets that Luna has had over the years. Over time, you’ve had four distinct programs. You’ve always had productions. For many years, you had your International Festival of Hispanic Theater. You have Experiencia Teatral or Experience Theater, which is going strong, as well as the Maratón de la Poesía, or Poetry Marathon. So, can you tell us how you came to launch each of these many dimensions and talk a little bit more about each one?
Nucky: It’s just to embrace more people in the community. To open the door to the poets. To open the door to the actors that, [00:29:00] during the festival, came. We receive about almost 400 actors during the festivals.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Nucky: Yeah. To the area. To share experiences from different countries. And I think that we owe to Panama, we never had Panama. But we have all other countries’ representatives, but we couldn’t get Panama during the festivals. But maybe later, no? We’ll have time to know more people, to know more people later. But that was in the area of the production of festivals, contacting, since we have many connections in our countries, and we brought the people to perform here. And we used to look for good actors. The best actors, sometimes. From Argentina, from Uruguay, from Peru, [00:30:00] Venezuela. Great representatives, really.
And in terms of the productions, since Mario is Argentinian, he is easily pick up plays from Argentina, but we are open also to plays from Spain or other countries, of course. But with an international festival, we open the door to many countries.
And in terms of the Experience Theater program, we started bringing the students to the theater. But then we decided to do the traveling theater, to save the time and money, to the schools and we go to them. We’re not going to wait until they come to us, we’ll go to the schools or to other venues. Approaching theater to them. And, of course, Ww decided to, we wanted to do a 24-hour poetry marathon in the [00:31:00] 1990s, ’94?
Marcela: When we were younger.
Nucky: When we were younger. No, it was impossible. For the security. For the police.
Elizabeth: Twenty-four hours, yeah.
Nucky: And all that.
Michael: Oh, sure.
Nucky: We did ten to ten.
Marcela: And that was enough. Twelve hours was just right.
Nucky: We could continue! We could continue.
Michael: I’d love to take you back to your initial production. What was that first script and what was that like getting that initial production up?
Marcela: Yepeto.
Nucky: Yepeto. Yepeto.
Marcela: Yepeto.
Michael: I assume it’s a script from Argentina?
Nucky: Yes! Roberto Cossa. Yeah. And it was de moda, cómo se dice.
Marcela: Oh, at the time, yeah Yepeto by Tito Cossa, a very well-known Argentine playwright also writes a lot about, underneath, about the dictatorship and all of that we’ve been through. Really it was a story of a young [00:32:00] man and an older man. So, Mario played the older one and Carlos Ramírez, a Colombian actor, played the younger one. And story about life, love, relationship, that generational gap, and a lot about what the younger one can do that the older one can no longer do physically, mentally. And how emotionally still, they’re very much alike. Even though physically, they cannot do the same things, but emotionally you still feel the same, no matter the age.
Michael: And do you have any memories of the audience reception or just your experience of suddenly having an audience, you’ve opened a theater you’re branding this theater in some kind of way.
Nucky: It was a boom. And then, oh, we have full house. But that time, we only, they [00:33:00] let us do only two performances that were filled back.
Elizabeth: So there was a huge demand but just not enough production or performances.
Nucky: Yes, yes. Then, when we decided to stay in Arlington, they were allowing us more time in the theater. So we went two weeks, then three weeks. Then to start doing more performances, at least 16, for the Helen Hayes and things like that, we decided to extend. But we couldn’t have more than four weeks because we were sharing the space with many other groups.
Marcela: This was at Gunston Arts Center.
Elizabeth: Gunston Arts Center, which is in South Arlington.
Michael: So, the history of your, could you maybe just talk about how your play selection over the years has maybe evolved or changed? Either because of space changes or because, again, you were saying you gotta play to your audience. And if the audience is changing, [00:34:00] they might want different things. They might want to see different things. Can you talk a little bit about that, the evolution of your play selection?
Marcela: Sure. I think that one of the important things that Teatro de la Luna has always maintained is to really go into the works of the current playwrights or, also, playwrights that have talked a lot about our past. Meaning the whole dictatorship and all of those plays that had all of that underneath the writing and so you really had to dig deep. We’ve done plays, we did a play about Monsignor Romero and that was written—
Elizabeth: In El Salvador.
Marcela: Right—by a Costa Rican playwright. And we did that. We have also done La nona by Tito Cossa. Also, Tito Cossa writes a lot about the dictatorship. And [00:35:00] that play was about a family situation, but it mirrored completely—
Nucky: The government.
Marcela: —the government situation about, in the ‘70s and the ‘60s in Argentina. And we continue to go through those types of plays while not forgetting other types of plays. For example, we have done recently, right before COVID, our last mainstage production was Andar sin pensamiento, also by an Argentine playwright, Jorge Huerta, that talked about really a love story and friendship. And, it had nothing to do with dictatorship, but it was something so common for everybody. The story of love, friendship between three people, two males, one female, how relationships are complicated. Sometimes friends get in the way of your own relationships. And sometimes relationships fall [00:36:00] apart. Sometimes they come back together, sometimes they don’t. So we’ve really tried to choose the themes of our plays with what’s going on also in society. Right now, we notice people want to laugh. Many times, people want to laugh. And so we go, “We need to find comedies.” Even if they’re dark comedies, but maybe we need to find comedies, especially now, after COVID.
Nucky: Dramatic comedies.
Marcela: Yeah. We noticed what the audience wants, and I think that you all know that very well. Sometimes you have to go with the flow and see what people are searching for. Because if not, people will go to the movies or will sit in front of their TV and not go to the theater.
Nucky: But not also doing only Latin American author. We open through the play reading series that we always want to embrace other authors and we [00:37:00] did many plays from—
Marcela: We’ve done Jean Genet’s Las Criadas—The Maids. We’ve done Strindberg. So, yes, we’ve done various—
Nucky: That’s only in Spanish. Only in Spanish. And it was called Un Acercamiento al Teatro Universal, An Approaching to Universal Theater.
Elizabeth: I want to talk a little bit more about when, during the years when you were producing the International Theater Festival, as you’ve mentioned, you brought companies from all over Latin America, from Spain. So, and in many cases, these artists were in, were living and working and creating in very unfriendly environments. They were even putting their lives at risk to produce plays. You mentioned how they had to have a subtext that had political commentary. Can you talk a little bit about audiences here, particularly Anglo audiences, who don’t really understand what it’s like [00:38:00] to be an artist in a country where you risk your life, you risk imprisonment by performing works that are contrary to the wishes of the government. Do you have any stories to tell about American audiences being shaken and moved by the kind of courage and circumstances of visiting companies?
Nucky: Americans always learn a lot through the theater, through what we can tell you, because our tradition also is to do a post-performance discussion. Like, it’s a tradition to, after every performance on Fridays, we do a post-performance discussion. And that helps a lot in terms of sharing and participating others with our experiences, personal experience sometimes, in the case [00:39:00] of Pepe Vásquez who performed the play of—
Marcela: Oscar Wilde?
Nucky: Not Oscar Wilde.
Marcela: El informante. The Informer.
Nucky: El informante. El informante is a play written by Carlos Liscano, an Uruguayan, who was in jail for so many years.
Marcela: For what he wrote.
Nucky: And things like that. And we had el placer—
Marcela: The pleasure.
Nucky: The pleasure of having those, the author and the performer with us. It was just amazing.
Marcela: I think, also, we brought, for quite some, quite a few showings from Costa Rica. We had an actor who unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago, also Carlos Menendez, he brought a play that he wrote and directed and starred in, [00:40:00] El inmigrante, and that was a huge boom—The Immigrant—and we brought that. And it was in the time that, also, we were having another huge influx of immigrants. And I do remember one of our patrons, an American, he, I think, came to every performance and he would hear the simultaneous English interpretation, but he loved the monologue. He loved it. He found it fascinating. The story of the immigrant, of everything that he was telling. Because he would say it and physically act out the swimming in the river, the coming, the getting up from the rocks to get to the other side. And so—
Nucky: He was from Nicaragua and immigrating to Costa Rica.
Elizabeth: Interesting. So that story, that play was about Nicaraguan immigrating to Costa Rica.
Marcela: Yeah.
Elizabeth: Interesting. Yeah. [00:41:00]
Marcela: But how American audiences, even listening to the translation, because we would simultaneously dub that one, he was just, I remember this audience member was just fascinated. And I remember seeing him buy another ticket and then I said, “Again? You were here yesterday!” “I found it fascinating! I’m here again.”
Michael: You didn’t give him group ticket?
Elizabeth: Lifetime pass.
Marcela: Exactly.
Nucky: Remember Wes? Remember Wes?
Marcela: Yeah, Wes!
Nucky: But then when we did Amor al Aire Libre, he will come every Saturday with another friend.
Elizabeth: Oh, nice. Wow.
Nucky: He came seven times.
Elizabeth: Audience recruitment.
Nucky: He loved it.
Marcela: Yeah, and I think also, we did a play, Chúmbale, also in 2009, and that was another play that you really had to scarve out what was going on politically. And we had one audience member, also [00:42:00] American, and he was sitting in on every Friday night discussion. He was going, “Oh, that’s why you did that!” “Oh, that’s what that means!” Because, as in theater, everything ties in—the lights, the sound, the music, the costume. He goes, “Oh, that’s why you were wearing that.” “That’s why—” and I said, “Yeah, because at that time you couldn’t wear that or you couldn’t wear that color because it meant this, or you couldn’t say that because it meant this.” He goes, “Oh, now I get. I wouldn’t understand it if I didn’t hear this post-performance discussion.” So, we’ve had so many of those performances and we think it’s really fascinating to see other people go, “Oh, now I get it.”
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