GALA’s gender-challenging fairy tale is as much for parents as it is for children
By hola | Published | No Comments
The new bilingual play at the GALA Hispanic Theatre is based on a fairy tale but of a modern kind. When this tale was first published in 2000 as the children’s book “King & King” by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, it was met with both praise and outrage. Due to controversy over the fact that it contains the first image of men kissing in a children’s book, it was listed among the top 10 most challenged books in 2003 and 2004. Still, it has achieved wide success and has been published in ten languages. Staged adaptations of “King & King” have been performed worldwide, from Vienna to Mexico City. The newest retelling is the GALA Hispanic Theatre’s bilingual production “Príncipe Y Príncipe,” which ran through March 24 at the theater located in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood.
The play’s director and adaptor Eric Swartz is a Salvadoran American, professionally known as El Chelito. His adaptation of the book is based on the play written by the renowned Argentinian playwright Perla Szuchmacher before her death in 2010. Swartz, a D.C. native, attended Washington International School in Northwest D.C. and went on to graduate from Amherst College with a Bachelor of Arts in Theater and Dance. He has been familiar with GALA from a young age and saw many of their performances as a child.
He has worked with several other organizations in the D.C. area, including directing plays at Imagination Stage. As Associate Artistic Director at Pointless Theatre, he spanned a variety of roles, from producing to performing. His previous work at the GALA has included “Que Las Hay Las Hay (Believe it Or Not),” a fantastical children’s play, and “La Vida Es Sueño (Life is a Dream),” a dramatic tale written in the Spanish Golden Age.
How has this experience diverged from your previous directing experiences? Which of your previous directing experiences most influenced your approach to this play?
The process of adapting and directing simultaneously is not unfamiliar to me. I had previously translated and adapted another Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) show for GALA Hispanic Theatre called “Que Las Hay Las Hay (Believe It Or Not).” I was translating and adapting a Spanish-language play into a bilingual format for a North American audience in D.C. and then directing that adaptation. That process of doing “Que Las Hay Las Hay” for GALA almost five years ago has really informed this one for me because I’m in a space with a similar audience. I learned a lot of lessons on that previous show. It’s been really exciting to be able to implement the lessons that I’ve learned on “Príncipe Y Príncipe.“
What were some of the lessons you learned?
So many. First and foremost, “Que Las Hay Las Hay” was the first show that I had ever done for young audiences. As somebody who does not have children, I didn’t necessarily know what the children would respond to most.
For example, “Que Las Hay Las Hay” is about a fairy and a witch who are neighbors and they’re enemies and they don’t get along. But a new neighbor named Juan Juan comes in, and they bond over the fact that they don’t want him to be their new neighbor. So they decide to haunt him, and in haunting him, a lot of ghosts appear. As soon as those ghosts appeared on stage, the children kept yelling, “Fantasma, fantasma, fantasma, there’s a ghost behind you, be careful, be careful, be careful.” I mean all that to say, children are so perceptive and responsive and will really want to interact with what is happening on stage.
With “Príncipe Y Príncipe,” I’ve used some of the lessons I learned on “Que Las Hay Las Hay.” I was also able to work with artists like Delbis Cardona, who has done a lot of GALita shows [GALA’s program for younger audiences] and was in “Que Las Hay Las Hay.” Having someone like Delbis on the show is invaluable because he has done so many GALita shows and really deeply understands how to perform for this audience, this age group, and anticipate how they might respond to certain moments.
Which scene in the play is your favorite?
I really really love when all of the princesses from around the world audition to be the prince’s love. Each of them uses a different dance or performance style from around the world. While the world of the palace and the world of the queen and the prince feel very Rococo, Baroque, classic fairy tale European, these princesses are very modern young women. Some dance styles that are represented include a little bit of rave, shuffle dance and tutting. There’s a “Schoolhouse Rock”-style rap that the princess from Greenland does. That’s really fun. The actress who plays most of these princesses, Cristina Sanchez, is just so talented, so delightful and so, so funny in these moments. That section of the play is hysterical.
But where I find the heart of the play to be is the scene where the two titular princes meet. In the original script that I received, which was written by Perla Szuchmacher, all it says in that script is “escena entre los príncipes.” That’s it.
In starting to adapt the play, I thought to myself, what might love at first sight look like? I immediately went to dance and started to draw from classic fairy tales of my youth: “Beauty and the Beast,” for example, or the Disney canon, and also Old Hollywood-style musicals to create a dream-waltzy quality. It’s a very sweet scene and a beautiful dance choreographed by Aldo Ortega.
In some ways, it’s the theatrical climax of the play. It’s been delightful for me, as a queer person, to be able to stage this scene of these young men discovering love.
In Amazon reviews for “King and King,” one reader complained that the book centers around the princesses’ faults instead of the princes’ positive attributes. How is that change reflected in the play?
It sounds like you’re giving a lot more stage time and a lot more presence to the actual good qualities of the princesses.
Luz Nicolas, Delbis Cardona
In reading the book and the adaptation of the Spanish language play, I did find that there was some negativity in the portrayal of the princesses. I did not want to make the young women in our audience feel that that was how they were being represented on stage. In consultation with the team – the designers and choreographer and actors – we’ve made a concerted effort not to portray any of the princesses in a negative light. They’re all talented, outspoken and empowered. At no point do we denigrate them or make them seem less than. I want all of the young people who come to see the show to see themselves represented in some way and not leave feeling negatively reflected by what’s happening on stage.
While the story is about two princes falling in love, most of the characters are princesses. Every single one has an opportunity for us to play against stereotypes so that their portrayals are really, really rich. While they don’t have a lot of individual stage time, it was really important to me and to everybody else on the team that they did not feel like caricatures. It’s not that they’re ugly or stupid or anything of the sort. It’s just that he doesn’t connect with them.
What are the challenges of a bilingual production?
The main challenge for me – which I really have seen as an opportunity as well – is to justify the switch in languages and to make it character-based. It’s not just a sentence in Spanish followed by the same sentence in English, communicating the same idea and not advancing the story. That’s not of interest to me. Because as somebody who is bilingual, it’s not how I speak.
When I received the offer from GALA to adapt it, they asked for it to be 60% Spanish and 40% English. I thought a lot about how to puzzle-piece that together. Where I landed is that the language that is spoken in the palace world is Spanish, so the play really begins almost entirely in Spanish.
As the plot starts to develop and we start to connect to the outside world, that’s where English starts to come in. English becomes almost a language of diplomacy. When the queen calls the other queens to ask if their daughters are available, she calls them in English. When the princesses come to visit the palace, English is the language that they’re speaking in.
I also wrote a couple of new scenes that were predominantly in English. For example, there are scenes where the prince is taking lessons, so I turned one of those lessons into an English lesson. When the character meets his Prince Charming, who is English-dominant, this became a beautiful opportunity to give the main prince of the story the chance to fumble his introduction because he’s an English learner. Then, it gives the other prince the chance to not make fun of him being an English learner but just say, “your English is much better than my Spanish. I’m also learning Spanish.”
We tried not to dip our toe into negativity because this is a fairy tale. As an adult and as somebody who can be a little bit jaded, I’ve learned so much about myself by accepting the magic and accepting the tone. It can be sweet and lovely. I don’t need to be so jaded in my approach to this because that’s not the feeling I want the young people to take away.
In one of the reviews of the books that the authors approved of, the book was described as a “postmodern fractured fairy tale.” To what extent does this description align with your vision of the play?
I think it does align in a number of ways. I really love working in theater for young audiences because children say yes. They say yes to the circumstances, they say yes to the joke, they say yes to the bit. It’s really a delightful group of people to create for because you’re able to go in silly and absurd directions. I’ve tried to embrace the absurdity of it in how we’ve been interweaving technology into the show. It feels like a classic fairy tale but with modern elements that connect to the day-to-day lives of the audience.
The prince has a cell phone that gets taken away from him because he’s not paying attention to his mother, for example. The butler character – the mayordomo – conducts all of his business on what looks to be an iPad. The princesses’ musical styles include rave, shuffle music and rap. While the costuming of the people in the palace is very big-wig-big-dress Rococo European, the princesses’ costumes have touches of modernity. To me, that’s an opportunity to put in absurdist touches.
We put in a lot of jokes for the parents as well because I think it’s so important that everybody finds something to delight in. Sometimes I’ll go to see a children’s show and the parents aren’t having a good time. When that’s happening, the child starts to check in with the parent – “are you having fun too?” – and that takes the child out of the experience. One of the things that I love about Pixar movies or cartoons is that there are often things that everybody finds a point of connection with. The joke is layered so that everybody is included. Even though the story is designed for younger people, hopefully everybody will connect to it and take something with them.
Another thing that has been really important to me, as somebody who has come out to my parents, is that while there are lessons being modeled for the young people coming to see the show, there is also behavior being modeled for the adults of how you might respond to your child coming out. What’s a way for you as a parent to remember the love and care that you have for that person? It is always about love and acceptance, and potentially also a little bit of forgiveness on the part of the parent towards the child.
In your adaptation, how does the queen react to her son coming out?
She has an explosive reaction that cycles through the five stages of grief. Her initial shock lands her in a place of acceptance where she has a heart-to-heart with her son in full view of the rest of the characters. It allows for a more complex point to be made for the parents: you might have a really strong reaction. You are entitled to be shocked, to grieve the life that you thought your child was going to have, the life that you had imagined for that person. But after that, you need to move beyond that. You hopefully celebrate the life that is happening, the choices that are real, the partnerships that do sustain that child.
While a world of possibility opens up for the person who has come out, that same possibility has opened up for the whole family: what can we learn about ourselves and our capacity for love and acceptance?
*This story has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
– Interview by SPEL’s Society and Culture story team members
Katherine Murray, Thomas Bravo, and Parker Garlough
– Written by Parker Garlough
– Edited by Piper Russell
– Photos by Stan Weinstein
Recent Stories
