HC: What interested you the most about directing this novel? How did you make your way into a pre-adapted novel?
Interview: Director José Zayas on García Márquez and adapting novels for the stage
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This week GALA Hispanic Theatre brings to the stage an adaptation of the short-novel, “Crónica de Una Muerte Anunciada” (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), by the late Nobel Prize winner and internationally acclaimed writer Gabriel García Márquez.
We spoke to the play’s director José Zayas about his fascination with taking novels to the stage, as well as his experience working with Hispanic theaters. José Zayas has directed Isabel Allende’s novel, “La Casa de Los Espiritus” (House of Spirits), and the play “Cancun” by Jordi Galceran at GALA in the past. He started off as a writer and produced his first play when he was in high school in Puerto Rico. He fell in love with directing as a junior at Harvard University when a friend asked him to direct a play he was producing. He has been directing for more than 20 years ever since, and holds a residency at the theater Repertorio Español in New York City.
HC: What interested you the most about directing this novel? How did you make your way into a pre-adapted novel?
Crónica is a play that has been done at Repertorio Español. It’s been running for about 15 years so I’m trying to find a different way to tell the same story. The text that I got was fragmented and we had different versions of it so I was able to piece together from past productions, without having to slavishly recreate it.
I’ve been learning about the novel and the storytelling from my actors, what skills they bring, what I understand of the rhythm of the piece. I’m more interested in the psychology of the novel than in the adaptation of the original. The original adaptation was more interested in the grotesque and the archetype, which was interesting to me as well, but I am more interested in the psychology of these people and the idea of people coming together to work through the issues.
I’m interested in the idea of the choral movement of a group of people who come together to tell a story. In the novel, there’s one narrator who collectively grabs everyone’s perspectives and they’re all contradicting. In the play it’s the characters themselves who try to unravel the mystery of what happened to Santiago and how they allowed it to happen. It’s also AN exploration of guilt and culpability.
I am also interested in the rituals that we engage in to exculpate ourselves; to wash our hand of things. Or how we internalize them and live with these particular emotions for the rest of our lives. So the play, I think, deals a lot with rituals.
HC: How do those rituals and psychological aspects of a collective culpability look like on-stage? How do you engage the audience in that exploration of guilt?
I’m trying to create a world that’s not literal. So we’re setting it up in a cockfighting ring that also serves as an abattoir. It’s bloody. There are going to be carcasses on stage. There are little houses—spaces where people gossip, talk to each other—where our perspective is always going to be a little blocked. No matter where you’re sitting, there’s going to be something that you’ve got to see through.
I’m trying to replicate for the audience, physically, the idea that they have to work through the mystery themselves. The structure of the adaptation is very fragmented. We know that death is happening. We end up seeing the moment of the death. It goes back in time to the moment when Angela Vicario says that it’s Santiago. It flashes forward. It is a wonderful puzzle for the audience.
HC: Although this novel is not very heavily focused on magic realism, how do you transmit some aspects of it in the play?
You have to treat it as realism. It’s mood. You have to trust that mood. This time we’re doing it by the way characters slip in and out of their characters. So there isn’t necessarily one character. Everyone is playing multiple people at the same time. That creates a particular sense of dislocation in the audience that could be called magic realism, which is a very dangerous label that we both love it and hate it. I think when you produce it is important to treat it as realistically as possible—to trust the dreams, to trust the moments when they happen and not to make them seem more than they are. They are just part of the fabric of the everyday of these people.
HC: What’s different about working in the theatre scene in New York and working with Hispanic theaters in D.C.?
I see that at Repertorio Español there is a particular audience that I gear to. I have discovered that there is an interest in Caribbean themes in New York. But it’s been very broad. In D.C., I find that there’s a great lovely Hispanic community, but there is more of a mix of who comes to GALA, there’s a lot of English-speaking audience members that are adventurous theater-goers. They’re like people who would see a foreign film, opening the door for a new experience. For me, it is exciting because I get access to a lot more plays and that allows for a lot more kinds of work. And I speak to a much larger group of people. Certainly, it is hard for me to sometimes access a bigger English speaking theater just because I focus a lot on the Spanish ones. I do want to let this community grow and connect to non-native speakers too, so it’s finding how both worlds mix.
Each theater teaches you what you need to do. My time in D.C. has really been lovely. I came here first to do the “House of Spirits”, which is something that I had done many times (at other theaters). So it was a new audience—a new way of communicating and use space to make the story different. Last year I came to do a different play: I did “Cancun”, which is so Spanish. It’s something I hadn’t done before.
HC: There are many fascinating novels in Spanish, are there any other novels that you would like to see produced on-stage?
I feel blessed to create a series of plays based on novels, this in my fifth one. We are working on one that is going up next year. Its called “En el Nombre de Salome” by Julia Alvarez. My dream would be to adapt Roberto Bolaño, “The Savage Detectives”.
I would like to tackle it because it feels impossible. How do you make it seem theatrical in terms of structure? I feel that whenever I adapt a novel it’s going to be a failure. The fact that people connect to it the way they do is exciting. When they don’t connect, I’m not bothered by it. Reading a novel is a very private event. What I love is that I’m trying to replicate my experience with it and share with someone who might have a similar experience. It either makes them see the novel differently, reminds them of it, and makes them want to see the play again. Or they’ll dismiss the capturing of the novel on stage as an impossibility. But the act of the impossible makes it worthwhile. It’s poetic to do something that, in a different genre, begins with a failure. I hope that audience doesn’t think it is; I hope they engage with it in a positive way.
Crónica de Una Muerte Anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) opens April 7 at GALA Hispanic Theatre.
—Estefani Flores
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