Interview with director José Carrasquillo
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Last week GALA Hispanic Theatre opened “La Señorita de Tacna (The Young Lady from Tacna),” a play written by internationally acclaimed writer Mario Vargas Llosa. While the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner is better known for his novels, he has also written several plays including this multi-generational tale about family, memory and the legacy of Peru’s late 19th Century War of the Pacific against Chile.
We spoke with the play’s director, José Carrasquillo, about his creative process and how working at a Hispanic theater differs from the other Washington-area playhouses were he has also worked.
Hola Cultura: What draws you to a particular work? How do you choose your material? And, more specifically, what made you choose to direct this particular play, “The Young Lady from Tacna”?
José Carrasquillo: I typically pitch an idea to a theatre. Three or four years down the road, they will call back and say, “Oh, this work that you told us about? We want to put it in the season.” The majority of the work that I do as a director happens that way.
Then sometimes somebody gives me a play that they think I’m a good fit for. That was the case with this particular piece. “La Señorita de Tacna” is a memory play, a non-realistic work, which employs some magical realism and dream sequences. I’m a stylist, as a director, so it’s really up my alley to create the world of “La Señorita de Tacna.”
HC: A theme in “The Young Lady from Tacna” is how we create stories from imperfect memories. How do you communicate this on the stage? Mario Vargas Llosa gives some direction in the text, but what does it end up looking like?
JC: I’ve been with this now for over a year. Vargas Llosa is a novelist and a journalist, he’s not really a playwright. He has written some plays, but structurally they do not behave like plays. They don’t have the typical structure that a drama follows.
The first two weeks of the rehearsal we were just sitting at the table, going over every word and just really working to understand the timetable, the chronology, the history of what happened at that time in Peru and Chile, and trying to figure out what Vargas Llosa was trying to say with this play.
When I first read it, it was really, to me, confusing. I didn’t know how on stage — given his requirements that he didn’t want any blackouts, scene changes, costume changes — how we could really tell the audience when we were going backwards and forwards in time and where we were landing, and why. When you get a play like that, then really the most important thing for me is to find a theatrical vocabulary to express that.
In analyzing the work, I decided that this has to be as much a movement piece as anything else. So the role of Mamaé has to be cast with a woman who has some knowledge of movement, or dance background, because obviously her transformations were going to have to happen right in front of our eyes. We found the perfect actress, who has a dance background but is an actress, from Spain. It’s a treat to see her go from a 16-year-old to a 100-year-old right in front of our eyes. It’s incredible.
HC: Does your creative process differ depending on the theater where the play will run? For instance, is the experience of directing at GALA different from working at any of the region’s other (non-Hispanic) theaters?
JC: GALA is like a family to me, I love working with them and I don’t get to do it all that often. It’s culturally an incredible thing for me, because I’m from Puerto Rico. It allows me to really understand and delve into the history — in this case, of Peru and Chile, the conflict that existed between those two countries and the whole social and economic equation in Peru after the War of the Pacific. To look at how people that had been very, very wealthy ended up being very, very poor.
All of that has been an amazing education for me and is one of the reasons why I love doing plays with them.
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“The Young Lady from Tacna” is showing at GALA Hispanic Theatre through March 9.
To read more about how Mario Vargas Llosa happened to write this play, check out the interview with the novelist in the Washington Post.
-Natalia Barnhart
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