From Poet to Playwright

by Marisela Treviño Orta

I’m an accidental playwright.

I moved to San Francisco from Texas to get my MFA in Writing, to take a few years to focus on my craft as a poet. I’m an Imagist. That is, very image driven. And it was images that first attracted me to theatre—the line of limbs stretching and moving, the pantomime of bodies.

I was watching El Teatro Jornalero! rehearse. They were doing a series of movement exercises, silent yet so expressive. Watching them I had the urge to write, to sit down and watch and write.

And that’s what I did. I joined ETJ! as their Resident Poet and began attending their rehearsals so I could write poetry while they did exercises and worked in collaboration to develop a new play.

ETJ! was a social justice theatre company made up of Latino immigrants led by USF theatre professor Roberto Varea. It was fascinating to watch them work and the subjects they explored were very close to me. Politics was an area I avoided in my poetry. I was always weary that I would fall into heavy-handed rhetoric, that I would be hitting people over the head with my opinions, when what I really wanted was for my readers to feel, to re-experience my own emotional state.

Working with ETJ! I learned that social justice theatre can do just that, create empathy by making the political personal.

Every Friday I’d hop on the 33 bus and traverse the city to the Women’s Building in San Francisco’s Mission District. They’d rehearse and I’d write, take pictures and maybe help run lines. Then we’d all sit down for dinner. We were a little family.

I kinda became the theatre’s Girl Friday. I made programs for their performances using my poetry and photos, created slides for their English supertitles, recorded performances and even once helped translate one of their plays into English.

After a year I began to get curious about playwriting. ETJ! developed their scripts collaboratively, but I wanted to know how to write a play by myself. Luck would have it that playwright Christine Evans came to USF to collaborate with ETJ! and teach an introduction to playwriting course. That last semester of my MFA I took her class with the goal of writing a full length social justice play.

At the end of the semester I showed the scenes I had written to Christine. I explained that I hadn’t written the play linearly, that some of the scenes were from the middle of the narrative, others from the beginning or end. Even today I seem to resist writing from A to Z. I jump all over the narrative, writing whatever my muse seems most excited about.

It was Christine who suggested I keep the play non-linear. She also suggested I submit my play, Braided Sorrow, to the Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

Getting into the festival was a bit of a shock. That was in 2005 and it was after the Bay Area Playwrights Festival that I began to seriously consider continuing to write plays.

My transition between genres was really cemented by the encouragement of others—Christine Evans and the Playwrights Foundation—coupled with the fact that my first play kept opening doors for me.

But there was something else, something about playwriting itself. As a child I used to write short stories, even worked on a novel. And my poetry always had a very strong narrative bent. Playwriting it turns out is perfect for my writing sensibilities.

Federico Garcia Lorca once said, “A play is a poem standing up.” I love that line. Love that I first new Lorca as a poet and it wasn’t until I came to playwriting that I discovered his plays.

I see the potential for poetry in plays. I don’t mean this literally, even though I do occasionally include poems in my plays. What I mean is that my poetics greatly inform my playwriting. Imagery. Lyricism. Repetition. Metaphor. All prosodic elements, can be applied to playwriting. And in doing so a play becomes a poem, stands before us, looks right into our very souls and takes hold.

 Marisela Treviño Orta is a San Franciscan poet and playwright. Her first play, Braided Sorrow, won the 2006 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize in Drama and the 2009 Pen Center USA Literary Award in Drama. Her poetry has appeared in BorderSenses, Double Room, 26: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics and Traverse.

Spanish, English or Both?

By Fanny Garcia

Analyzing the poem Bilingual/Bilingüe by Rhina Espaillat helped me identify why I like to intersperse my plays with Spanish, my native language. One of the questions that arose several times during the workshop production of The Rosalila was why there was so much Spanish in the play. I’ve struggled between wanting to translate the dialogue so that a wider audience will understand it, and leaving the Spanish intact because in my imagination, that is the language my characters speak. Below is a youtube video of the poem and my thoughts about it.

Rhina Espaillat is a Dominican-born poet who writes in English and Spanish. Her poem “Bilingual/Bilingue” is told from the point of view of the poet as a young girl trying to navigate her education between two languages. She is discovering the beauty of words and relishes exploring the world that words open up for her. However, she must also keep a balance between her need to absorb as much as possible and her father’s insistence on maintaining rules and boundaries to her learning.

The young girl’s father likes to keep English and Spanish separate, “English outside this door, Spanish inside,” as if this will ensure that his daughter will not be lost forever to American culture.  The father may not be learning the language as quickly as she is and therefore feels that she may lose her connection to her roots if English becomes her primary language.  He is afraid that English will, “cut in two his daughter’s heart/ (el corazon) and lock the alien part,” which he identifies with, “with a key he could not claim.” The alien part that is mentioned in the poem is his Dominican identity, which the young girl may see as foreign because she is rapidly assimilating to American culture.  In contrast, the key he can’t use to relate to her is the new language she is quickly owning.

The young poet is stubborn. She defies her father’s wishes to keep the two languages separate and sneaks reading material in English into the house and reads, “until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run/ where his stumbled.” In several lines of the poem the words in Spanish are in parenthesis. It represents the poet following her father’s wishes to keep Spanish and English separate. However, as she grows up the young poet discovers that the two languages don’t need to be separate. They can co-exist and provide a view of a unique American experience, one that is sprinkled with Spanish words alongside English ones. The author makes this distinction well in her poem. She infuses Spanish where she may not need it but the language’s syllables enhance the rhythm of the poem. She uses words like “corazon” and “nombre” that are common and well known to most people even if they are not fluent in Spanish. But she uses the word “testaruda” which is the word for stubborn in Spanish. It is a hard word to pronounce for non-Spanish speakers and in using it, the author expresses her defiance towards what can and cannot be used in literature. She says it first in English, the language currently holding her fascination, but the translation in Spanish reminds her (and the reader) that Spanish is the language in her heart and imagination.  It is her father’s voice and one that she cannot easily relinquish.

The poem’s conclusion is the thoughts of the young girl as an adult and a poet. She expresses that she would like to believe her father is proud of her education and the writing she has produced, “he stood outside mis versos, half in fear/ of words he loved but wanted not to hear.” The poet does not put parentheses around the Spanish “mis versos” because she no longer needs to. She has embraced her bilingualism. Her father’s fears of losing his daughter to English and Americanization did not occur. She is both Dominican and American. She writes in English and in Spanish and his Dominican influence and culture are present in what she writes because they are hers as well.