Q&A with Julissa Contreras

The Reading Room Festival (January 30–February 2) features new work and conversations inspired by, in response to, or in dialogue with the plays of William Shakespeare. Leading up to the festival, we’re doing a Q&A series with the creators involved.

One of the plays featured is a Spanish Golden Age comedy written by Shakespeare’s contemporary Ana Caro Mallén de Soto (ca.1601–ca.1645). Dramaturg Julissa Contreras shares more about working with this bilingual translation, the joys of expanding the canon beyond Shakespeare, and the gendered issues of the play that still resonate today.

Read more in the Q&A below and join us for a staged reading with ASL interpretation on Friday, January 31, at 8pm.

Q&A

This play was written by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ana Caro Mallén de Soto. What can you share about this Spanish Golden Age playwright and her work Valor, Agravio y Mujer (The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs)?

This play is a lot of fun and, given the time period, it is interesting to see how the gender bending is led by the women rather than men. The last line of the play immediately stood out to me as an indication of how catalytic the work was for its time, “And so ends, wise senate, The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs. Its creator, a modest woman, begs you to forgive its faults.” I’m not certain if this is her sarcasm but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a genuine apology for the work, as absurd as it sounds given the play’s beautiful poetry and witty humor, because even the women in the piece have moments of surrendering to patriarchal norms. The art of women minimizing their greatness through apology is one that lives on today. If it is sarcasm, that doubles down on how de Soto portrays the absurdity of the male gaze through characters like Juan and Ludovico. It is so interesting to feel the power the women hold throughout the piece come to a quick fold once the men offer their hands, despite their questionable choices, that the women themselves call out throughout the piece.

For this particular staging, you are interweaving different translations of the play, contemporary English and Spanish versions. Can you share more about these translations and this act of textual interpolation?

It was no easy feat. Let’s start with the Spanish text— it was not very contemporary for me. There is an abundance of nuances within each Spanish-speaking country and how they would define contemporary language. I was working with old Spanish, which like old English, needs its own translation. I am Dominican, not Spanish, so it was interesting to sit with wanting to honor de Soto’s original text while wanting to bring in the beauty and humor of Spanish spoken across the former colonies. There could have been a version that was all in Spanish that interwove various Spanish-speaking regionalisms with no English at all, and Spanish audiences would still find themselves wondering what certain phrases and metaphors meant. That is the beauty of the language and how it can only be standardized to a certain extent. The English was the easy part. I kept a lot of it in because the group at UCLA that did the translation had done such a great job in contemporizing the old Spanish that I was also able to let de Soto’s original text find life in much of the prose and comedy while trusting the audience could walk away understanding the piece. Still, it was fun to decide, based on the tone of a scene, when we wanted to bring in the Spanish of today and honor different regions in the process to represent the breadth of our community.

What do you find most exciting, interesting, or challenging about de Soto’s work?

I love how she unapologetically calls out how male immaturity in the piece. I can imagine it also reflected the very men in the audience. It’s so funny, and in some cases tragic, to see how we are still navigating women’s perception through the male gaze and the assumptions men have over our desires and capabilities. The piece also challenged me to not be judgmental about the moments when the women surrender to their desire to love and be loved over the courage to stop entertaining the men’s nonsense. If I let my guards down—that are mostly up because of the insidious perceptions about women that society refuses to evolve, I can see myself and my own feminine desires in the characters. If I didn’t live in a world where men often trade beautiful poetry for an “ayo, what’s good ma,” I might fall right into love, too. It made me wonder how de Soto found peace in the duality she represents.

What are you hoping that audiences will take away from this play? What are your next dreams and plans for this play?

Duality. It is an interesting social climate to consider gender norms. I hope audiences can draw softness from the piece and into their hearts to heal something that is only guarded because it fears to be perceived as a weakness or validation of a toxic perception of any gender. I also hope it intrigues audiences to go beyond Shakespeare which, as beautiful as his work is, feels like listening to the same playlist you created on your first iPod. How can we bring in other writers and represent the classical canon beyond everyone’s favorite hits?

Is there anything else that you’d like readers and audience members to know about you and/or this play?

In my own work, I tend to care very little about translating things for audiences since I grew up in a household where I watched people who knew little to no English find resonance in the universal. I think audiences have often been spoiled to assume English should be prioritized. People love operas without translation and I wonder why we still feel so strongly about translating words in a medium where the embodiment and magic of all theatrical elements can do that work for us. Granted, I love the idea that full translations give different communities the chance to retell a story and own it with their nuance. When we are thinking about work like de Soto’s and mine, I want us to trust our audiences more and their ability to connect. In this particular case though, the idea of having it be bilingual was fun and an interesting challenge. I wish I had more time to dig deeper and collaborate with other Spanish speakers outside of my own to really give this story a “bi-lingual” feel within this singular language. Someone should commission that for us! It could be a healing and eye-opening experience for both the creatives and the audience.