Delivering guilty pleasures smartly
If as many as two billion people watch telenovelas, or a regional version of the episodic melodramas, as some reports suggest, then it can’t come as a surprise that so many of us have a story about, well, our “stories.”
“There was one with a girl who ran on the beach,” the award-winning playwright Karen Zacarías recounted recently of the telenovela she watched as a kid. “And every time we were on the beach, my sister and I would do that.” She stopped to imitate a slow-motion montage of the surf scene with mirth. Even at a tender age, she was tuned into the drama but also the pleasures of telenovelas.
When Zacarías returned to the genre as a playwright in the mid-2010s, it was with a different lens. As one of the cofounders of the Latinx Theatre Commons, a national network of theater-makers working to expand and deepen representation, she discovered that she was not alone in her frustration with the ways the word “telenovela” was often used by theater reviewers to describe performances and plays by Latiné artists. “It’s a shorthand. It’s always used in a kind of derogatory fashion. It’s never like, oh, this is wonderful.” A gauntlet was thrown.
“I remember thinking, I’m going write the best darn telenovela,” Zacarías said on a video call. And so, she set about interrogating the genre, planning to make clear what it actually is, so that culturally clumsy critics couldn’t easily equate it with every other play performed or written by and about the boundless Latino experience.
Only a funny thing happened on the way to writing that play. Zacarías found she also had to question the discomfort she and her fellow creatives felt with the comparison. “Why do we get offended by being called a telenovela?” she recalled thinking. “What is it about us? Why are we so snobby?” As she watched anew, she made a discovery. “What happens with melodrama is that you sit there going, ‘oh, this is so stupid.’ And then suddenly you’re like [she feigns a gasp] ‘What’s going on!?’”
There will be gasps aplenty when the Castillo and Del Rio families of the fictional town of Bellarica, Mexico, take the stage in — cue the portentous music — Destiny of Desire: A Telenovela Play with Music (playing Sep 11-Oct 4 in the Wolf Theatre). There will also be laughter. How could you not giggle at the disaster that befalls Fabiola Castillo, grasping second wife of casino owner Armando, when she asks Dr. Mendoza to switch her dying infant with the healthy newborn child of the wondrously compassionate Hortensia Del Rio (the Castillo’s housekeeper) and her hard-laboring husband Ernesto?
As playful as the script is, make no mistake Zacarías hasn’t written a spoof. “Oh, no, that’s not my intent at all,” she said. Instead, she teased and tested the question, “What does it mean if we try to make it feel like higher art?” Still, like any telenovela worth its salty tears, Destiny of Desire touches on class, on romance, on betrayal, on cultural even religious mores but with twists.
Destiny of Desire is the fourth Zacarías play produced by the Theatre Company. Mariela in the Desert, Native Gardens, and Just Like Us (her adaptation of the author Helen Thorpe’s nonfiction book about four friends on Denver’s Northside whose divergent immigration statuses become an issue as they prepare for college) found a home on the Denver Center’s stages. With this latest play, she becomes the most produced female playwright in the Theatre Company’s nearly 50-year history, appearing on all three main stages.
“I’m very excited that I’m getting to come back to Denver,” she said. “I love Denver, it’s been home to me in many ways.”
Performances are scheduled Sept. 11-Oct 4, 2026, at the Wolf Theatre By Karen Zacarías and directed by Marcela Lorca.
Additionally, Latine Heritage Celebration night is on September 17. There will be pre-show music, a special ticket offer, and a post-show discussion. Spanish interpretation performances on September 17 and October 3
Source: By Lisa Kennedy
