culture

photo courtesy of Teatro En Circulo

Not just words in translation
by Eric Jackson

If you are a newcomer (or a well established resident) who knows the 1930s play "You Can't Take It With You" and are just getting around to learning Spanish, this play will help you improve your language skills. That, of course, is not why director Edwin Cedeño and the folks at Teatro En Circulo are putting it on, but it's still a good reason for some of the people who read this to catch the play, or to patronize the Spanish-language theater in general.

My Spanish is far from perfect, but language was no barrier for me. The transition from the canonical American comedy that I know to the Panamanian stage was more striking to me for the cultural translation from the Method acting style that's the mainstream in the USA to the Latin American style that one sees in the telenovelas. Many gringos exposed to soap operas from Venezuela, Colombia or Mexico for the first time, will, because of this difference, consider those works to be over-acted.

This particular play, however, is madcap comedy so the over-acting charge would be no more relevant than it would be to the best works of Jim Carrey or Jerry Lewis.

You're dealing with a family of nutcases here. True, a good portrayal of madness using the Stanislavsky Method can be downright frightening, and true, centuries before the great Russian professor came on the scene the greatest English-language playwright of them all, William Shakespeare, set a high standard for his understanding and depiction of mental illness. But we're not dealing with Ophelia or Jack the Ripper here, just a mostly nonviolently deranged family and its one more or less normal daughter who has fallen in love with a Wall Street magnate's son. These are not people who need to be confined in padded cells, but they might run the risk of being placed in halfway houses for the weird. It's entertaining, even for those who know about how unfunny mental illness can be. A little over-acting doesn't at all detract from the fun, either.

The other big cultural translation is the choice of this Depression-era American play in the first place. That was a time when Broadway and Hollywood touched upon the issue of class, as this play does, but as the promoters and studios were all capitalists tended not to get into class hatreds. Panama has stark class divisions that are characterized by plenty of anger and contempt, and in this play the Teatro En Circulo can obliquely broach the subject without driving off their rabiblanco patrons.

Edwin Cedeño is one of Panama's well-known directors, and this time you get to see him act in one of his plays, as a crazed Russian ballet instructor / wrestling coach. That's a special treat, too.