DTC Celebrates LA Escena 2024 by Rebecca Ogden Smith

From September 12-17, 2024, LA Escena held its fourth biennial festival at UCLA’s historic, recently renovated Nimoy Theater, the festival’s largest venue yet. This year, LA Escena brought together artists from all over the US, Spain, and Mexico to perform 11 cutting-edge productions, the most in the festival’s history. An extraordinary joint conference of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater (AHCT) and the Asociación Internacional de Teatro Español y Novohispano de los Siglos de Oro (AITENSO) took place at UCLA in conjunction with the festival. LA Escena artists participated in roundtables and other presentations at the conference, while comedia scholars were able to attend LA Escena performances.

At the Nimoy, Peter Kazaras directed an excerpt from composer Pedro Osuna and librettist Amanda Hollander’s opera Valor, based on Diversifying the Classics’ translation of Ana Caro’s The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs. Grumelot again collaborated with LA Escena to premiere Amar por ver amar (o recuperar lo perdido), a performative lecture about the recovery of joy after loss in Lope de Vega’s El perro del hortelano, written and performed by Carlota Gaviño with original music by José Pablo Polo. Sarah Grunnah, another long-time DTC collaborator, directed a staged reading of DTC’s translation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Love is the Greater Labyrinth. Red Bull Theater performed a staged reading, both online and in-person in New York, of DTC’s most recent translation, Lope de Vega’s The Beast of Hungary. The festival also reprised theatre dybbuk’s The Marvelous Puppet Show, an illuminated lecture on Miguel de Cervantes’s El retablo de las maravillas featuring Professor Fuchs.

Three playwrights from DTC’s Golden Tongues initiative premiered staged readings of their comedia adaptations: Flickers, by Diana Burbano, based on Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s La cueva de Salamanca and set in the early years of classical Hollywood cinema; I Put a Spell on You, by Rosie Narasaki, based on Ana Caro’s El Conde Partinuplés; and Fling, by Zharia O’Neal, based on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Los empeños de una casa and set at a contemporary beauty pageant in Toledo, Ohio.

The first three productions in DTC’s MEX-Clásicos series also debuted at LA Escena 2024. Mulas Teatro performed La última gran aventura de la Monja Alférez by Ismael Rojas and Tamara Garduño Pacheco—a reimagining of the last days of Erauso, the protagonist of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s La monja alférez. Los Colochos Teatro premiered Historia de un amor, a Mexicanized musical retelling of Rodrigo de Cota’s late 15th-century Diálogo entre el amor y un viejo, written and directed by Juan Carrillo. Finally, playwright-screenwriter David Gaitán debuted his exploration of the comedia form and its themes in La tinta de mi honra, the story of a close-knit community grappling with a new technology that threatens to tear the town apart. All three presented fully staged productions, even, in the case of Los Colochos, complete with live music.

Planning is now underway for LA Escena 2026, as Diversifying the Classics looks forward to continuing to share the depth of Hispanic cultural production in Los Angeles and beyond.

Photos by Reed Hutchinson