Playwright: Tanya Saracho
At: Teatro Luna, 556 W. 18th Street
Phone: (312) 829-7552; $15
Runs through: March 30
In two years, las mujeres Latinas of Teatro Luna have defined their ensemble esthetic, developed new works in Chicago and New York, and established a cozy storefront theater in Pilsen. With Kita y Fernanda by ensemble member Tanya Saracho, Teatro Luna presents its first full-length play, as it grows in strength and confidence.
Despite some problems, Kita y Fernanda is a dynamic night in the theater, starting with the rich Latin, Asian, Black and Euro mix of the audience. Simply taking a seat, one senses that this is not the same old Off-Loop group or event, but part of Chicago theater’s continual reinvention of itself. The Teatro Luna mission (in part) of self-validation for and by diverse Latina artists then snaps to life through a cast of women who are blond and brunette, fair and dark, tall and short, large and small and fully bilingual, yet only four in number. They are uniformly energetic under director Marcela Munoz.
Told in flashback fashion (more in English than Spanish), the story follows two girls who meet over Barbie dolls and grow up as best friends living in the same house, although not without conflicts of class, wealth and temperament. Fernanda (playwright Saracho) is the child of a well-off Tex-Mex family, while Kita (Jasmin Cardenas) is the daughter of the family’s undocumented live-in maid. In late adolescence, Kita abandons her mother, home and Fernanda to find her own way. Ten years later, chance offers an opportunity to reunite; a reunion left in doubt at play’s end.
The title characters are complex creations constantly pushing the envelope of friendship as they grow from girls to women, one outgoing but needy and one quiet but intense. The other characters, played by Beatriz Jamaica and Marisabel Suarez in multiple roles, are quickly sketched and fall into easy stereotypes. It might have been better to create deeper secondary characters by focusing on fewer events in Kita’s and Fernanda’s checkerboard lives. Selectivity vs. the shotgun approach.
As it is, there are too many incidents covering too many years, requiring much jumping back-and-forth in time. Especially late in the play, several scenes add to the history of the women without deepening the story. They stretch the playing time to 100 minutes without intermission, a little too long. At that point, the characters are well established. What the audience wants is resolution and completion, rather than more information. Among these scenes are the break-down of Fernanda’s pill-addled mother, and crises faced by Kita and Fernanda in their lives long after they’ve gone their own ways. Despite these issues, Saracho has a voice worth hearing and theater sense worth watching, which may be said of Teatro Luna itself.