Playwright’s Note

Reprinted by permission of Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

Karen Zacarías, Playwright

Telenovelas, whether watched or not, are a daily part of popular culture and seep into the lives of most Latin Americans. So when my family emigrated from Mexico to the United States, telenovelas seemed destined to become a thing of my past. Until I realized,  Americans watch telenovelas too.

Telenovelas are not daytime soap operas like General Hospital and One Life to Live. In Mexico, telenovelas are more like prime time shows like Scandal; they are finite and have an arc with a beginning, middle and end. Each episode is an explosive storytelling event. American daytime soap operas, on the other hand, inch along for decades.  The way the U.S. public reacted to “Who Shot J.R.?” was much more in line with the palpable power of telenovelas back home.

As a playwright that grew up in Mexico, my goal has always been to introduce U.S. audiences to stories that humanize the people of my birth country. But as I worked more in theater, I began to notice that critics would use the word “telenovela” to erroneously and disparagingly describe a lot of work written by Latina writers.

To combat this, I decided to write the best stage telenovela I could…to show what a telenovela really is and what it is not. I wanted to examine my own ambivalent feelings about this popular and populist art form and both honor and test the genre. I wanted to give a large cast of Latinx actors, musicians, designers and directors an opportunity to show virtuosic chops. I wanted the play to be aesthetically beautiful and full of music (the melo of melodrama).

I created a Brechtian epic theatre frame around the melodrama to give the play context and sharpness. The actors create the story and are also the audience getting pulled into the story. No matter how crazy the antics get on stage, there are funny or sobering facts that ground the plot and connect it to life in the U.S. In the tradition of Brecht’s poor theatre, all the scenery is moved by the actors — a reminder that theatre is powered by human muscle and can be done anywhere with any type of budget. Imagination is our biggest theatrical element and the love we feel for these characters fuels a rollercoaster of emotions.

Writing Destiny of Desire became for me a subversive, political and artistic act… and I’ve never had more fun in my life.

Anything is possible in Destiny of Desire… and in the theatre.

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• Zacarías Returns with Destiny of Desire

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