Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 263
Gloria Garayua is Gracie in Octavio Solis’s Christmas play, La Posada Mágica (The Magic Journey), which
echoes the traditional Latin American procession honoring Joseph and Mary’s search for lodging in which to
bear the Christ child. This 2008 production, directed by playwright Solis himself, was presented for the fifteenth
consecutive year at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California. © Henry DiRocco/South Coast Repertory Theatre
Aviateurs (1981) is performed entirely in English—
the language of aviation—although it is a thoroughly
French play that (so far) has been performed only in
France. Endstation Amerika, Frank Castorf’s adaptation
of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named
Desire for Berlin’s Volksbühne (“People’s Theatre”),
was performed in a roughly equal mixture of German,
French, and English. British dramatist David Edgar’s
Pentecost (the word refers to the Biblical “tongues
of fire” of multiple languages) portrays a mix of
frightened Kurdish, Romani, Azeri, Mozambican,
Hindi, Afghan, and Bosnian refugees, all speaking
their own languages along with their individual versions
of English. The American macaronic theatre has
recently generated Octavio Solis’s Spanish-English
Lydia, Lonnie Carter’s English-Tagalog (Filipino)
The Romance of Magno Rubio, David Henry Hwang’s
Chinese-English Chinglish, Tony Kushner’s French-
Arabic-Pashto-Dari-English-Esperanto Homebody/
Kabul, and Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House, which
memorably begins with a housekeeper telling the
audience a joke in Portuguese.
It is both realistic and poignant for the characters in
all those plays to speak in different languages, for in each
case linguistic variety conveys differing aspects of cultural
identity while still propelling the plot, character, and
the creation of audience empathy. Many of us face linguistic
variety in our increasingly multicultural lives, and a
macaronic theatre mirrors our evolving nature. It is hard
to overestimate the importance of this trend, which can
powerfully depict conflicts between cultural survival and
assimilation, and give voice to the multiple perspectives