San Juan dispatch #1
In Puerto Rico for LASA 2015, talking and thinking about rewriting, adaptation, translation, performance, the borders (where are they?) between fiction and the real, on or off stage. Conversations enhanced (or reality stressed, or undermined) by the palm trees in the background, the ocean breeze, the ruined fort incongruously attched to the far end of the hotel grounds. 
Thursday night, I had the opportunity to make the short drive (short largely because friends made all the arrangements) to Santurce to Abracadabra for a special performance of ¿Cortadito o capuchino? an adaptation of Osvaldo Dragún’s Los de la mesa diez. 
I reread the play just before the trip, so I had it fresh in mind. It’s a happier, more optimistic play, less hard-edged than Dragún’s better known Historias para ser contadas, though the form and some content (direct audience address, actors assuming multiple roles, emphasis on storytelling, economic constraints and social inequality) have points in common. This version was full of music, masks, movement. 
The actors were agile and engaging, and the acordionist quickly had the adudience clapping along. The troupe translates Dragún’s Argentine idiom and references to Puerto Rico, even making the play lightly bilingual, as when characters call for an “easier” song, launch into a charming, cheesy, overdone rendition of “Endless Love,” and then shift–seamlessly–to an up-tempo version of “Un buen perdedor.” Memory lane tunes available for all. In keeping with the play’s roots, we sipped an Argentine Malbec. Great fun.
