"Telenovelas are a populace form of entertainment, and what intrigued me was the idea of taking this form of storytelling and marrying it with high art, as theater is thought of being...
Coming to the theater humanizes people...
Culture informs perspective, and the world is a complicated place. Telling the story on stage increases understanding.
In DESTINY of DESIRE, for example, we are exercising a different cultural aesthetic, a different idea of beauty, a theater style that speaks directly from the Latino perspective. Both the director, Jose Luis Valenzuela, and I specifically understood the focus in DESTINY on the elevation of the telenovela concept. One thing that happens when we don't encourage diversity, is that these amazingly trained actors keep getting relegated to small roles, as background rather than protagonists. There are eleven actors in the DESTINY cast, all Latino, some are trained opera singers, one is a civil engineer by day, and each is playing two characters (their primary character, and the character they portray in the play-within-the-play). Audiences need to see this."
- Karen Zacarías as quoted in a marvelous interview by Ellen Burns www.BroadwayWorld.com
snapshots from tonight's brilliant musical play
DESTINY OF DESIRE is playing now through October 18, 2015 at Arena Stage's Kreeger Theater.
I grew up watching telenovelas. The women in my famliy would gather after dinner to indulge in the latest drama for an hour or two. It was a ritualistic escape from day to day life and a communion all at once.
I wish to see DESTINY of DESIRE again...with my mother, my aunts and my mother-in-law...
