(Above: Los Dreamers at the University of Oregon’s Robinson Theatre, featuring left to right, Monse Quesada Gonzales as Scoobi, Laila Ortega as Petra, and Evan Stalnaker as Dylan.)
By Jennifer Appleby Chu
If you know your life can be demolished by a single knock on your door, what do you do? How far do you go to protect what you have? Whose help are you willing to enlist?
These are the all-too-familiar questions posed by Mónica Sánchez’s play Los Dreamers, currently enjoying a belated world premiere at UO’s Robinson Theatre. Originally published almost ten years ago, it was shelved due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was written yesterday.
At the heart of the play is mother-daughter pair Petra (Laila Ortega) and Scoobi (Monse Quesada Gonzalez). It’s 2017, and ICE is doubling down on deportations all over. Scoobi is undocumented, so the women devise an unusual solution: marry her off to a white American college student (Evan Stalnaker) whom they find through Craigslist. It’s meant to be a temporary fix, but slowly blossoms into something more for all three of them.
Because the label “undocumented” conceals a lifetime’s worth of context, there is also a parallel plot, chronicling Petra’s youthful days in Mexico as a Zapatista fighter. It was here that she both met Scoobi’s father and found herself as a person, so it’s here that her daughter’s story actually begins.
The cultural love is palpable in every aspect of this production. The nearly all-Latine cast alternate readily between English and Spanish and clearly relish what they are doing on stage. Several of the actors note in the program what a joyful thing it was to represent themselves through this script.
They weren’t the only appreciative ones. One of the show’s best moments, when Scoobi’s new husband finally learns what to call his mother-in-law, got both knowing laughs and whoops of delight from the audience.
The design team (almost all students — a rare feat) is also savoring the vibrance of the setting. Most of the action happens awash in the colors of a Southwestern sunset, occasionally shifting to dense Chiapas jungle. You might find yourself quietly dancing in your seat to the transitional music. For more juicy design insight, check out the concept art table in the lobby.
Working with brand new scripts is its own special delight and challenge. Actors, directors, and designers all get to set historic precedent but have to build everything they do from scratch. An un-produced play, if not in its infancy, is definitely still in adolescence. Like any teen, it’s figuring itself out moment to moment.
That freshness is visible in the text of Los Dreamers, which is still deciding some key things about what story it wants to tell and how to tell it. A few important connections need better establishing, and the parallel plots sometimes obscure rather than illuminate each other.
The saying in the theater is that it takes a new play at least three productions to find itself. Los Dreamers has some searching still to do, but UO has laid the groundwork. Others can now follow.
