Bilingual play ‘La Algajira’ celebrates diversity, stories of migration

When inspiration strikes, sometimes it does so almost literally. Whitworth University visiting assistant professor of theater Naphtali Fields-Forbes was on a research trip to Chile and Argentina in 2018 hoping to collaborate with South American artists on a bilingual adaptation of Isabel Allende’s “The Stories of Eva Luna,” a collection Fields-Forbes has loved since she was a child.

On her way to Allende’s native Chile, Fields-Forbes stopped in El Salvador, where she lived for two years after college, for the baptism of her goddaughter. It was while talking to friends and community members there that she began to hear more and more about aspects of migration that media outlets in the United States weren’t covering.

“I was noticing that in the communities of my friends how those communities were affected by the forces that pushed people to leave and then also what happened in those communities once folks had left,” Fields-Forbes said.

Fields-Forbes initially pushed against this newfound inspiration, worried that any play she wrote about it would be beating a dead horse, but, while in Chile, she found herself caught in the middle of a fight between Colombians who had been forced out of their country because of economic reasons and local Chileans.

“Suddenly, I was avoiding getting hit with a table and realizing, ‘Holy moly, this question of why do people leave their homes and go to a new place isn’t a question that’s limited to the United States. It’s a question that’s happening all over the world,’ ” she said. “We talk a lot about what happens when they get to us, but I was really interested in exploring what makes them want to leave.”

The play that those conversations and that table-throwing incident inspired, “La Algajira,” opens tonight at Whitworth University’s Cowles Auditorium and continues through March 15. This is Fields-Forbes second bilingual play following her undergrad thesis. While living in El Salvador, she wrote plays in Spanish.

“This feels in some ways like my first adult bilingual play, and that feels great,” she said. “It feels wonderful to be making that attempt.”

The titular character (played by Cambria Pilger) is a made-up mythical creature inspired by La Siguanaba, a Salvadoran mythical woman, La Pincoya, a Chilean mythical creature, and La Llorona, a Latin American mythical woman. Save for one instance, “La Algajira” never translates the English dialogue to Spanish or vice versa. Instead, the play uses things like visual storytelling, songs, movement and context clues to help speakers of either language understand what’s going on.

“It depends on who you ask when you think about the idea of bilingual theater, but the dream is that someone who is a monolingual speaker of either language could come into an audience and have a similar experience of a person sitting next to them who’s a monolingual speaker in the other language,” said Fields-Forbes, who received a bachelor’s degree in bilingual theater from Wheaton College and an MFA in directing and public dialogue at Virginia Tech. “The idea’s not to privilege one language over the other.”

Fields-Forbes admits that this feels like “a utopian dream” she has yet to see or create and said “La Algajira” favors English at times because of Whitworth’s location and the play’s audience.

But whether an audience member is a native English or native Spanish speaker, Fields-Forbes wants the experience of watching the play, and the added elements including visual storytelling and movement, to make audiences feel like they’re on a journey.

“As any of us who have experienced sitting in a room with subtitles or translations can tell you, when you’re constantly waiting for whichever language you don’t understand to finish, that journey keeps getting interrupted,” she said. “The idea is that natural, theatrical elements can help the whole audience participate in a journey together instead of two separate journeys in the same space.

“One of our hopes for this play is to recognize that there are a lot of windows and doorways into other cultures … recognizing there are so many things that we share and what are the tethers that can attach me or tie me to someone who speaks a different language than me but is sitting next to me hopefully crying at the same scene that I’m crying at.”

Fields-Forbes believes the bilingual nature of “La Algajira” has inspired the cast to research and ask questions about the script, perhaps even more so than with a single-language play. They are learning about vocabulary that’s new to them and perfecting their accents, but also learning about the cultural context of the work thanks in part to the help of Kim Hernandez, an instructor in the world languages department.

Working in two languages, Fields-Forbes said, also is giving students a chance to practice navigating cross-cultural contexts.

“In some ways, rehearsal is going ‘Yes, we’re rehearsing for telling this story and telling this play,’ but we’re also rehearsing living in a space in which multiple cultures are featured and one isn’t more important or better than the other,” she said.

Fields-Forbes and the cast and crew of “La Algajira” believe the fact that Spokane is a space where multiple cultures are featured is proof that this story needs to be told in the Inland Northwest.

“I think there’s something really beautiful about community members in any community being able to tell a story that stands up and says, ‘Hey, we’re here, and we’re part of this community, too, and we want you to hear who we are,’ ” she said. “We’re excited to share ‘La Algajira’ with the community, and we hope that people come and spend time in a beautiful, multicultural space with us.”