Picture yourself walking, ticket in hand, through the glass doors of the building where you are to see a play. Upon stepping in you see, tacked to the lobby walls, photos of Latin American families in the midst of joy. Laughing, joyful—content. Wow, you think as your eyes scan the glossy 4x6's, now these are honest-to-goodness, down-to-earth families if I've ever seen any. Before long it comes time for you to step into the theatre. And, as you step about in search of a seat, you can't help but pick up on the waft of good cooking - the homespun smells of celery, garlic, beef, cumin. You sit down and, feeling immensely comfortable, you get the feeling you're in for a show spectacular and different.
 
This is Caridad Svich's Guapa, coming to the Christine DeVitt Black Box from February 8th to the 13th, a production that, yes, you bet, will be as spectacular as it is innovative. 
 
Guapa is a play about many things. It is about the eponymous character and her dreams of making it as an international soccer phenom, yes, but it is also a play about family. It is a play about being true to oneself and seizing one's dreams despite the hardships you might face. It is about fighting for oneself, and it is about perseverance, achievement and, perhaps most importantly, success.
 
For director Carlos Medina-Maldonado, Guapa is about assimilation in a country—and in our familiar southern, stilliform state—that, historically, has treated Latin Americans unfairly. Carlos says how one of the first things he noticed about the play was how its dialogue epitomized his experiences growing up as a Latin American in the United States. To him, Guapa is about a family assimilating in a Texas border town. It is about achieving the American dream in a land whose social, political, and economic adversities do so much to preclude Latin Americans from ever achieving it. And Carlos is no stranger to the hassles of assimilation. Born in Puerto Rico, he and his family moved to Florida when he was seven years old. He began preschool before he could comfortably speak English, and he recalls with no little discontent coming home crying because neither his teachers nor the other students could understand what he was saying:
 
“My parents made a big push for me to learn English, and I lost a lot of the Puerto Rican side of me, because I started only speaking in English. When I started looking at this play, I found myself gravitating toward conversations that were happening in the text, as experiences I personally had with my own family.”
 
In this sense, more underlies this production of Guapa than merely its being the next up on the stage in this season's selection of shows. It is an occasion—for director, actors, and audience all—to witness storytelling both personal and socio-culturally urgent. It follows Evangeline Jimenez's Nunca Olvidaré in September 2014, a pastiche of interviews from the Lubbock Hispanic community as part of The Identity Project. If nothing else, this production of Guapa, coming  more than seven years later, demonstrates that a meaningful discourse on the place  of Latin Americans in this country is still as needed as it was then.
 
That is why Guapa is in such good hands under Carlos' direction. He has taken pains to make sure the show will not only steer clear of but actively rebuke Latin American stereotypes. As director, he has worked hard  to not let the play's characters be one-dimensional generalities. Too often in media, Puerto Rican characters are harmfully mistyped. Men are seen as violent, aggressive, and surly, and women as fiery and exotic. Carlos recoils from these stereotypes. His directorial style follows the psycho-physical approach to acting, where actors are encouraged to bring their personal experience and emotion to bear on the roles they play. Given the show's all Latinx cast, Carlos' approach offers the student actors a welcome chance to work more inside their own individualized narratives, instead of having to adapt to unfriendly roles within the oftentimes white-dominated structure of the American theatre's traditionally Western canon.
 
Guapa will, in other words, delight in the magnificence of Latinidad—Latin American culture in all its lovely, layered dimension. And it is this devotion that necessitates the use of real food on stage—traditional Latin American dishes, slow-cooked for seven-plus hours prior to the show's start, which Carlos deems a sort of “smell design.” That is why photos of Latin American families—smiling together, joyous—will be tacked to the walls of the lobby. To be sure, Guapa will be a show unlike any other yet reproducible in the households of millions of Latin American families across this country. Because stories are always as numerous as the individuals who people them. And there are people just beyond the walls of each house on every block in this country.
 
 No matter how acquainted one may be with the Latin American experience walking into the theatre, there is something in Guapa for everyone. The play contains within its story patterns of upbringing that just about anyone can latch onto: chasing the dreams one had as a child, rebelling against the status quo, building on one's dreams, and even, yes, rising to new heights. 
 
Guapa is your chance to see that stories like this one still exist, and that the individuals who people them are all around you. 
 
That they are, in a very real sense, you.