On June 29, 2012, a massive series of wind and thunderstorms known as a derecho moved through Northern Virginia, with fierce winds up to 80 miles an hour that knocked out power to a million households, killed five people and left a trail of destruction for hundreds of miles.
Playwright Noelle Viñas was spending that summer at her parents’ Virginia home on the day that storm blew through and took down a 40-foot-tall tree in their backyard.
Twelve years later, Viñas has conjured up her own tempest at the La Jolla Playhouse, which opens her world premiere comedy-drama “Derecho” on Sunday.
First presented locally in workshop form at the Playhouse’s 2022 DNA New Works series, “Derecho” is the story of two very different Latin American sisters.
Actor Ashley Alvarez stars as the older sister, Eugenia, a White Latina who is running for office in Virginia’s general assembly. Caro Guzmán plays younger sister Mercedes, an Afro Latina and struggling musician who eschews politics. As a massive storm closes in on the affluent Virginia home where they’re meeting, tensions rise to a boiling point as the clash over culture, values and lifestyles.
Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley said “Derecho” is the 11th play from the DNA series to make the transition to a full production.
“Noelle Viñas has crafted a fascinating, thought-provoking piece that taps into so many relevant issues in our country right now,” Ashley said, in a statement.
Viñas was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and was 4 years old when her family immigrated to Northern Virginia. She re growing up among a diverse community of Latin American women whose families did business and politics in nearby Washington, D.C. Now splitting her time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, she’s a playwright, a TV writer and a teacher.
Just as “Derecho” was inspired by her storm experience in 2012, Viñas said her earlier plays were all based on her personal experience of growing up feeling like an outsider in America.
“I wrote … plays about migrations of all kinds and what it means to migrate from a lower-class family into an upper-class family by marriage, or to migrate across the country and what it means to migrate into artistic circles if you’re an outsider,” she said. “My writing is about women who enter new spaces and feel they don’t belong.”
“Derecho” got its start in 2012, when Viñas said she wrote some “very bad pages” of a script about two sisters and was so uninspired by the results that she ed the pages into her Google drive and promptly forgot about them.
Six years later, after she’d used her savings from a software sales job to pay for grad school, she rediscovered the “bad pages” in her Google drive. At the time, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a New York native of Puerto Rican descent — was among a number of women of color who were running outsider campaigns for public office. That provided Viñas with the inspiration to finish her play.
After a workshop and a couple of readings in the Bay area in 2018 and 2019, “Derecho” was further developed in a virtual workshop during the pandemic at the 2020 Bay Area Playwrights Festival.
Among the many people who tuned in to watch that online performance was Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, the co-founder of San Diego’s Moxie Theatre who now works as a freelance director across the country.
She loved what she saw.
“The writing is exquisite,” Turner Sonnenberg said. “I loved the relationship between the sisters and also the creativity, the theatricality and the language. I think a playwright’s use of language is what separates theater from other storytelling forms. Language is how you get imagery in theater. I appreciate how bold the characters are and it’s smart, sexy and surprising. It’s also a great blend of comedy and poetry and prose. It’s a very grown-up contemporary play.”
Turner Sonnenberg wanted to pitch the play to a theater for possible production but wanted to speak to Viñas first and ask permission. Viñas said she was immediately impressed by Turner Sonnenberg because she had connections in the San Diego theater scene, she had a solid background in producing and she also had good ideas for how to get the play “up on its feet.”
“It’s rare you meet a director who is thinking about both the production and the literary parts of a play,” Viñas said of Turner Sonnenberg. “She had a specific combination of both and I thought, ‘Damn I think she’s going to get it done.’ I wanted to work with an older, more experience director who knows what she wants and who she is. And I wanted to learn from someone who had handled a budget on a really difficult thing at a bigger scale.”
One of the play’s technical challenges is creating the derecho that engulfs the home where the sisters and their family are sheltering. Viñas said the play does not have horror or supernatural elements, but it does feature some surrealistic moments that re-create the heart-stopping experience that can occur when a major storm arrives.
“There are these moments in a storm when you’re living through it where it feels like things are happening in slow motion and then the storm comes back at full speed. There’s that sort of surrealism in the play,” she said.
Viñas said the characters in “Derecho” were inspired by the many generations of strong women in her own family who aren’t afraid to argue their way into leadership positions.
“It’s also about how younger sisters are just as strong and what is the power struggle between two sisters with different ways of living. One is an artist and one has hustled in a capitalistic way to win an election,” Viñas said. “It also examines how Americans view Latinos as a monolithic group and we’re not. We’re a lot of different races, values, religions and politics.”
Although this is an election year when Latinx voters are expected to make a big difference at the polls, Viñas and Turner Sonnenberg said “Derecho” is not a political play. Politics is just the lens through which these sisters try to figure each other out and find their way back to each other.
“It’s political in the sense that they’re trying to figure out a way to live their lives with all these other things that push them down and ask them to change,” Viñas said. “There are a lot of love stories in the play, but the main love story is between the sisters.”
‘Derecho’
When: Previews July 23-27. Opens July 28, and runs through Aug. 18. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 1 and 7 p.m. Sundays
Where: Mandell Weiss Forum, La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, UCSD La Jolla
Tickets: $29-$74
Phone: (858) 550-1010
Online: lajollaplayhouse.org
