Do you remember the first time reading Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”? Suddenly, the world becomes a magical place in which your ninth-grade crush who sits in front of you is going to show up at your doorstep and proclaim their undying adolescent adorations.
Quite unrealistically, you begin to believe in the world that Shakespeare created. Then, you find yourself reciting lines for class and all too casually, you can identify with characters written in 1597.
This is the mysterious power of Shakespeare’s classic play.
Whether it’s told through two animated gnomes (“Gnomeo and Juliet”) or a ’90s modern backdrop including post-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio, the story of these two tragic lovers transcends through time, still making people feel those butterflies they can sometimes forget they still have inside of them.
Seres Jaime Magaña, a native of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, and a graduate of legacy institution UT Pan American, has written a rendition of “Romeo and Juliet” titled, “The Tragic Corrido of Romeo & Lupe,” for the Pharr Community Theater.
The play is set to premiere in April, with auditions taking place last week.
Magaña’s spin on the story takes place in “Magic Valley,” with his two main characters being heavily rooted in Rio Grande Valley and Mexican culture.
He described culture being something he wanted to touch on as a writer, which coincided nicely when Pedro Garcia, the theater’s artistic director, approached him about wanting to do an adaptation.
“When I first got here [to the U.S.], I feel that there was little bit of wanting to belong to the U.S., and I was kind of getting away from my culture,” he said. “As I progressed as a writer, I started to find more and more material and connection to myself and the things I’m trying to say in my culture.”
Characters Romeo Campbell and Lupe Díaz struggle with the new and old of culture, and seek to find balance in the traditional and modern.
They resemble their original counterparts in wanting to break free from family ties, but more important, Magaña adds the struggle between family and passion that many Valley natives and Mexican people can relate to due to cultural conventions.
“At one point I’m saying, ‘Romeo, get connected to your culture,’ but at one point I’m also saying, ‘But there is an aspect of tradition that it’s so conservative it doesn’t let you move forward,’” he said.
Romeo is written as the son of an irrigation company owner, and caught between duty and his free spirit.
His father seeks to build canals on land that locals do not agree with, and finds himself in a bind of who he is, and what his family wants.
“Romeo’s dad married a woman who had inherited land, because her dad was a ranch owner, so Mr. Campbell came in and married her and became the owner of the land,” Magaña said. “He started building canals in this land, and people started not responding well of how he’s going to do it. Romeo shares his father’s ambition but doesn’t share that view that his father has that he’s on top of the locals and superior to his mother.”
Protesting the Campbells is Lupe’s family and cousin Plácido [the Tybalt personality], creating the conflict for our Montague and Capulet families.
He describes his leads as night and day, complementing each other in what the other lacks.
“She’s very brave. Romeo is very, in the shadow of his father. He cannot go against it. He has a very hard time. He’s repressed. With Lupe, she’s more outgoing, more vibrant, and her father is really depressed but she’s able to get him back on his feet,” Magaña said. “Those are the two personalities. Him being the moon, very passive, her being the sun, very vibrant and alive.”
Adding to the themes of cultural representation, Magaña replaced the marriage conflict of Count Paris and Juliet with a Tía Marla, who seeks to take Lupe to Mexico with her.
“She just lives in this huge house and this echo of the possible family she could’ve had,” he said. “She wants to take Lupe and make her the daughter she never had. If she works as a symbol, she works as a symbol of Mexican principles that are very conservative.”
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Magaña hopes that audiences leave the theater with a new outlook on their culture, and of course, with hope for love.
Asked what art means to him, Magaña replied,“A lot of people think art is something you have to strive for all the time, like ‘Art is over there, you’re over here,’ but art is something you have to live. That’s the only way; it all of a sudden starts to just come out of you. I always describe that the musician hears music everywhere. He can hear a sound and he can hear beats.
“An artist can look at something and just think, ‘I want to paint that.’ The writer is finding words, storylines, plots, meaningful moments in every moment. Art is, in fact, something that you’re living. It’s not something you live at your office or at the computer. It’s something that’s happening all of the time.”
If you simply can’t wait for April to see “The Tragic Corrido of Romeo & Lupe,” and want more out of this poet, you can find him every Saturday night at open mic night at Luna Coffee House, located at 113 W. Nolana Ave. in McAllen.
His advice for aspiring UTRGV playwrights: “Learn how to be an artist. It’s in you; you have your intuition, but you have to practice. Only through that practice are you going to be able to reach people the way you want to reach them.”
