“Nuestra Señora de las Nubes” and Translating the Latinx Experience

After a four-year hiatus, TEATRO!, Harvard’s Spanish-language theater troupe, returns with “Nuestra Señora de las Nubes,” or “Our Lady of the Clouds.” The show explores the story of Oscar and Bruna, two political exiles from a fictional Latin American country, who learn to define their home in a world of constant hostility. Written in response to the Argentine Dirty War, the show is an original translation by director Nicolas E. O’Connor ’17. The play will run Oct. 28 to Nov. 5 at the Loeb Experimental Theater.

According to O’Connor, the endeavor of translation spanned almost five months, beginning in April and finishing in mid-September. During this time, O’Connor consulted with Vargas, who lives in Ecuador, where O’Connor was studying abroad.

Other than difficulties with translating puns and wordplay, O’Connor says, preserving the narrative tone in translation was especially challenging. “There’s always the traditional difficulty of trying to find the voice that exists,” he says. “It’s one thing to just straight translate it. Anyone who kind of knows the language can straight-translate it. But there’s a particular art to actually figuring out how the characters speak and how that’s going to be preserved in translation.”

In addition to translation, the unconventional character-to-cast ratio proved an interesting challenge. Though the show features 17 characters in total, the cast comprises only four actors who take on multiple roles throughout the show.

All of the actors in the cast are Latin American. “[The show] tells a very unique story [with] a unique Latinx perspective that other shows don’t really capture,” O’Connor said. “Other shows have tried… casting race-blind or gender-blind, but oftentimes if a Latinx person ends up in the show, it never ends up being the focus of the production. What’s interesting here is that it’s very much the focus.”

Besides its all-Latinx cast, the content of the show centers around an experience that will be familiar to Latin American students. The play will be a defining piece of theater for Latin American audiences typically underrepresented onstage, according to Danny L. Rodriguez ’18, the stage manager of the show and president of TEATRO!. “I feel like everyone should be able to have that option to see a show that they say, ‘This is me. This is my family,’” he said. “This is definitely the first show where I read the script and said, ‘Okay, I see myself in this show.’”

Rodriguez, who worked on shows with BlackCAST, says he noticed how race representation fostered a spirit of inclusion in the theater world among African American students. “I would love for this show and our next shows to have a similar effect on the Latin American community,” he said. “I want them to get excited and think, ‘Theater can be about us.’”

Thematically, the show will likely resonate with audiences who identify with the immigrant narrative. “It’s an experience very specific to someone who lived through the Argentine Dirty War and had to flee to another country, which also makes it relevant to the immigrant experience,” O’Connor said. “Just like people coming to the United States and not fitting in here…. A lot of the cast will tell you that they feel personally connected to it because they have a family member who had that experience or maybe [have had that experience] themselves.”