Perhaps you’ve heard of telenovelas, those soap opera-ish dramas popularized by the Telemundo channel and adored by more than 2 billion viewers worldwide. If you have, then the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park’s production of Destiny of Desire should be on your dance card in the weeks ahead. And if you haven’t, well, perhaps you owe it to yourself to check out this cultural phenomenon — even in the over-the-top, caricatured version that playwright Karen Zacarías has assembled. (Two other scripts by her, The Book Club Plan and Native Gardens, have been previous hits for the Playhouse.)
Zacarías has replicated the overheated, melodramatic form with a complicated story about two Mexican families whose baby daughters are illicitly switched at birth. Suffice it to say that before the two-act show winds up there have been confusions, confessions, coincidences, revelations and remorse, all enacted to the nth degree, often with musical accompaniment (Robert J. Revell is the singular musician who supports all this with piano, guitar and more). While Destiny of Desire is not a musical, it has enough impassioned songs to raise the temperature to fever level, especially a forlorn “ranchera” number, “Fallaste, Corazón” (“You failed, heart”), sung in Spanish by Sebastián (hunky, bare-chested Eduardo Enrikez), capable of melting hearts onstage and off.
Fabiola Castillo (Ruth Livier), the manipulative wife of wealthy casino owner Armando (Juan Luis Acevedo), delivers a sickly child; in another part of the hospital the Del Rios, simple farmers (Yassmin Alers and Ruben Flores) have a healthy daughter. Imperious Fabiola demands a swap. As a result, the Castillos raise Pilar (Esperanza América), who yearns for a simple life, and the Del Rios nurture sweet Victoria (Elia Saldana), who dreams of a Cinderella-like release from poverty and a career in medicine despite her frail constitution. Of course, they meet as young women and fantasize about changing places.
América and Saldana have played these back-and-forth, switched-at-birth roles previously, and they have the right kind of finesse to portray their 18-year-old characters with genuine feeling within the broadly comic storytelling. Both are fine singers, too.
A salty, no-nonsense nun, Sister Sonia (Dyana Ortelli), is the voice of reason who keeps pulling dishonest narratives back toward the truth. When all is revealed during the show’s finale — one gasping moment after another, not unlike the endings of several Shakespearean romantic comedies where order is happily restored — she becomes the ringmaster. She also has an amusing moment where she crosses the stage while playing a plaintive saxophone solo.
Destiny of Desire is not simply a comedy. It opens with a choral statement by the entire cast, defining the show as “an unapologetic telenovela: in two acts. We are here to change the social order. Deal with it.” Stop-action moments feature various actors stepping to a microphone to voice sobering facts: “At hospitals in the United States, about one in eight babies is given to the wrong mother.” “One person is found dead each day in the desert between the United States and Mexico.”
These insertions connect the show to a larger reality: According to the program, the location is “an abandoned theatre in Cincinnati.” It’s performed under an ornate, time-worn proscenium, hung with a tattered red curtain. Everyone in the cast is involved in floridly choreographed scene changes, demonstratively pulling drapes across wires, athletically rolling furniture on and off, making sound effects, and displaying large posters to the audience indicating the substance of the next scene: “A Chance Encounter,” “Servants, Poets … Sisters?” “Another Surprising Turn of Events” and “Life, Destiny, And Denouement.”
Telenovelas are not serious dramas, but they can subversively address issues as important as class differences and the role of women. Zacarías’s script does just that while navigating the complex stories that often make 180-degree turns in a highly entertaining way. Director José Luis Valenzuela, the artistic director of the Latino Theatre Company in Los Angeles who has staged productions of this show in Washington, D.C., Chicago and elsewhere, makes the most of what Zacarías has written, perhaps even too much at times. With a running time of two-and-a-half hours (there’s a 20-minute intermission), his broadly comic staging of Destiny of Desire is almost too much of a muchness. But I assure you that along the way you’ll be surprised, caught up short and more than once laugh unexpectedly.
Based on the announcement of Governor Mike DeWine regarding the COVID-19 virus, all remaining performances of Destiny of Desire have been cancelled, as of March 12. Ticketholders will receive further information by phone or email. More info: Cincyplay.com.
This article appears in Mar 4-17, 2020.
