By Douglas Langworthy, Literary Manager, Denver Center Theatre Company

Robert Sicular and Yetta Gottesman in Mariela in the Desert. Photo by Terry Shapiro.

Our production of Karen Zacarias’ play Mariela in the Desert should have been a fairly straightforward mounting of an existing script. Since the play had been produced four times previously at theatres all across the country, our director, Bruce Sevy, had assumed the script was locked in and ready to go…until he called Karen to tell her we were going to do Mariela—and Karen asked if she could do some rewriting.

And so instantly, the play became a “new” play again, and the playwright became an integral part of the rehearsal process. Karen has a quote she loves to share: “Plays are never finished, they’re just abandoned.” This was just one of those projects that she had set aside to work on other plays. But she never felt she’d gotten it quite right. So with the theatre’s blessing, she dove right back into a play she had begun some eight years earlier.

She admits that, like one of the characters in her play, she had started the play seeing things from the outside, and now it was time to see things from the inside. While the plot remained virtually intact, she made significant adjustments to the characters, making them more human, more complex, more able to love. She deleted the first scene and wove the essential information into the next one. The tone of the play became warmer and more accessible. Up through the first preview actors were having to absorb the latest changes. The excitement that goes along with developing a new play and having the playwright in the room is palpable as this fifth production of Mariela heads toward opening.

Is the play finished now? Did Zacarias get it right this time? She says “yes,” this is the version of the play that will live on in future productions and hopefully in published form. Time to finally abandon this one and start the next play and the next.

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