Spanish captions, now on Seattle stages near you

“I can’t consider anybody’s out in that deluge,” he tells Celestina after they meet. “They’re calling it the storm of the century.” 

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As Seattle actor Myles Joseph Romo performs Aníbal’s traces throughout a current matinee efficiency of Cloud Tectonics at Seattle’s twelfth Avenue Arts, white letters seem on a TV display screen to the left of the stage: “No puedo creer que haya alguien afuera en este diluvio. Lo están llamando la tormenta del siglo.” 

The Spanish translation isn’t included within the stage notes for the 1995 magical-realist play by Puerto Rican playwright José Rivera. It’s an addition by Seattle’s Sound Theatre Firm, a part of a Spanish-captioning initiative in collaboration with Seattle’s E-book-It Repertory Theatre, in hopes of creating the play extra accessible to Spanish-speaking audiences. 

Sound Theatre is providing Spanish captions at 4 performances of Cloud Tectonics (co-produced with native theater group Earthseed), together with its closing-night efficiency (Oct. 15, 7.30 p.m.) at twelfth Avenue Arts. At Seattle Middle, E-book-It’s presenting the play Within the Time of the Butterflies, playwright Caridad Svich’s adaptation of the novel by Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez, during which she traces the Mirabal sisters’ well-known resistance towards the brutal Trujillo dictatorship within the Dominican Republic. E-book-It’s offering Spanish captioning throughout two performances of Within the Time of the Butterflies (by Oct. 16, Spanish-captioned efficiency Oct. 15, 2 p.m., Middle Theatre). 

Captioning is frequent in opera, through English supertitles showing above the stage, and English captioning for the deaf and hard-of-hearing neighborhood is gaining some traction in theaters (though progress is sluggish). However Spanish-captioning initiatives for play performances are uncommon within the U.S. 

Whereas Seattle has a deep historical past of bilingual theater, because of neighborhood theater teams like eSe Teatro and a robust contingent of native Latino and Latina playwrights and producers, Sound Theatre and E-book-It’s joint undertaking very doubtless marks the primary time native theater organizations are providing Spanish captioning. The transfer places the organizations on the forefront of a nationwide effort to make theater extra accessible to non-native English audio system, immigrant communities and audiences of colour. 

“Making room for different languages, even when you don’t perceive it, is a big step for our metropolis,” says Ana María Campoy, director of Within the Time of the Butterflies. “It’s additionally a step for these arts organizations to acknowledge the communities that they’ve ignored, and to truly begin making efforts to serve them and welcome them.”