Christine Quintana’s El Terremoto shakes things up at Tarragon Theatre with its inspired approach to adaptation

Open this photo in gallery:

• Title: El Terremoto
• Written by: Christine Quintana
• Director: Guillermo Verdecchia
• Actors: Mariló Núñez, Miranda Calderon, Margarita Valderrama
• Company: Tarragon Theatre
• City: Toronto, Ont.
• Year: Runs to April 21, 2024

Whenever times get tight in theatre, living playwrights have to adapt or die: If you want to say something new on a stage, you must find an older play or book to say it through in order to be produced and attract cash-strapped, risk-adverse audiences.

There’s nothing necessarily negative about this ancient practice, of course; lately, however, I’ve seen a couple adaptations in Toronto that left me feeling like the contemporary subject matter and classic source material were at odds.

For instance, I’m not sure what Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, a two-part play about gay life a generation after AIDS now on at Canadian Stage, really gains from its sometimes straitjacketing structural similarities to Howard’s End. Then there was Inua Ellams’s Three Sisters at Soulpepper – which could have been a strong adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play, or an amazing original play about the Biafran War, but wore out its welcome at the three-hour mark by having to be both.

For inspiration on how a playwright can start from a place of adaptation and then let a work evolve into something that talks about today in way that is fresh rather than forced, go check out Christine Quintana’s El Terremoto at Tarragon Theatre.

Quintana, an on-the-rise writer who’s being commissioned left, right and centre these days, seems to have used Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters as inspiration only as long it was useful in the development of her emotionally intelligent new dramatic comedy – and then thrown it in the fire.

El Terremoto – which means earthquake in English – does begin with a Chekhovian trio of sisters gathering at the family home, in East Vancouver, to celebrate the youngest’s birthday, their parents, Mexican-born, long deceased.

Luz (Mariló Núñez) is, like her late mother, a professor at the University of British Columbia; unmarried, around 40, she assumed the role of family matriarch after her mother died at the age she is now.

Rosa (Miranda Calderon) is slightly younger, a successful architect, and a less than successful human always itching for a fight; she drinks to excess and still pines for an ex named Henry (Michael Scholar Jr.) who married another woman.

Then, there’s Lina (Margarita Valderrama) – referred to as the “late-breaking” surprise of the family – who was still a baby when her parents died. She’s turning 21 and, after a couple extra gap years because of the COVID-19 pandemic, has just started at UBC, but is having trouble focusing on studies while the world is, literally, burning.

Open this photo in gallery:

Lina and, to a lesser extent, Luz long for another place in the play – not Moscow, but the Mexican town that part of the sisters’ family came from. It is only the older sister who ever actually lived there, however. But maybe is it harder to miss a place you’ve never been, parents you can’t remember, and a language you never learned to speak?

Ditching Chekhov to interrogate a common Canadian experience from a specific perspective, Quintana has her sisters explore a spectrum of feelings about dislocation – having immigrated as a child, as a baby, or being born in Canada, respectively.

There are vividly drawn and beautiful acted secondary characters for them to explore these with – from their abuela (Rosalba Martinni); to sad-sack Omar (Sam Khalilieh), divorced and caring for his elderly father next door; to Tash (Caolan Kelly), Lina’s happy-go-lucky partner who is constantly being pulled into her drama.

There’s fine work too by Mónica Garrido Huerta and especially Juan Carlos Velis as pair of characters who arrive later in the show.

I won’t spoil who they play but I think it’s okay to reveal that there is a literal earthquake that hits the sister’s house – as it is signalled form the start by the seat-shaking rumbling of Alejandra Nunez’s sound design.

El Terremoto becomes more entirely engaging once it is shaken up – and leaves behind Chekhov’s brand of realism for a different genre that’s more Latin American; in a sense, you might say Quintana’s play decolonizes itself in style and structure.

Director Guillermo Verdecchia’s production stumbles in fully selling some of the comic and poignant moments in the first half of the play, however, with some awkward blocking and unnatural movements making Shannon Lea Doyle’s living-room sitcom set feel encumbered.

Audiences will come to understand the early directorial and design choices better, however, by the time they reach the end. El Terremoto might, in fact, benefit from being staged with no intermission in the future.

Quintana’s play is more than worth checking out in its world premiere, not only as a model in the way it adapts and then evolves, but in how it acknowledges the pandemic and climate crisis and incorporates their effects into the psychology and motivations of its character. It’s inspired writing – not just inspired by.