Working in close quarters, five Latina immigrants dodge immigration officials and pursue green cards while they work to keep their small business alive. The setting is 1987 Los Angeles, but the immigrant story of the latest Bregamos production fits right in to 21st century New Haven.
Real Women Have Curves, the story of five Mexican-Americans struggling to keep their tiny sewing factory, goes up at the black box theater at Fair Haven Junior High School Thursday night and plays through Saturday. (Performances are at 8 p.m. each day, as well as 2 p.m. on Saturday. Tickets, $15, are available at the door.)
The set is small and intimate, but busy with color and clutter: a floral couch, spools and spools of thread, a sewing machine, draped manikins, a fridge, toilet, deodorant, toothbrushes, a coffee pot, a bright pink radio.
Late Monday afternoon, the set was still a work in progress. As he waited for the cast to arrive for rehearsal, Rafael Ramos, the director of Bregamos community theater, fiddled with lights, drilled in a set wall, inserted a shower rod, and tried to get a hold of some wire to secure it in place.
Ramos (pictured) said that the title of this particular play, by Josefina Lopez, grabbed him as he was flipping through a catalog as something that felt right for Bregamos. He read the play, loved it, and brought on Venessa Soto, the female lead from Kingdom, to direct. “It’s so right for New Haven,” he said. “It’s hilarious, but it’s also so important.”
The play takes place during the enforcement of the first amnesty laws in California in the late 1980s. This immigrants’ story clearly resonates decades later. “New Haven is a place that has tried to embrace our immigrants, especially recently with the ID card program, and that’s something that looms above this play,” Soto said.
The play’s title holds the key to its second major theme. “It’s in all of our generations and its in all walks of life, the idea of being thin, this whole westernized idea that to be a real women you have to subscribe to higher standards of beauty,” Soto said. “There are so many poignant issues for women, and it’s not that they get resolved necessarily in the play, but they are still explored and talked about and I think it is in this tiny, tight factory setting that they can really hash out these issues.”
In Kingdom, Soto (pictured) was one of the only women in the cast or crew, as compared with the all female cast of five she is now directing. “It’s just been really great, being surrounded by females, and having that be the focus and the power,” she said.
Maria Nunez, who plays Carmen, hadn’t acted in 15 years, but decided to take a chance on the audition. “The next thing I know, my niece is calling me saying we are in!” Her niece, Pierrette Silverman, plays Carmen’s daughter, Estela.
Silverman, a patron of Bregamos who has never acted before, said this is something she has always wanted to do. And as the vice-president of Planned Parenthood, she has found Real Women a great place to start. “In this play in particular, there’s a lot around the right of women and their reproductive choice, and so that resonates with the work that I do on a daily basis,” she said.
Alison Scaramella plays recent high school graduate Ana, who is trying to get out of the barrio to go to college and become a writer. “It’s pretty timeless,” she said of the play. “We think of ourselves as being so sexually empowered, but a lot of those gender roles and expectations for women haven’t changed all that much.”
Scaramella is the youngest cast member; she just graduated with a degree in theater studies from Connecticut College. “It’s been really fun for me to have a cast full of people who are the ages of the characters they’re playing, roughly,” she said. “I feel very close to these women, and I’ve only known them for three weeks.”
Just like the women in the play, Soto and her cast have bonded as they work at breakneck speed towards a shared goal. “I was just thinking on the way over here, the experience of working on this play is similar to the women’s experience in the factory,” Soto said, “in the fact that we had only a month for rehearsals, the way it’s all very intense, working together for hours and hours and hours on end.”
“It’s a lot more rough around the edges,” she said, compared to other directing jobs — she has taken on tasks like sound directing, costuming and helping with the set that are not usually the domain of a director. “You know, ‘bregamos’ literally means to barter, to trade, to kind of cut around the edges. It’s a lot more work, but I’ve actually taken that as a blessing because you can really learn more when you have to do more.”
What an amazing show. Incredible local talent. So true to its original script. Director did an amazing job with these talented women. These women made me feel proud to be a Latina. They brought me to tears. Congratulations, Job Well Done! Adelante Bregamos, thank you for bringing meaningful stories for us to enjoy watching and think about.