Fuenteovejuna in the 21st century

Last year, I attended a grant writing workshop where a new colleague in the Spanish Department and I got to talking during a break, getting to know each other a little better.

Apart from the language itself, he teaches Golden Age Spanish Literature and after he told me about his classes, we bemoaned the fact that my small college on the hill seems fixated (like most colleges of its kind) on Anglo texts. That's when I said something like:

"Wouldn't it be great if we could do a bilingual reading of Fuenteovejuna (the Lope de Vega play in which a whole town kills its ruler and then no one can be found guilty)?"

And he said: "I actually know of a bilingual script for the play!"

That's how we both got to thinking that we should apply for a college grant to do a dramatic bilingual reading of the 17th-century play and he suggested that we include a fellow colleague from the Drama Department in our planning. The three of us applied for a community grant and, though we didn't get all the funds we requested, we did get enough to buy the bilingual scripts.

In the end, we had about 15 students, native Spanish speakers, Drama students and Anglo students studying Spanish, who signed up for and performed the reading. We had three rehearsals and the performance was today. And it totally rocked!

My Spanish Department colleague did a fantastic job adapting the play for a 40-minute production and the Drama professor did a great job in getting the students (and another Spanish professor) to get into their roles.

I basically wrote the grant, did the advertising, and will write the report about the grant so while I did not contribute much to the endeavor itself, I feel good that I helped diversify the artistic offerings at my small college on the hill.

After the performance, a group of us met for lunch to discuss the issues raised by the play, including the fact that we had decided to have the characters that represent power (the Commander, Isabella and Ferdinand, etc.) speak in English, and the people of Fuenteovejuna (Frondoso, Laurencia, Don Esteban, etc.) speak in Spanish. The conversation over lunch was very engaged and I felt so proud that I teach at a place where students are so open-minded and eager for new cultural experiences and exchanges.

Before the performance, both my colleague and I wondered why we had gotten ourselves into yet one more thing that was taking up precious and at-a-premium time that we simply don't have at this point of the semester. But after the performance, he said: "I'm very proud of us." And his wife told me in an aside that he almost never says that about himself, that he is his most severe critic.

After seeing how much fun the students had with the performance, and how engaged was our sparse but enthusiastic audience, we were both glad we did this and we both agreed that we would simply have to do it again next year.