Chapter 5: Sueño: A Latino Take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Norge Espinosa / Teatro SEA
This is an excerpt from Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater (2023) by Carla Della Gatta. To read it in its full context, click on the link. The book can be purchased on all major sites that sell books and it is FREE to download.
PUPPETS AND PUBLIC SPACES: TEATRO SEA’s SUEÑO
Teatro SEA’s mission to educate and entertain children, and their efforts to do so through puppetry, displace ideas about ethnic theater that position actors’ bodies as central to the audience-performer connection. The Society of the Educational Arts (Teatro SEA), which was established in 1985 by Manuel Antonio Morán, is a New York–based theater company “dedicated to theater for children, youth, family, Latino and bilingual audiences.” SEA has been extraordinarily successful, with over thirty Association of Latin Critics (ACE) Awards, over twenty-five Hispanic Association of Latin Actors (HOLA) Awards, and several dozen more awards and honors, including the invitation to perform Sueño at the Dedication of the Fifty-First International Theatre Festival of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2015. It has a history of producing Latinx versions of a number of classics, including Don Quijote, Cinderella, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, and others. Teatro SEA uses children’s stories and puppetry to address specific issues, a type of “cultural preservation.” For example, A Mexican Pinocchio! | ¡Viva Pinocho! addressed immigration, and The True Story of Little Red | La verdadera historia de Caperucita took up the issue of children using technology. (p.142)