There’s a new gringa in town, and we here at Repertorio are very excited to welcome her!

Meet Darlenis Duran, the fantastic Dominican-American actress who will be taking up the role of María in Carmen Rivera’s iconic play, La gringa as the previous actress, Carissa Toro, will be moving to Los Angeles. A native of The Bronx and the daughter of Dominican parents, Darlenis has an impressive resumé that shows great talent both on the stage and screen.

Currently, you can catch her in the web series “Henry” which has been featured in the New York Television Festival (2013) and the LA Web Series Festival (2014), and on stage she was recently seen in the HOLA Award Winning “Comida de Puta.” Other stage credits include “Here in Vain” by Nadira Simone, “Women of Manhattan,” “Spike Heels,” “Please Have A Seat And Someone Will Be With You Shortly,” and “Women In Motion.” She was runner up on Season 1 of NuvoTV’s Model Latina and since then has appeared in music videos and done several print/commercial work. She has also appeared in various independent films and is AP of HBO/New York International Latino Film Festival winner “Crush.”

Now, Darlenis comes to Repertorio in not just any play, but La gringa, a play that will be celebrating 20 years of continuous performances on our stage. The play follows the story of María, a young woman from New York City of Puerto Rican heritage that ventures to Puerto Rico to discover her roots and bond with her family, discovering the true spirit of what it means to be Puerto Rican. The play is an excellent story with a universal message of acceptance and resounds with any child born in The United States with familial roots abroad. Moreover, the play is a key part of Repertorio’s ¡DIGNIDAD! arts-in-education program, with countless performances of the play a year.

Welcome to Repertorio, Darlenis! The theater is excited to see what your tenure as “la gringa” will be.

For more information on Darlenis, visit her website www.darlenisduran.com.

La gringa is performed throughout the year. For more information, check out the production’s webpage on Repertorio’s website, www.repertorio.nyc.

On Saturday, October 17th, Nobel Prize Winner Mario Vargas Llosa paid a visit to Repertorio Español to see a performance of “Tía Julia and the Scriptwriter,” an adaptation of his mostly autobiographical novel of the same name. WIth a VIP cocktail sponsored by Pisco Portón and together with friends, contributors and board members, familia Repertorio had a magical night with one of the most iconic literary figures alive today.

Check out some of Michael Palma’s excellent shots of the evening below, and see a performance of “Tía Julia and the Scriptwriter” here at Repertorio! For tickets, click here.

Mario Vargas Llosa, board member María Cristina Anzola and playwright Juan Claudio Lechín.

Mario Vargas Llosa with Playwright Caridad Svich and Director José Zayas

Mario Vargas Llosa at the VIP Cocktail at I Trulli

Mario Vargas Llosa with playwright Caridad Svich and José Zayas.

Mario Vargas Llosa with Board Member Francisco Martínez

Theresa González and Deyanira Martínez of The New York Times.

Mario Vargas Llosa took in a performance of “Tía Julia and the Scriptwriter” – based on his largely autobiographical novel of the same name.

Mario Vargas Llosa with Founding Artistic Director René Buch.

Writer Wendy Gimble was also present at the event.

Executive Chef of Goya Foods, Fernando Desa and his wife, Claudia, snap a picture with the writer before the start of the 2nd act.

Executive Producer Robert Weber Federico, Board Member María Cristina Anzola and playwright Juan Claudio Lechín.

OBIE Award winning playwright Caridad Svich

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a multi-faceted, exuberant novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. It tells the provocative and mischievously autobiographical coming-of-age story of a young college student named Mario, who wants to be a writer, and two people he meets when he is eighteen years old whom will change his life forever: his aunt-in-law Julia, a 32-old divorcee and a scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho.

The novel is poised somewhat classically (in theme) in the tug of war between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in human beings, examining the latter as a central life force that can turn destructive.  As a playwright, my way into interpreting and re-imagining Vargas Llosa’s novel for the stage has been to approach the material from several perspectives. First of all to allow the audience to enter into its situational comedy from gentle and boisterous positions – to see this story as a comedy of misrule and disorder as well as a big-hearted romance that examines the performance of everyday life, and the masks we wear (and need not wear) to live, love and survive. In the play of AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, everyone is playing a role in the drama of their life, not to mention the dramas being enacted in the radio shows which Pedro Camacho writes, some of which we glimpse, and some which we see being written. The play also serves as a winking homage to Hollywood’s classic screwball comedies with nods to Ernst Lubitsch, Marx Brothers, and the complex romantic comedies directed by George Cukor and Howard Hawks. In fact, the spirit of “screwball” influenced, in great part, my approach to this sometimes raucous but also tender love story. It is a tale that is anchored, after all, in what may be perceived as a transgressive romance between an older woman and a young man. This transgression plays out amongst a portrait of mostly middle-class characters living in Lima, Peru in the 1950s.

Parallel to this love story is another kind of love story – and that is the one between a writer and his craft and art. Pedro Camacho, the scriptwriter, is one of the novel’s most extravagant and memorable creations; he is the prototype of the “mad genius,” and he also serves as Mario’s mentor, and the story’s elastic heart. If Mario represents a kind of lightness, or perhaps even the callowness of youth, then Camacho is the story’s mysterious, volatile darkly comic, melancholic center. The writer of radio dramas that in this day we might call “pulp” stories or associate chiefly with the form that has become “telenovelas,” Camacho is a figure that disrupts, with his storytelling, the status quo. He rages against a society of spectacle and moreover, one that wishes to tie art’s function to a profit motive.  Camacho rails against society and his own impulses. He is the play’s sad clown and Quixote figure, albeit with elements of both Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Mario, the budding writer who becomes his protégé, is the refractive lens through which we see this complex man.

Of course, the play and the novel on which it is based rests on Julia – a strong, passionate, intelligent, sensual woman who is both of her time and very much ahead of her time. What can I say about her? She is something. She is, yes, something else. A force of nature. A powerful spirit. A muse to inspire us all. But at day’s end, a radiant, complicated woman who follows both her heart and mind, as she remakes her life.

So, call this a love letter. Of sorts. To theatre, to writing, to being in and out of love, to relishing the ironic, mocking, beautiful, outrageous drama of life itself, and to the stories that live in our imaginations when we gather in the dark (or light) to try to make sense of our lives.