Christine Quintana's Clean/Espejos brings together two women from different sides of a Mexican resort
New play is performed in English and Spanish to fully explore both perspectives
Alexandra Lainfiesta and Genevieve Fleming in Clean/Espejos. Photo by Sewari Campillo
The Cultch and Neworld Theatre present Clean/Espejos live at the Historic Theatre from March 10 to 19 and online from April 5 to 10
JUST OVER FOUR years ago, Vancouver playwright Christina Quintana got a firsthand look at the strange dichotomy of Mexican beach resorts—one that would spark her first bilingual script.
Her father was working at a resort in Cancun when he won a trip for two that he gifted to his daughter and her partner. And so it was that Quintana got a unique view at both sides of resort life: that of the tourist, and that of the work force that keeps the illusion alive.
“I had this weird trip, where I came in through the staff entrance with my dad, but we were guests,” Quintana tells Stir over a Zoom call. She’s speaking from Southern California, where her new Clean/Espejos will open at South Coast Repertory just two weeks after the upcoming premiere at The Cultch. “Resorts are weird places, because it’s supposedly Mexico, but it's more of a performance of Mexico by American-run companies using Mexican labour. It’s also very beautiful and very luxurious, and there's a lot about it that's very alluring, but there's a very insidious undertone to the whole thing.”
When Quintana arrived back home to Vancouver, those unsettling feelings of displacement, disassociation, and disembodiment started to remind her of the experience of trauma recovery. And that has led, finally, to an ambitious new two-hand show, called Clean/Espejos, about women from two worlds who form a bond one rainy night: Sarah, a Canadian wedding guest with a long-held secret, and Adriana, a Mexican hotel floor manager grappling with a family loss.
“The way that Adriana talks about the resort where she's worked for eight years is very different from the way Sarah does, with the idea that two people can be looking at the same thing and have vastly different perspectives and understandings,” Quintana says.
The most unique aspect to the show is that the women perform it in two languages: Sarah in English and Adriana in Spanish, with surtitles for both. Paula Zelaya Cervantes worked with Quintana on translation and adaptation. (A group of female “cultural ambassadors” from Latin America have also sat in on the creation of the play for further perspective.) Quintana, whose own Spanish is limited, wanted Clean/Espejos to have authentic vernacular, cultural, and geographic details woven into Adriana’s storytelling. But she also wanted to push the audience to try to see the world in a more multidimensional way.
“English is not the only language that matters here,” the playwright says. “And this is a provocation for audiences to listen….If we really want to know one another, and be privy to the experiences of one another, we’re going to have to really listen to each other in a way that we don't necessarily expect to or in a way we’re not used to.
Christine Quintana
“And I think it's good for people who are not multilingual to open their eyes and their ears to the breadth of linguistic, and therefore cultural, experience that is all around us—even in our own city, including in East Van where it's being performed!”
As a theatre artist, Quintana, a recipient of the national Siminovitch Protégé Prize for Playwriting, has long tried to challenge who we see and hear onstage. Her Dora Award-winning Selfie, a finalist for the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for drama, took a smart look at consent and rape culture among teens. Her Delinquent Theatre’s Stationary: A Recession-Era Musical was an indie-rock-fuelled looked at Millennial disillusionment and job stagnancy. Her Arts Club Theatre Company Silver Commission Someone Like You updated Cyrano De Bergerac for the Tinder age. Elsewhere, she’s also a cofounding member of the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition.
In the case of Clean/Espejos, Quintana wanted to push back on plays that fixate on the suffering and trauma that happens to women. “I’m interested in the experience that I know, that I see, in the people around me, which is: What is it like 10 years later? How does that shape who you are, how you see the world, and how you respond to things? How none of us can ever know what's happening with someone else and how they are responding,” she says. “It’s really about honouring the ways we disassociate from ourselves and our bodies in order to protect ourselves from the things we've been through—and women in particular are so often subject to abuse, to marginalization, to vulnerability, and we find these heroic ways through our lives.”
The added bonus in Clean/Espejos? Quintana says she’s finally been able to write a really rich, fully developed role for a Latinx woman—in this case actor Alexandra Lainfiesta, who plays opposite Genevieve Fleming.
And while the play is about much more than the surreal atmosphere of the Mexican resort that first inspired it, the two women’s stories will probably make anyone headed to one in the near future think twice about their surroundings—and about who’s labouring to create the illusion.
“A lot of energy goes into keeping up that fiction of this place where everything is perfect for tourism—an outside vision of what it’s supposed to be like,” Quintana reflects, “but there’s a whole beautiful area outside of the resort gates that most people never bother to go to.”
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