Sarah Lunnie: What’s happening in rehearsal right now?
Benjamin Benne: We just finished our first week of rehearsal. Because we’re particularly interested in the delicate dance of what the text is asking in terms of the logistics of cooking in tandem with these other conversations the family is having, we got up on our feet on day three. So, in our most recent rehearsal, we ran the first movement with stand-in props and some ideas of how long things might take. Of course, I think everything’s gonna have to slow down once we have real food, but it was really cool to feel the momentum of what the first movement is asking for in broad brushstrokes.
SL: You describe Fantasma as a play about your Guatemalan family’s immigration and assimilation. When did you start writing it, and how did that first impulse unfold into this shape?
BB: It’s a story that has been living with me for a long time. Most of the characters are amalgamations of different people in my family. And that goes for the events too. A lot of the events started with family stories that I knew or had some vague memory of, but I’ve become aware that there is some fiction in terms of the stories that I’ve told about my family. Sometimes it’s rooted in some fact that I remember, but I’ve wiggled it in my own brain. And I’ve realized that there are so many different versions even amongst my family about what the story is and different details that change even when they’re telling the story to each other.
SL: I would be interested to hear you talk about how the play engages language across three generations, not only who’s speaking Spanish or English when, and why, but also generational and intergenerational code-switching. Every time I read or hear the play, I’m struck by your ear for how language functions in groups of different sizes, and what happens when a new person comes into the room or leaves the room.
BB: Part of character in relationship to language began with an observation of my grandmother, who came to the United States from Guatemala. To this day she almost exclusively speaks Spanish, but she understands a lot of English. I’m the eldest of the children in my nuclear family as well as amongst my cousins, and most of us never learned to speak Spanish fluently. Attempting to have conversations with her and seeing where the spaces of understanding or not understanding were happening was something that really influenced the writing of the piece. I sort of lament that I’ve never been able to have the deepest of conversations with my grandmother, especially alone. There have definitely been attempts, but we can only go so deep, not having full access to each other’s language. And so, the attempts at having a fuller conversation need to have a translator available, which is my mother’s generation.
SL: Which then does something else to the conversation.
BB: Yes, I think there is just always going to be something in translation that is never fully able to be expressed. There are also certain things that I’ve noticed with my mother that she doesn’t want to translate directly. And I’ve realized that I think my mom and my aunts kind of like having a language that I don’t have access to, that it gives them a sense of privacy when they’re speaking amongst each other.
SL: Let’s talk about Celeste. She’s second generation. She’s wanting to document her grandmother’s recipe. There’s an awareness of matriarch Rosie’s age at the beginning of the play, and a valuing of traditions that maybe have been taken for granted, an appreciation of the finite nature of time with people that we love, and of the histories and traditions and knowledge they hold. If on the one hand, Celeste is wanting to preserve these traditions, it also feels like the play is pointing out what is inevitably lost inside that process. Can you talk about that movement from an oral history—one that is living, embodied, shared among a community of people, and subject to constant argument and reinterpretation or even revision—to a written history, which may seem to claim to be definitive, but of course can’t be? Is it overly tidy to observe that there’s maybe a little bit of a rhyme between what Celeste is doing in the play, and your own project, writing it?
BB: There was that sort of initial desire to archive and write down a lot of what I understood happened, but I didn’t have a lot of the why, and I think that was the real desire to write it as a play, even though archiving became part of the project. We didn’t have a family tree for the Guatemalan side of my family, so that was one thing that I sat down and worked on with my grandmother as part of the provocation of this play and not knowing all the information. This was born out of a moment where I was back home for the first time in a long time, and in close proximity to Grandma, and I think I was just more sensitive to the fact that because I have had long spans of time away from her, I’m like, “There may be a span of time where I may not be able to be with her again.” And that sort of realization and fear was the thing that made me go, “I wanna learn how to make chuchitos. Will you take the time to show me how to do this?”
And of course there were no measurements ascribed to anything! So that really did become a project that some of my other family members became invested in in a way that I didn’t expect. It became a family endeavor where we were all around my grandmother and attempting this thing.
I also had just come off of a dramaturgy class in grad school where we were talking about archival memory versus embodied memory, and how there is a huge difference in terms of the written word and how that does have value, but also how there’s something really important about what it is to actually go through the steps, and oral tradition, and have the words in your mouth as well as in this particular instance of cooking, what it is to feel the textures, and taste the thing, like a memory that is involved with that sensorial aspect.
Because there was a grandma going, “You have to know what the masa feels like. You can put down that it’s this many cups of water and this many things of oil,” but she’s like, “That’s only gonna be true in this particular moment doing the recipe.” And that’s something that’s come up in rehearsal, “How accurate is this recipe?” And I’m like, it is the recipe we used on that day, as closely as it could be. But I think we’re all aware that when the actors are doing this in the production, they’re gonna have to learn what the consistency of the masa is, because it’s gonna have to wiggle a little bit each night that they do it! And how scary, but also, how beautiful that is.
Fantasma
Primary Stages and Lucille Lortel Theatre in association with Jan McAdoo
By Benjamin Benne
Directed by Laurie Woolery
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