Palomar play deals with the mixing of English and Spanish in the border region

By: PAM KRAGEN - Staff Writer | Wednesday, July 11, 2007 11:57 AM PDT ∞

Over the past five years, Palomar College professor Carlos von Son has written a number of plays about immigration issues, Mexican cultural traditions and history, and his own experience as a Mexican-American. But one element of the scripts has kept his plays largely out of reach for many local playgoers. They were written almost exclusively in Spanish.

This weekend, von Son will debut a play at Palomar that deals with the same subject matter but will be performed almost entirely in English. Appropriately, the play is titled "Espanglish," and it deals with the cross-hybridization of the English and Spanish languages in the border region.

The play was commissioned last fall by Michael Mufson, who heads Palomar's theater department. Mufson said it was one of his fantasies to bring Spanish and English-speaking audiences together to share an event.

"I see it as being the first step that expands into bigger waters," Mufson said.

Originally, Mufson said he had hoped to collaborate with von Son on the script, but the playwright (who teaches Spanish and Chicano studies at Palomar and MiraCosta colleges) had an idea inspired by his own experiences and he came up with his own script very quickly.

"I assumed it would be more a controversial play that dealt with immigration or housing, but he chose language as the subject matter, and it gets to the core of what's going on around us," Mufson said. "It's brilliant that the play is about language, and the barriers that are created by language, because it deals with prejudices that exist within the idea of language purity. The script plays with all the ideas of mixing the language with the variant forms of English, Spanish ---- Spanglish and Mexicanish. There's a beauty of words and rhythms that come out of mixing the language."

The play is set in a Spanish classroom on a college campus, where the professor accuses several students of speaking an impure form of the language. Instead of using the formal Castillian Spanish, the students are speaking a more informal style of Spanish common in Mexico and California. The students file a complaint and the faculty board brings in a mediator to settle the issue. The final scenes, inspired by Mexico's teatro tradition, become more fantastical, with mythical archetypes of angels and devils appearing at the meeting to debate the pros and cons of pure language.

Von Son was born and raised in Mexico City, where he spoke formal Spanish and learned English from the rock 'n' roll songs of U2 and the Rolling Stones. He moved to the U.S. in 1986 to attend college, and while working on his graduate degree at UC Santa Cruz, he encountered the exact types of debates he wrote about in "Espanglish."

"There was a lot of talk that Espanglish was dirty and a degeneration of the language," von Son said. "I remember that I thought this too, at first, but eventually I learned that this bringing of words together, this fusion of languages, was the birth of a new dialect. It was something to be proud of, not ashamed of. We should be proud of who we are."

The three-act play is directed by Diana Cabuto and will feature students in Palomar's Theatre Projects class. About 85 percent of the play is in English, and von Son said the parts that are in Spanish will be easy for non-Spanish speakers to understand. Past performances of von Son's Spanish-language plays in Vista and Escondido have drawn audiences of 300 to 400 each, so he said he's hoping these English-language performances will attract an even bigger crowd.

"Espanglish"

When: 8 p.m. July 13-14; 4 p.m. July 15

Where: Performance Lab, Room D-10, Palomar College, 1140 W. Mission Road, San Marcos

Tickets: $12, general; $10, seniors; $8, students

Info: (760) 744-1150, Ext. 2453

Web: www.palomarperforms.com

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