Sometimes a character sticks to you like a shadow.
In college, admittedly as a "very green actor,"Xiomara Cornejo tried out for the title role in Jose Rivera's "Marisol."
Their names never matched up on the cast list. As a doctoral student and director at the University of Missouri, Cornejo prepared to bring Rivera's rich world-building to the stage.
Then the pandemic arrived, waylaying the production.
Displaying a saint's patience and an artist's flexibility, Cornejo and a deep team of collaborators endured. "Marisol" continues a run of streaming performances through Friday, and the imagination it displays is equaled only by the amount ofcreative labor invested.
"There’s blood and sweat on that stage," Cornejo said.
The show, which earned Rivera one of his two Obie awards, walks beside the title character —a Puerto Rican woman living in the Bronx — as she navigates a world on the edge of ending. Rivera weaves the spell of magicalrealism, bringing Marisol in contact with harrowing and fantastical forces.
This world, created by Rivera on the page and cast in three dimensions by Cornejo and Co., speaks at onceto multiple senses and moods.
"It’s poetic and it’s gritty and it’s funny. It’s also very painful — but not to the extent where there is no light in the darkness," Cornejo said.
Written nearly 30 years ago, "Marisol" possesses as much or more relevance as it did upon debut. The show "deals with themes of climate crisis, violence against women, economic inequality, and white supremacy—all painful parallels to the present world, even more so after 2020," Cornejo wrote in program notes.
The cast and crew's journey with "Marisol" on the stage feels all the more real and significant for the sojourn they took together beyond the wings.
Cornejo has been"planting seeds" for the show since 2019, when she directed a scene from "Marisol" in a class, then successfully proposed the show to MU's theater department. Meeting with theater artists across the program, Cornejo gathered momentum for a visually- and lyrically-rich show that is a "designer's dream."
The initial week of rehearsals in spring 2020 was also the same week courses went online. The show was postponed; plans and personnel "shifted" right along with the outside world, Cornejo said. Several collaborators graduated and left Columbia, but Cornejo and others in her cohort remained resolved to stage the show.
Some names and details changed, but the department refused to wake from its dreams of "Marisol." Mounting the show a full year later steals none of the show's meaning. If anything, the delay adds soul and texture,Cornejo said.
"It had a completely different weight," Cornejo said of returning to the show. "... In this weird way, it felt like we were supposed to do it in 2021.”
Readying the show in 2021 meant crafting a newer, safer rehearsal process out of established protocols andlessons learned earlier in the pandemic, Cornejo said. She "reinvented blocking" for masked actors who needed to stay six feet apart.
Creating visual language absent of touch somehow suited a world full of characters reaching across the void, Cornejo said.
The show's multidimensional nature is reflected in its title character, played here byDaJah Maree Garrett. Marisol is always more than one emotion or quality at a time.
"We get a Marisol who’s funny, a Marisol who’s paranoid, a Marisol who’s strong, a Marisol who’s meek," Cornejo said.
These facets enable each audience member to relate to something in Marisol's constitution throughout the show, she added.
"We have to root for her because she’s the she-ro of the story. And we want her to survive — just like we want to survive our current apocalypse," Cornejo added.
A filmed version of "Marisol" is available to stream at 7 p.m. nightly through Friday; tickets are $10. Cornejo encouraged viewers to step "into the world with us" by making their viewing a real experience. Dress up; keep favorite snacks and beverages at the ready; watch the show on your TV or project it onto your wall; use headphones to get the most from original music composed by Stephen "Crosslight" Walters.
The cast and crew staged an early performance of the show for department facultyand, after the time and trial of the past year, that moment arrived with a certain sweetness.
"t felt like a gift — to give this to ourselves, to each other, and to celebrate all the hard work that has taken a whole community to do," Cornejo said.
Seeing the show through, Cornejo is "artistically content." "Marisol" is even better than she envisioned, she said, thanks to the commitment and innovation of cast and crew.
adanielsen@columbiatribune.com
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