Working with Raúl Hernandez was an honor, junior Coralys Miranda-Reyes said.
The Spanish Stage Productions class presented the U.S.’s premiere of “All Who Are Left” translated from Hernandez’s original “Todos Los Que Quedan” at 7:30 October 29 through 31 in the Mallette Studio Theater.
Hernandez, translated by Odalys Miranda, said he originally wrote the play in 2007 for a festival in Madrid and Buenos Aires as a two person play. He has lengthened the play and increased the cast since then.
The play depicts a young woman by the name of Ana searching for information about her father, Juan Cerrada, who she believes was killed in the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen.
“Ana decided to take matters into her own hands when she received a letter about her father and this was after her mother’s death,” Miranda-Reyes said. “She left all that she knew, her boyfriend and where she lived, and searched for him both in Spain and Germany.”
Ana is portrayed by six different actresses to represent all the Spaniards who lost family members to the war and who often never learn what happened to them.
“I play the Ana that’s very frightened of what she will find,” the international studies, anthropology and Spanish major said.
Typically actors would rehearse several hours a day, five days a week, Hernandez said, but for the first several weeks of “All Who Are Left” the class only rehearsed for three hours on Thursdays.
“And it couldn’t have been done without the actors’ cooperation and hard work,” the director said.
Hernandez said when researching he read about 5,000 pages over the Spanish Civil War and interviewed real survivors of concentration camps.
“All Who Are Left” jumps from Ana’s life in the 1970’s to Juan Cerrada’s life during the Spanish Civil War and WWII including the time he spent in Mauthausen.
Senior Nolan Spinks, who played Cerrada’s fellow prisoner referred to only as “the German,” said that his character gave a reality to the time period.
“I think some people may not have realized that you didn’t just have to be Jewish or you didn’t just have to be gay or you didn’t just have to be Hungarian or something like that to be thrown into these concentration camps,” the theatre major said.
Spinks compares the friendship between Cerrada and the German to fraternity brothers.
“And when things get really heavy (the German) tries to lighten the mood sometimes successfully, sometimes not,” he said.
Junior Tharilyn Bunker portrayed Cerrada as a grumpy, old man who doesn’t want to “look back.”
“He’s not as gruff and mean as he seems,” the theatre major said. “He has an altruistic purpose.”
Bunker also played Ma Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath” and only had 10 days to learn her entire part.
Because her character was in a wheelchair, Bunker said, she couldn’t rely on her blocking to help her learn her lines which made the role even more challenging.
Although the play is fictional, many real people have similar stories, Bunker said.
“The Spanish version is much longer and more complicated, more in depth,” she said. “It was really truncated and cut down for our purposes here.”
Bunker feels proud to have been involved in the play’s premiere.
“You don’t often get to work with the playwright,” she said. “This was really an incredible opportunity.”
