'Garcia Girls': In the Language Of the Footlights

The guava is having its theatrical moment -- as a pivotal metaphor.

Yes, the tropical fruit arrives ripe with meaning in "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," which has its world premiere at Round House Theatre's Bethesda venue through Oct. 12. Adapted by local playwright Karen Zacarías from Julia Alvarez's best-selling novel, and interpreted by an all-Latin cast, "Garcia Girls" chronicles a family's move from the Dominican Republic to the United States, where the four daughters struggle to find love, anchor their identities and decipher their pasts.

"It is a specific family, and a specific place in time, and yet it's really the journey that all of us take, migrating from childhood to adulthood, and trying to find your place in the world," Zacarías notes in an interview before a recent tech rehearsal -- in which actors toting guava-embossed suitcases troop over scenic designer Milagros Ponce de León's set, which suggests a guava orchard as deconstructed by René Magritte.

During the rehearsal, director Blake Robison -- Round House's producing artistic director -- hovers about in a black baseball cap, offering feedback on Caribbean-tinged lighting and sound cues and demonstrating the merits of a prop guava, carved from a green Nerf ball.

If "Garcia Girls" evokes a universal human journey, as Zacarías asserts, the production also signposts a specific institutional one. Since Robison took over the Round House leadership in 2005 -- succeeding Jerry Whiddon, who held the reins for two decades -- the company has re-branded itself as a theater that specializes in dramatizing literature. In recent seasons it has mounted preexisting adaptations: Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus's version of "Crime and Punishment" and Nigel Williams's take on "Lord of the Flies," for instance.

By contrast, "Garcia Girls" is Round House's first commissioned script. As such, the production marks a coming-of-age -- "a quinceañera party," as the Mexican-born Zacarías half-jokingly puts it -- for the company's writerly incarnation.

Robison says that although Round House "was known for doing a whole lot of things quite well" in the years before his arrival, "in this crowded arts marketplace which is D.C. nowadays, we needed to stand out a little bit more."

Hence the bibliophilic focus, which made sense because "the patrons of this theater think of themselves as being literary and literate and well-rounded," Robison says. He has always believed that finding newly minted adaptations was key to the page-to-stage process, "so that the characters talk like we talk, and sound like we sound, and we don't have to deal with that sense of remove that you get in older adaptations."

Commissioning scripts was a natural step, then, once finances and logistics permitted. Hunting for limelight-worthy books, Robison remembered "Garcia Girls," which he'd read and still had on his bookshelf. Tracking down Alvarez to gauge her interest was not difficult: Although the two had barely met, Alvarez is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College, in the Vermont town where Robison grew up. (His father was Middlebury's longtime president.)

Speaking from Vermont by phone, the poet and novelist who spent part of her childhood in the Dominican Republic says she was happy to place her 1991 book in Round House's lap.

When a text is published, she says, it becomes a living entity, with its own future -- rather like a child. "You raise your kids, put all you can into them, but then, it's their life!" she says.

With a green light from Alvarez, Robison broached the "Garcia Girls" idea to Zacarías, a prolific dramatist whose credits include "The Book Club Play," "Looking for Roberto Clemente" and "Mariela in the Desert" (which were presented earlier this year by Round House, Imagination Stage and Theater of the First Amendment, respectively). Alvarez and Zacarías are "similarly accomplished artists in the Latina community," Robison points out. "It seemed like a really good fit."