David Ramón Zayas with the cast and production team of “I Don’t Speak Spanish”
“We…tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—‘Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’”
—John Steinbeck
This month, Gamut Theatre will host the world premiere of “I Don’t Speak Spanish,” a new work by local playwright David Ramón Zayas.
Each of the three acts of this work plunge the audience into a crucial moment in a family’s life—an uncomfortable dinner party in 2019 Lancaster, a brawl on an LA street in 1943, an impossible choice in south Texas in 1915. Behind all these moments is the long shadow of La Malinche—an enslaved woman who uncomfortably straddled languages and cultures during Cortés’ conquering of the Aztecs, a symbol of the constant and ongoing tension between conqueror and conquered.
It seems apt, considering “I Don’t Speak Spanish” is a play about turning points, as Zayas can pinpoint the exact moment of the project’s inception. Sometime in 2017, his brother called him and (without preamble) announced, “I’m sick of feeling like a fraud. I’m going to learn Spanish.”
This was something the brothers had never discussed—the confusing weight of being a brown person with a Hispanic name who could not speak Spanish. Until that moment, Zayas had quietly assumed this—having others mistakenly assume his bilingualism and then be disappointed when that assumption proved false—was his own insecurity and not a shared experience. To learn otherwise, to unexpectedly discover he was not alone in feeling shame at not speaking Spanish, was not just liberating but invigorating.
So Zayas, who is Mexican American, started talking to other Latine people, and he quickly learned how many others felt similarly. It’s not an unusual story, parents creating an English-only household in an attempt to protect their children from the prejudice they had endured (and often continued to endure) due to their accents or lack of English-language fluency. He also began to research his family history, discovering (among other things) that his family didn’t so much immigrate to the United States as a changed border curved around the family’s home, and suddenly they were living in another country. Slowly, from his amorphous idea for a play that would explore language, race, identity and assimilation grew a concrete plot about three generations of a Mexican-suddenly-American family.
Zayas was already an experienced actor, playwright and director, but his earlier projects (a series of very successful “Choose Your Own Plays” co-written with Philip Mann, as well as adaptations of “Beowulf” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” among others) were all created for a specific performance goal. This new play was not just more personal but more substantive than his previous works—and it was not something he planned to direct or to act in (though since the universe loves to laugh at our well-laid plans, he is in fact doing both for this production).
“I wrote the play a younger version of myself needed to see,” said Zayas, adding that he suspected younger David might have avoided the play, and he hoped anyone feeling a similar discomfort would risk attending.
He himself had long feared he did not belong in the world of such stories, but as he researched philosophy and literature, he realized he had long been in good company, that generations of Latine writers had wrestled with the same struggles he was trying to articulate.
That said, he never worried that his play, increasingly filled with historical details about one family’s experiences, might not speak to a broad audience.
“I feel very strongly that specific stories told honestly will speak to everyone, even those with no connection to those exact experiences,” he said.
Audience reactions are proving him right.
In 2022, the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference hosted a staged reading of an earlier incarnation of “I Don’t Speak Spanish,” and that audience, despite not having a connection to the Spanish language, despite not being Latine, nonetheless expressed a strong connection to the characters and story. Zayas puts this down to the magic of specificity to get to the heart of human experience.
“When you’re clear and honest about a particular, personal experience, the core of the struggle speaks more clearly,” he said.
That struggle is a story told and retold throughout every corner of the United States, where people’s connections to their ancestors have been muddied by time or stolen outright by slavers, invaders and colonizers, where an immigrant’s language serves as both shackle and tether and breaking free of one demands severing the other. However, “I Don’t Speak Spanish” is also a very specific story, and that specificity gives it a compelling universality.
“I Don’t Speak Spanish” runs from Oct. 7 to 22 at Gamut Theatre, 15 N. 4th St., Harrisburg. For more information and tickets, please visit gamuttheatre.org/i-dont-speak-spanish.
UPCOMING EVENTS
At Gamut Theatre
www.gamuttheatre.org
717-238-4111
“I Don’t Speak Spanish”
By David Ramón Zayas
Oct. 7 to 22
Fridays & Saturdays at 7:30 p.m.
Sundays at 2:30 p.m.
Popcorn Hat Players Present
“The Little Mermaid”
Oct. 7 at 1 p.m.
Popcorn Hat Players Present
“The Halloween Show”
Oct. 21, 28 at 1 p.m.
TMI Improv
Oct. 27 at 7:30 p.m.
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