Stage Review - Carmelita (Key City Public Theatre)

Stage Review - Carmelita: A Vindication for the Unwritten: Or How to Write Yourself Back into History
Presented By: Key City Public Theatre - Port Townsend, WA
Show Run: April 24 - May 11, 2025
Date Reviewed: Thursday, April 24, 2025 (Preview Night)
Run Time: 2 Hours (including a 15 minute intermission)
Reviewed By: Greg Heilman

If you head out to Google and look up Carmelita Colon, out of every ten search results, nine of them are going to be for Ana María Campoy’s new play called “Carmelita: A Vindication for the Unwritten: Or How to Write Yourself Back into History”, or more simply just “Carmelita”, and one, like that rascally dentist who doesn’t recommend that specific brand of toothpaste, will be for the historical figure from which the play takes its name and its subject. History, as we all know, is largely a reflection of who documents it, and those who have traditionally documented the history of the Americas have been men, predominantly white, so everything we read about history, or learn in school about the past, is going to be from that perspective, from the perspective of the white, largely affluent men who wrote it. So, to think that there would be much at all out there about an immigrant from Mexico, who escaped her home country during the aftermath of the Mexican-American War and settled in Walla Walla in the 1860s, who, with her husband, ran a mule train between Eastern Washington and Idaho to support the burgeoning prospecting business, and then subsequently started a Mexican restaurant when that business failed, would be just a bit shortsighted. In fact, those three facts about her is really all I could find without doing a bit of digging. But Ana María didn’t stop there, and when you read the full name of her play it’s clear that she was a writer on a mission, determined to take a real historical figure, someone whose past is cloudy at best, if only for the sheer lack of any readily accessible documentation, and bring her to life, reanimate her from the pages of “historia obscura” and introduce her to a modern world, to show us that important, independent, and strong women always existed, regardless of whether men thought to write about them or not. The play itself began development at Key City Public Theatre in Port Townsend over two years ago and is part of what is seeming to become this company’s trademark, underwriting and producing new work, and it seems to be a responsibility Artistic Director Denise Winter and her team are shouldering alone as they are one of the few theaters still putting their investment dollars in the jar of new work after Covid, and thank goodness they are. The development life cycle, for the most part, complete, the play’s premiere is running on stage at Key City through May 11, directed by Ana María and featuring Antonieta Carpio as Carmelita in a one person, two hour, show that is part fact, part fiction, part English, part Spanish, and entirely unique.

The reanimation theme is at the heart of the scenic design, which is spearheaded by set designer and scenic artist Michelle Cesmat. The Key CIty stage is configured to resemble a museum exhibit and when the audience enters the theatre space, that’s the first thing that catches the eye, the old photos on the wall, the pieces displayed in the exhibit, all with a clear western theme including a saddle and lasso, and Carmelita’s name high above the display, written on the wall above what looks like a space carved out of the wall. In the middle of it all is a pedestal, empty, but with a sign in front that says “Restoration in Progress”. After Denise Winter finishes her pre-show announcements and leaves the stage, the lights go down, and when they come back up, the restoration sign is gone, replaced by a figure standing, still, on top of the pedestal along with a second in that area below Carmelita’s name, the latter also still, both clearly intended to resemble museum figures, the latter accessorized with a guitar. This is Carmelita’s exhibit of course, so it follows that the silent and unmoving figure on the pedestal is, in fact, the focal point of the display. And as with most museum exhibits these days, there’s an interactive piece, a monitor, or kiosk of some sort from which more information about the subject can be gathered. It’s this piece that begins the play. Voiced by Clarice Marx, it’s this kiosk that is asked to provide more information on Carmelita Colon, but in doing so, Clarice’s voice provides what information she can, but it’s all told in the context of her husband. Well, that alone is enough to get the attention of Antonieta Carpio, who, as Carmelita Colon, has been standing on this pedestal for a few minutes by the time this all happens. As if a switch has been flipped, she begins to move, stretch, and enters into a dialogue with Clarice’s digital assistant, exclaiming that her life is more than what can be explained by talking about her husband, and for the next two hours, that’s exactly what Antonieta does. Through a combination of narration and role-playing in scenes from her past, Antonieta takes the audience through this character’s life, from her childhood in Mexico, through the fear and stress of living through the Mexican-American War, emigrating to America, through California and then up to Washington, her marriage, business, and divorce, and life after marriage are all covered by the actor portraying a good number of characters along the way. It’s a complete life story, though admittedly Ana María took the facts where she could find them and filled in the gaps with a bit of artistic license. But from start to finish, she’s built quite the narrative for this strong and independent woman who heretofore has been largely lost to history, and at the end of the day, if you asked me, other than those few pieces of truth I mentioned above, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what is fact and what is not.

Ana María’s vision for how to present this is a good one, after all I can think of no better place than a museum to go and learn about someone. And Michelle’s design of the Carmelita display is nicely done, it’s a good layout for allowing the director to keep Antonieta in motion. It also allows the other member of the cast, Olivia Pedroza, who provides musical accompaniment to Carmelita’s story as she roams the stage with her guitar, to join Antonieta or find a new area to camp out in. Her playing is good, it adds mood to the storytelling, and Olivia herself is part of the drama, providing her own reactions to the tales that Antonieta is spinning. And those tales are plenty, the work that this actor does with this piece is so impressive, the sheer amount of dialogue that she recites, not just as Carmelita, but as the many characters she portrays in the retelling of her memories, is stunning and it’s non stop for the two hours of the show, save for the 15-minute intermission. Her costumes are gorgeous as well. Designed by Corinne Adams, they work very well for each part of the story that she recounts, and for each stage of Carmelita’s life that Antonieta is portraying. Costume changes, when they do happen, are quick, and usually accompanied by Olivia’s excellent guitar playing. There’s a lot to this life of Carmelita Colon that Ana María Campoy presents, including the facts from her research along with what she has fabricated to “fill in the gaps” as she puts it, all of it coming together to create a persona that has all of the characteristics of someone who is worthy of admiration and an existence that is filled with the love, sadness, joy, and drama of a human life well lived. Some of these more dramatic moments are made more so in this production through the use of lighting, a prime example being during the war, as the rare woman who has learned to read, Carmelita is responsible for reading off the names of those who have died in battle, and as she does this, standing on that pedestal in the center of the stage, Brendan Chambers’ lighting adds so much to the accompaniment of this scene, making it one of the more heart wrenching moments of the show. There are other scenes as well, especially one that describes the Bacum Massacre, where the Mexican government slaughtered Yaquis leaders and civilians alike, the lighting and sound come together to provide the right level of suspense and shock to drive home the impact of that event. One other note on the creative, and the casting, side, is on that information kiosk in the museum exhibit. As Carmelita describes events of the past, it’s used to display facts, figures, and other details about those events, though I’m not sure the entire audience noticed that during the performance I attended on Thursday. I only noticed it late in the play, so I’m not sure how much I missed, but once I did discover it, I enjoyed the extra detail that it provided. The best part about that kiosk, of course, is the voice, and Clarice has the perfect delivery, tone, and rhythm for this voice role.

While there is a lot of good in the show, there are a few things that I feel hold it back, some things that make it challenging as an audience member. The first is pace, and this has to do more with Antonieta’s delivery as Carmelita the narrator, which skews to the slow and deliberate. When she is portraying other characters, when she’s role-playing and acting through scenes from Carmelita’s past, pace isn’t an issue, her dialogue is quick, she rapidly and seamlessly moves back and forth between characters and between accents, all while going through all of the motions of the particular reenactment. But the pace slows again when she comes back into the narrator role, and there are moments when this goes on for a bit, moments that can tend to feel tedious, but speeding up the delivery a bit would surely prevent those and would make sure that the audience remains engaged throughout. There are also some moments when she moves quickly from narrator to a particular character, and it’s not clear who the character is, or whether she switched to one, or switched to one and then another. These scenes are rare, most of the transitions from narrator to role-play are solid, but it’s something that an actor needs to be careful with, especially if she is playing so many different characters. The most troublesome, though, is something I also referred to in my review for Laughs in Spanish at Seattle Rep, that being the use of Spanglish, or mixing in Spanish words with English. I mentioned in that review that there’s a balance that needs to be walked, done well and whether or not audience members understand the Spanish words or not, they get the gist of what is being said, and the dialogue is as impactful as it’s meant to be. But each time a second language is introduced into a play, the audience has to context switch and go through a process of first identifying that the word or phrase spoken is in another language and second, there’s an attempt to translate it, or failing that, gleaning the meaning from the context of the scene. When too many Spanish words are mixed into otherwise English sentences, or when that’s done too much in a play, it becomes taxing on the audience, especially when they’re not Spanish speakers and uncommon words in that language are being used that can’t be readily understood. There’s a bit too much of this in Carmelita, requiring a decent amount of work for the audience, leading up to a scene, late in the play, in which Carmelita receives a gift from her abuela, a newspaper which she reads to the audience, but the entirety of it is in Spanish. The audience is understandably curious about the contents of the letter, but without any knowledge of the language or translation, it’s time that doesn’t add much value, other than being able to glean the emotion from the way Antonieta reads it.

Carmelita: A Vindication for the Unwritten: Or How to Write Yourself Back into History is quite a mouthful, but the play also known more simply as Carmelita, does tackle quite a bit. Written and directed by Ana María Campoy, the partly true, partly embellished story of Carmelita Colon isn’t just a nicely designed play that brings to life the story of a strong, independent woman who would otherwise remain in the shadows of history, it’s also a showcase for Antonieta Carpio, who embodies Carmelita for the entirety of the show in this two-hour exposé that is part narrative and part dramatic biography. Antonieta is excellent, especially in her portrayals of characters from Carmelita’s life, and while the show could use improvement when it comes to pacing and its balance of language, Carmelita proves that just because independent and strong immigrant women aren’t depicted to any extent in our history books, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist.

Carmelita runs on stage at Key City Public Theatre in Port Townsend through May 11. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit https://keycitypublictheatre.org/.

Photo credit: Mel Carter