San Diego Moxie Theatre Presents 'Lesson 443'

This is KPBS Midday Edition I'm [Captioners Transitioning] anyone. For those of us that can speak only one language, the thought of being will abide -- of being bilingual is that this. This opens doors and enhances your life. But for a teenage girl that wants to fit in, and accent can be the mark of the outsider he will never fit in. A new play premiering in San Diego this weekend tells the coming of age story that tackles issues about identity and belonging and the lessons that give you strength along the way. Joining me are petty and as far as the coat who had written the play "Lesson 443", opening at Moxie Theatre this week. Will come to the show. ________________________________________ Thanks for having me. ________________________________________ And Jennifer Thorne is director of the play. She is cofounder and artistic director. ________________________________________ Thank you for being here. ________________________________________ And Danielle [Indiscernible/Name] is the lead actress of lesson -- "Lesson 443". She is a student at the scene to go school of performing and creative arts. ________________________________________ Hello. ________________________________________ This play used to be entitled, anatomy of an accident. Why did you make a change to this new title? ________________________________________ Actually the original title was 443. And we have played around with titles and we ended up going back to something closer to the original title which was, 443. Honestly, the anatomy of an accident could be -- and parentheses, title under the "Lesson 443". ________________________________________ So the main character in the play is a 14-year-old girl. Her name is Jerry Gonzalez. Tell us about her, Tatiana. ________________________________________ She was born in the United States. But taken to Mexico. Her dad took her back to Mexico when she was a baby. She comes back to the United States as a teenager. A 14-year-old, soon to be 15. And she begins at -- experiencing a sort of identity crisis. And of course, everything that goes along with that, we are throwing out there. Having a boyfriend. Figuring out how to get control -- testing your independence. And the play is about an identity crisis and how much of that -- how much are accent and the way she speaks as a part of that. ________________________________________ And there is also a ghost -- a secret involved? ________________________________________ There is a ghost. There is a ghost. Should we get to this, Jennifer? ________________________________________ I think it is too late now. ________________________________________ [ LAUGHTER ] There is a ghost. It is her dead mom. And, yes. That is the ghost. ________________________________________ I have been saying that this is a coming-of-age play. It is about serious topics. Belonging, identity. There is a secret involved. There is a tragedy from long-ago involved. And yet, Tatiana, this is a comedy. How does that work? ________________________________________ There is funny and everything that is tragic, I think. And I feel that a lot of what the character years arts -- with the characters are experiencing, -- there is so much levity in it. I think the characters are not in any way, attempting to be traumatic. They are just experiencing life that way. And when you are experiencing life that way -- and you are looking at this -- you are somebody looking at those experiences from the outside, it is funny. It is just funny. ________________________________________ When you are not the one going though it. ________________________________________ Exactly. Everything is so amped up when you are a teenager. Everything feels so important. And so immediate and so urgent, that sometimes -- you are just watching somebody go through that. And it is funny. ________________________________________ Jennifer, what drew you to this play. Why did you want to bring it to a San Diego audience? ________________________________________ I have to say the first thing that drew me to the play was the ghost work as a director, I am really attracted to magic and Theatre. I think that theater is at its best when it takes us outside our comfort zone, outside our day-to-day life. And when it does that, we open ourselves up and make ourselves vulnerable as audience members, to the story, in a way that we wouldn't otherwise. And so the ghost in this play, for me, it sort of threw me off in the great way where I said, okay, there is a ghost. So I have to satisfy all of my other preconceived ideas. And explore this play. It took me a little while to figure out -- on the page, it is a little harder to figure out if there is a ghost or not. We all joke around. Sometimes people ask me, is the ghost in chains? Is there a lot of moaning? I say, no. She is not that kind of ghost. Aside from -- as you mentioned, the story about the struggle of the accident, it is also an incredible story about the challenge of parenting. There is a beautiful relationship between the father in this play and the daughter. He is a single father. He is trying to do his best for her. And she is challenging and hotheaded and a determined young woman. And he is struggling with that. And even though she is a ghost, it is an incredible mother/daughter story also. As a mother -- both a daughter and a son, that really drew me to the plate. It emphasizes without challenging it is to do the best for a teenager. ________________________________________ Often we see young looking adults playing teenagers on the stage and even in movies. We are not seeing that this time. ________________________________________ You are making your professional stage debut at Moxie. And you are 16 years old. Tell me what that is like. What is it like to know that you are embarking on your professional career now? ________________________________________ It is definitely a great experience for me. It is really exciting. And I have to deal with school and with this. And so it is like -- it is a bit difficult. But it is like what I love doing. So although it is a challenge, I really like this experience. It is nice. ________________________________________ And you had to learn and accent for this role? ________________________________________ Yes. ________________________________________ How did you do that? ________________________________________ Looking at videos. I did a lot of that. Actually, JoAnn, one of the Moxie's, she is linguistic -- ________________________________________ She helps a lot of actors. She is Mexican. She doesn't have an accent herself. But she really does, as an actor, explore how you break down the sounds and learn them in that respect. ________________________________________ That is what I did. I just marked up my script and shows -- and shows the specific words that I wanted to say differently. And the different vowels that I wanted to switch. From their on, it just slowly came to becoming an accent. ________________________________________ I wondered, could you read something short from lesson -- "Lesson 443"? ________________________________________ Of course. ________________________________________ Thank you. ________________________________________ "I was born here but everybody thinks I'm a foreign exchange student because I have an accident. Things are not always what they seem. I just miss not having to think about belonging. I belong there. And I never had to think about it. I was. And that is all that mattered. I which I fit in here in this country. And I which I could be like everyone else at school. And I wish I sounded like a newscaster. Flat. And I wish people thought I grew up in the Midwest. And I wish they couldn't tell whether I was born in Kansas or Pennsylvania or Michigan or Eleanor up -- or Illinois or Indiana. If I didn't have an accent, I could be from any place in this country. A piece of the puzzle that could fit anywhere. Every time I see that -- you broke into my locker and wrote -- on every book, remember that might puzzle is back in Mexico somewhere and they hate it ". ________________________________________ She is reading from a small section of the play, at Moxie Theatre, "Lesson 443". Thank you so much for that. ________________________________________ Thank you. ________________________________________ Tatiana says, yes [ LAUGHTER ] ________________________________________ Well-done. ________________________________________ Tatiana, you were born in Columbia -- Columbia. Coming to America, did you experience any during -- anything that she goes through in this play? ________________________________________ Some of it is rooted as my experience as a Democrat. As a teenager, I did not know any English. So it was a little bit different, in the sense that -- the first year that I was here, just trying to figure out -- getting my ears to the sounds in English. The first time I came here, I had no idea what people were saying. Even when they said, hello, how are you? It was like, no idea. It was like somebody speaking Chinese to me. That is another language. ________________________________________ That is very interesting. Because you have hardly any accent now. So you must have really worked on this. So tell us what it is like to speak with an accent and the kind of assumptions that people make about you when you do. ________________________________________ This doesn't -- this has happened to me a lot. People just make assumptions. Like you are from there -- you are from someplace else -- the assumes -- they assume things about you -- your background -- in terms of your family as, how much money you have. , to education your parents may have -- how much education your parents may have. Based on what you found. That is numb -- not only applicable to someone with a foreign accent -- but I think that when you combine ethnicity -- a foreign ethnicity, a foreign accent and you put a person like that in a very homogeneous community, there are bound to be misunderstandings about each person in that group. ________________________________________ I wanted to ask Danielle about another first. This is your first professional play. It is also your first love scene in a play. How is that going for years? ________________________________________ -- how is that going for you? ________________________________________ It was awkward at first. I have never experienced anything like that -- on stage. But although it was my first experience toward it, I feel like -- I have gone into a mindset where -- this is what I want to do when I grew up -- so there will be much worse than this. So I think it was a good first step for me. ________________________________________ So tell me, Jennifer, how did you help guide Danielle through this? ________________________________________ I think it is really important when you are -- this is a real love scene. It is not handled in a titillating way. It is watching two young Ernest people have a first time together. And I approached it initially talking about what happened -- just talking. Reading this out loud. Talking about how I imagine that with them. And the rest we handle like choreography. So I said, your hand is going to go here. Or other hand is going to go here. That is not how I normally direct. I think it is really important. I felt it was worth it to have young actors in these roles. There is a magic on stage when you have young actors. And there are challenges because they haven't learned recessional lingo and things like that. They are still in school. But that feeling of a first time is truly captured I think in the love scene in this play. And so that is how we did it. I try to sell out everything I wanted clearly. So that neither actor felt like the other was taking in -- advantage of each other or taking things too far. I think that Daniela and my other actor he was 18, have handled that really well. And their parents have been really brave. I was really upfront with them and said, this is a young role. But it will require them to have adult conversations. So I am really lucky to work with them on this. ________________________________________ It can't -- had -- it sounds like you felt pretty protected all along the line. ________________________________________ She is a very great director. [ LAUGHTER ] ________________________________________ I feel like she has paved the way for us really nicely. ________________________________________ Tatiana, what you hope audiences will take away from "Lesson 443"? ________________________________________ It is hard to make a plan for that. But I can tell you what I intended to do and the rest is up to the audience. I intended to write a story about someone accepting or learning to accept themselves. That is not something we finished doing as teenagers. That is something that continues well into adulthood. As I found out. And I wanted to write something that had that inspiration. So if people take something like that out of it, I would be more than grateful and happy. But anytime people read this play, they react differently. They react to -- feelings about the relationships. And about the mom. I remember someone came up to me after the reading of this play and said, I didn't know you were a member of the dead mothers club. So they take away different things from the play. Because the relationships are interesting. It gives a little complex. ________________________________________ I want to tell everybody that "Lesson 443" opens at Moxie Theatre this Thursday. It runs through May 24. And I have been speaking with the playwright, Tatiana far as. And Jennifer, the director of the play and Danielle, who is the lead actress in "Lesson 443". Thank you all so much. I really like this. This was fun. Thank you so much. ________________________________________ Thank you.