Brown students take to stage with Duende Arts

The troupe's debut production of "The First Eff" will be presented Aug. 1-3 at the Arcade in downtown Providence.

by Mary Jo Curtis

The Brown connections with Duende Arts, the city's newest theater troupe, are nearly too numerous to mention.

Co-founder Maria Goyanes '01 is directing the troupe's debut production of "The First Eff," which will be presented Aug. 1-3 at the Arcade in downtown Providence, commemorating the Arcade's 175th anniversary. The hybrid play -- a combination of theater, prose and narrative -- was written by Donna DiNovelli MFA '92, who was a visiting assistant professor in creative writing this past year. Alicia Wolcott '02 is the set designer, and the cast features Charise Smith '05, Rebecca Rouse '04, Christina Anderson '03 and Jessie Austrian '03, an incoming MFA candidate in the Trinity Consortium. The production is co-sponsored by Brown's Creative Arts Council.

Goyanes -- who's now an associate producer at Trinity Repertory Company and just directed "Much Ado About Nothing" for its Summer Shakespeare project -- describes Duende Arts as "a theatre arts troupe dedicated to performing site-specific work among the streets, parks and buildings of Providence." The group takes its name from Federico Garcia Lorca's "Play and Theory of the Duende."

"A duende is a kind of Spanish hobgoblin," she explained. "Lorca says artists can have duende; they can send waves of emotion to the audience. We say a space can have duende... and we can take theater to incredible spaces and do great plays."

According to Goyanes, "The First Eff" is a coming-of-age tale in which six women play various combinations of mother-daughter roles.

"It portrays both the universality and the individuality of femininity," she said. The play has already been work-shopped around the country in such venues as The Mark Taper Forum's New Works Project in Los Angeles, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Joseph Papp Theater in New York.

Performances are Aug. 1-3 at 9 p.m. at the Arcade, 65 Weybossett St.; doors open at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $5 and can be reserved by sending e-mail.