THE SINS OF THE REVIEWERS OF
THE SINS OF SOR JUANA
 

THE PLAY  (at the Goodman, closing June 25) tells the story (or rather, a story) of a remarkably brilliant and beautiful Mexican child-prodigy who at fifteen years of age enthralled the mid-to-late seventeenth-century Spanish viceregal court in Mexico City with her poetry and other writings.  She became a Carmelite nun at age 19 but continued to write prodigiously on all sorts of topics—from Baroque poetry and drama to some particularly attention-getting tracts on the rights of women.

Chris Jones (Tribune) found the play “sadly disappointing,” and complained about the “clunkiness of the script” and the “crude comedy.”  Hedy Weiss (Sun-Times) found it “an uneven mix of drama and sex comedy” without a “unified tone,” and lamented that the play ended up “trivializing” the story of Sor Juana.  Barbara Vitello (Daily Herald) was also disappointed in not finding sufficient “gravitas.” Other reviewers piled on, echoing those complaints in almost the same words (Adler, The Reader; Zeldes, Chicago Theater Blog; Williams, Chicago Critic; Norby, Showbiz Chicago).  Some of them furthermore complained about the fictional components, especially “the whole-cloth invention of an explanation for why Juana entered the convent” (Bommer, Curtain Up) by “defining a strong women in relation to a made-up man” (Vire, Time Out Chicago).

Other  reviewers spent their allotted space objecting mightily to the comic-relief characters of the viceroy and his valet (Tony Plana and Joe Miñoso).  And they simply could not stand the historically unjustified romance between Juana and her would-be deceiver, Silvio (Dion Mucciacito).  Taking this line of thought one step further, one might ask whether we should endure the night porter’s booze-and-sex chatter in Macbeth, a serious play about regicide, or whether we should permit Sir John Falstaff, a fictional character for heaven’s sake, to detract from the “gravitas” of the history of King Henry IV.

Alyssa Norby (Showbiz Chicago) called the play a “derivative rom-com” that “undermine[s] the very figure it intends to esteem.”  But as Guillermo Schmidhuber notes in  The Three Secular Plays of Sor Juana, “attempts to define her have not taken into account Sor Juana as a dramatist.”  Among her 52 dramatic works there are several plays that Schmidhuber calls falda y empeño (“petticoat and perseverance”) comedies.  Evidently there was room in Sor Juana’s serious life for a little rom-com.

Chris Jones (Tribune) criticized the acting of Malaya Rivera Drew, the actress who played Juana, saying, “I didn’t believe for a second that she was a 17th-century nun.  She read to me as a smart young actress.  At one point, she puts on a coat that reminds you of a trendy bikers’ jacket; she fit right in.” And yet the real Sor Juana was a very modern woman in many ways.

The painted script at the bottom of the portrait to the left, dated 1666, identifies its subject as Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, at age fifteen, “having come out victorious from the very difficult situation of having her prodigious intelligence put to test in an examination before forty doctors of theology, philosophy, and the humanities” —but this handwriting is not the first thing that strikes the eye.  One immediately sees a confident and beautiful young lady with long, straight black hair and large brown eyes, rather busty for a slender woman—indeed, looking nothing whatsoever like a seventeenth-century nun.  In fact, she rather resembles a teen-aged Christina Ricci, holding a well-studied book in her right hand and offering something, perhaps a philosophical point of argument, with her left, and looking for all the world like she like has just sailed through a rigorous examination by forty professors and is ready to slip right into that trendy biker jacket and go out for the night.

One can imagine other ways that Karen Zacarías might have written her story—perhaps as a deadly serious play about devotion and sacrifice to an ideal (The Dialogues of the Carmelites), or maybe a saucy story about Juana having an affair with the vicereina, being thwarted, then joining a convent for whatever fun might go on there (Sister Act).  Surely we’ll see other versions of this story as time goes on, but just as surely there is room for Zacarías’s beautifully “operatic” take on the story of Sor Juana’s life.

To those reviewers who trashed this production to the point of driving people away: shame on you for your parochial narrow mindedness.

—Curtis Tuckey, Chicago