Marine Life playwright Rosa Labordé weaves ecoactivism, mental illness, and cultural displacement into a story with magic realism and romantic comedy.
As a child, Rosa Labordé used to dream her name was Mandy or Jennifer. In Ottawa, there weren’t a lot of Chilean-canadians or other kids whose first language was Spanish, and the name Rosa felt like just another way in which she was different. If she were a Mandy or a Jennifer, Labordé reasoned, at least she’d be able to get one of those nameplate keychains like every other kid did when they visited places.
Now Labordé realizes she was dealing with internalized racism. But she was also looking for that thrill of validation that only comes when you feel truly seen, when your identity isn’t erased or appropriated by the dominant culture. When you’re eight, it might be as simple as a keychain. But it’s what that keychain represents that shapes your life.
She’s a screenwriter and an actor, but primarily Labordé is known as a playwright. Aspects of her life and her family’s life have made it onto the page and stage throughout her career. Her 2006 breakthrough play, Léo, told the story of three young people caught in a love triangle during the 1973 military coup d’état in Chile, following the assassination of President Salvador Allende. The one-act play made Labordé one of the most buzzed-about new writers in Canada. Now Vancouver is home to the Western Canadian premiere of her newest play, Marine Life, which explores, among other things, family, mental health, and the destruction of the environment.
Light stuff, right? Well, yes. It’s also a romantic comedy. A dark one, Labordé admits, but a romcom nonetheless. When Marine Life was making its Toronto debut in 2017, Labordé told Lattin magazine that one influence on the play was meeting many people who claimed they used to go to the theatre but didn’t anymore because they were “tired of feeling bad”.
“It remains true!” Labordé tells the Straight over the phone from Toronto, where she now lives, before the play debuts out here with Ruby Slippers Theatre. “People keep saying that to me. Even people in the theatre who have to go, like dramaturges, they’re going, ‘Oh my God, I just went to another thing where someone was like, “Here’s my awful story.” ’ ”
So Labordé set about writing Marine Life, which focuses on Sylvia, an environmental activist who falls in love with her total opposite, and her codependent brother, who, in the middle of a mental-health crisis, becomes obsessed with breaking them up and self-destructing.
“I knew that I was writing an environmental piece,” Labordé says about her decision to situate Marine Life as a comedy. “I knew that I was writing also about cultural displacement, but I also was writing it for my brother, who had some health stuff going on. I asked him permission. I won’t say exactly what it is, but specifically it’s in the play. I asked him, ‘Am I allowed to write about this?’ And he said, ‘Yes, but it has to be funny. And there has to be music.’ ”
Labordé accepted his challenge, and ultimately Marine Life tends toward a magical-realist humour— like telenovelas, she says—where pathos and absurdity are the shared space in a Venn diagram, not juxtaposed as opposites. Latin-american audience members get it, she says, but not everybody does.
“Here, often, you get the ‘I don’t get what tone it is. Is it dark or is it light?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know that you need to make that distinction,’ ” Labordé says. “I think we live in a world where it can often be both at the same time. And that might be disturbing, but that doesn’t make it not true.”
Labordé is also thrilled with director Diane Brown’s casting of Latin actors in the Latin roles, including Christine Quintana as Sylvia. Labordé met Quintana for coffee in Toronto last year to talk about the role. It’s one of the few opportunities Quintana has had to play a person of Latin descent.
“She said, ‘It’s just like me,’ ” Labordé observes. “And Christine’s a wonderful artist who can play anything, but she’s getting an opportunity here to express a real part of herself: as written, as being divided, of being both here and there.”
As for Labordé, she long ago gave up wanting to be Mandy. She’s very happy to be Rosa. Now, as she looks at aspects of her culture and her experiences in her work, she’s excited that Marine Life and its majority-latin cast are delivering the change she longed to see when she was growing up.
“It gives it a really beautiful authenticity,” Labordé says. “It offers legitimacy. I love it.” g
Marine Life runs from Thursday (March 14) to March 23 at the Firehall Arts Centre.
I knew I was writing about cultural displacement, but I also was writing it for my brother. – playwright Rosa Labordé