Destiny of Desire

Destiny of Desire opens on a stormy night in the town of Bellarica, where two baby girls born minutes apart are swapped in a hospital nursery, one carried into wealth and one into poverty. Eighteen years later the lie is still holding, and the play sets about pulling it apart.

What follows is telenovela logic staged at full tilt: a scheming former beauty queen, a landowning family with money and secrets, a farming family with neither, a doctor and the son who disappoints him, a nun who knows more than she says. Fortunes reverse, parentage is revealed, love arrives at the worst possible moment. Underneath the melodrama sit sharper questions about class, medicine, work and who gets to decide a person's future.

Karen Zacarías calls the piece a telenovela play with music rather than a musical, and the distinction matters: a live band and a handful of full-throated songs punctuate the story instead of carrying it. The dialogue slides between Spanish and English with a bilingual ear. First produced in 2015, it has been taken up repeatedly by major companies since.

The pleasure is in the double vision. Performers play the genre absolutely straight while the production winks, stepping forward to address the audience, freezing a scene on a gasp, letting the band vamp under a revelation. It is very funny, and then, without warning, it is moving, because the people inside the joke are drawn with real affection.

Destiny of Desire is for anyone raised on telenovelas and equally for anyone who has never watched one, since it teaches its own rules as it goes. It rewards an audience willing to laugh out loud, and it leaves something behind once the laughing stops.