If you happen to be onstage, however, all you need is a sound cue.
“Tack-a-tack-a-tack-a-tack-a-tack-a,” went the director Marco Antonio Rodríguez. He was sitting in the third row at Repertorio Español during an afternoon rehearsal of “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” based on Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which Rodríguez has adapted for the theater.
On the stage was 22-year-old Edgar Sebastian Martínez, who plays the title character, a comic-book-obsessed Dominican-American teenager whose shyness and body issues prevent him from flirting with women.
As Rodríguez repeated his manga-inspired theme music, Martínez flexed his biceps. In this universe, time had stopped, as everyday objects took on the weight and texture of elements out of the nerdiest sci-fi.
In the novel, Oscar is so insecure that his story is told by an unknown narrator whose identity is revealed in the last pages. Rodríguez knew that onstage he needed the world to feel active.
“We’ve seen the narrator business before — hello, ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ ” he said playfully.
For Rodríguez, the show, which began performances this month, became about how Oscar “changes everyone around him through his openness.”
Martínez, who sat near Rodríguez during a rehearsal break, described himself as much more self-aware and confident than Oscar.
Having trained at the Stella Adler Studio, where he portrayed the Gentleman Caller in “Menagerie,” among other characters traditionally cast as white, Martínez is part of a new generation that is trying to erase the color barrier.
“People don’t put me in a box,” he said.
Behind him sat Maite Bonilla, the 44-year-old actress who plays Oscar’s mother, her eyes and smile widening as she listened to her stage son talk about representation.
“Senior actors have done really good work in the field so you can feel that way,” she pointed out.
Although she always dreamed of taking on the title role of “Yerma,” Bonilla believed she would never be considered for the part. Going to auditions in her 20s, she noticed how she was always the darkest-skinned person in the room, even if the role being cast was a Latina.
“I’ve had to prove myself,” she said, “and I’ve done it with my talent.”
She was always set to play Oscar’s mom in the seven-member cast, with Rodríguez being a fan of her work. But the search for her son proved harder.
“We needed to find an Afro-Latino, who could act and was fluent in Spanish,” explained the director. Unlike the search for Dorothy in the film adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz,” which legend has it had MGM casting directors seeing thousands of aspirants, the search for Oscar Wao came down to a handful of young men who fulfilled the cultural checklist.
Bonilla and Martínez bonded over noodles in Washington Heights, where they both live. Last year, the neighborhood was officially designated “Little Dominican Republic,” and the pair share their cultural heritage and their pride as Afro-Latinos.
They both celebrated when Jharrel Jerome became the first Afro-Latino to win an Emmy for “When They See Us,” though Martínez had regrets, too: “I wanted to be the first one,” he said.
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is the first time both actors have played parts specifically written for Dominican characters.
Rodríguez first adapted the novel in English before translating it into Spanish for Repertorio. The result is a fusion of Díaz’s melancholy with the comedic precision of the Marx Brothers.
Cultural specificity is paramount. Rodríguez’s witty script establishes that Dominican slang words should be respected as they preserve the essence of these characters.
For the novelist, who understands the importance of separating the mediums, his characters onstage needed to feel like three-dimensional human beings.
“I don’t have a lot of control issues, so at an emotional level I was not troubled by the adaptation,” Díaz said by email. “In fact, I enjoyed the process; it’s a relief that I didn’t have to carry the weight of the project. Creating is hard damn work.”
The production was delayed a year after Díaz was accused of sexual harassment and misconduct last summer. (The Pulitzer Prize board and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches, cleared him of the allegations after investigating.)
Although Díaz’s fee is confidential, Robert Federico, Repertorio’s artistic director, disclosed that he was paid as much as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, and other prominent novelists whose work Repertorio has staged.
The theater owns the rights to the “Oscar Wao” script, in English and Spanish, for productions in New York City, but hopes it can present the play elsewhere too. (The novel was also adapted in 2011 as a one-person show by the American Place Theater.)
“Plays become their own entity,” explained Rodríguez, keeping with Oscar’s wondrous vision of the world. “They become their own energy, and do their own thing.”
This article originally appeared in
.