Aluna Theatre’s production of Jorgelina Cerritos’ On the Other Side of the Sea (translated from Spanish by Dr. Margaret Stanton and Anna Donko) opened at The Theatre Centre last night.  Cerritos is from El Salvador and the play is set on a beach somewhere in that part of the world.  There are two characters (three if you count the sea).  Dorothea is a no longer young civil servant sent from the capital to a remote fishing village to issue birth certificates, ID cards and the like.  Every day she sets up her desk on the beach but she has no clients until the Fisherman arrives.  He has come from the Other Side of the Sea in his rowing boat.  He needs a birth certificate; “something that shows who he is”,  but has none of the information needed for Dorothea to issue one.  She gets angry at his bugging her day after day; especially as he is her only client and she can’t do anything for him. They quibble about the possibility of names (he wants his ID to read “Fisherman OftheSea”) and argue the finer points of grammar concerning what may, or may not be, possible.  This is often very funny but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

At least that’s how it starts.  As things progress though we learn that the Fisherman has several times tried to make a life ashore but the simplest transactions require “First Name, Last Name, Address, Age”; none of which he knows and which becomes a kind of mantra.  In any event, his shore going efforts always end in disappointment.  He has led a complicated but legally non-existent life.  Dorothea, on the other hand, has a documented legal existence but her life is all “might have beens”.  And all this takes place against a background of the sea; the eternal sea, pounding away and, if one has the ear for it as the Fisherman does, speaking profoundly.

It seems almost lazy to use the term “Magical Realism” when talking about a Latin American work but really that’s what’s going on here.  There’s a reality-unreality that sucks the audience in to believing in and sympathising with the essentially incredible.  What plays out, almost subversively, is a profound, and profoundly moving, meditation on identity and what it means to be a “person”.

Beatriz Pizano and Carlos Gonzalez-Vio create this really quite complex story with the minimum of help.  The set consists of a jetty with a desk on it.  Scenically, everything else is down to the effective lighting plot and Thomas Ryder Payne’s evocative sound design.  Director Soheil Parsa gets superb, and often very funny, performances from his actors.  The timing, for example, is immaculate; each pause packed with meaning.  The resolution is unclear right to the end.  It’s really good theatre.

On the Other Side of the Sea plays at The Theatre Centre until February 25th.

Photo credits: Jeremy Mimnaugh