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.

Continue reading →