Review: DESTINY OF DESIRE: A TELENOVELA PLAY WITH MUSIC at Denver Center For The Performing Arts

Rose petals fell from the ceiling as actors sloppily laid into each other onstage. At either side, other cast members manned enormous electrical fans, sending hair dramatically flying while musician Ge Enrique supplied a sultry saxophone soundtrack. It was ridiculous. It was sexy. It was extremely funny.

This is Karen Zacarías’s Destiny of Desire at its best: excessive, knowingly artificial and completely committed to the bit.

The play bills itself as an “unapologetic telenovela,” embracing a form built from enormous emotions, impossible coincidences, mistaken identities and beautiful people making terrible decisions. It takes a little while to learn how to watch it. There is something almost Shakespearean about the tonal warm-up: for a while, your brain rejects the heightened theatrical language, and the play feels awkward, distant, and cold, and then suddenly, your mind submits and you are engrossed in the gargantuan stakes and overwhelming emotions.

Zacarías wraps her melodrama in an explicitly Brechtian frame. Actors step outside the telenovela to acknowledge its absurdity and offer funny or sobering facts that connect its heightened world to real questions of class, gender and immigration. For the most part, it works: the distance lets us laugh at the artifice while holding the reality beneath it at the same time.

The trouble comes when the play asks our empathy for its characters to expand into empathy for the real people those characters represent. Shortly after intermission, the production appears to kill its joyous eighteen-year-old heroine while crossing the desert, using her apparent death to invoke the real migrants who have died making similar crossings.

But we don't believe she's dead. We have spent an entire act learning the rules of this telenovela, and we know perfectly well that our heroine is about to pop back up. Coming immediately after an intermission (when we've gone to the bathroom, checked our phones and gotten a glass of white wine) the artifice is particularly hard to forget. The moment seems designed to give us goosebumps; instead, asking our nonexistent grief for a fictional death to open into grief for actual deaths felt icky.  The fourth-wall breaks can hold the telenovela and the real world beside one another. This moment asks one to emotionally authenticate the other, and the illusion simply isn't strong enough to do it.

That was the production’s most significant tonal stumble, but there were smaller places where its theatrical instincts felt not wrong so much as unfinished. Destiny of Desire is a show built on excess; not every excess has yet found its ideal proportion.

Enrique, for example, was a hilarious presence throughout the evening, but particularly early on, his musical trills came so frequently that they began to step on their own joke. Bianca Marroquín's Fabiola had an equally fun recurring trick, physically rewinding and replaying moments of surprise as though the telenovela itself had skipped backward. Despite an unfortunate prop failure on opening night, the device was delightful—I just kept waiting for the repetition to build toward some enormous final payoff that never came.

Visually, Takeshi Kata's open set, paired with Pablo Santiago's lighting, could have used more punctuation. The large playing space sometimes swallowed both the light and the performers, when tighter spots and sharper visual beats might have better served the show’s heightened tone—particularly early in the evening, while the audience was still learning its rules. And why, in a show this committed to theatrical silliness, were those two pop-out windows so criminally underused?

The younger performers brought a welcome looseness to the production. Jessica Lopez and Victoria Gómez, as Pilar Esperanza Castillo and Victoria María del Río, were especially good together, playing off one another with an easy, mischievous energy that made their scenes some of the evening’s most enjoyable. Both were also strong vocalists. Adam Enrique Hollick was similarly magnetic as Sebastián José Castillo, deploying the requisite sexy-stepbrother swagger while emerging as the production’s vocal standout.

Bianca Marroquín’s Fabiola Castillo was a force. Clearly drawing on formidable dance chops, she seemed to lead with either a shimmy or a hair flip, throwing her whole body into the comedy while her voice climbed and dropped octaves to punctuate a joke. The audience ate out of her hand.

For all my quibbles, I left Destiny of Desire with a feeling I don't get nearly often enough at the theater: this thing has legs. This is already a very funny, very good play, and its rough edges made me more interested in what it might become, not less.

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