INTERVIEW: New play, ‘El Coquí,’ looks at identity behind vejigante masks

The elaborately detailed and exuberantly colorful vejigante masks of Puerto Rico are iconic visuals of the island. Their uniqueness speaks to regional identity in the country, and the people behind those masks represent a wonderful variety of perspectives and viewpoints.

The metaphor of these beautifully ornate masks are not lost on playwright Matt Barbot, who has used their cultural influence to inform his new play, El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom, currently playing at the Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey.

“The beginning of this play sort of began to germinate for me when I was a kid visiting Puerto Rico and seeing the vejigante carnivale masks for the first time, which are sort of emblematic of Puerto Rico,” Barbot said in a recent phone interview. “They are these big, elaborate, horned, brightly colored, brightly painted masks that are made on the island, and different towns have different styles. And you can sort of tell where they’re from.”

When a young Barbot saw these masks he instantly thought of the superheroes from cartoons and comic books. As he grew older and took up drama as a passion and profession, the playwright began to see a story behind this connection of genre fiction and the cultural expressions of his youth.

In the play, main character Alex Nuñez decides to become a superhero to help the people of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. He’s an out-of-work comic book creator who tries to save his local neighborhood from impending gentrification and villainous corporations.

“The idea of the vejigante masks merging with superpowers and superheroes and masked heroes wearing vejigante masks sort of stuck with me as I was growing up,” he said. “I came back to those ideas in college when I was thinking a lot about media and the way people of color are portrayed and the way that they were portrayed in a lot of the media I love to consume, specifically genre media, which also got me thinking of growing up, examining my heritage and what my heritage meant for me in my life and how it fit in to who I was and how I defined myself. And so as those questions kind of combined with one another, this play took form with a comic book artist who is dealing with identity issues creating this vejigante-masked superhero who he believes is the avatar of everything he thinks it means to be Puerto Rican.”

The production, which runs through Feb. 4, features direction from Jose Zayas, who also directed a reading of the play in 2013. Barbot said that Zayas has helped shape and refine the play over the course of the rehearsal process.

“The cast is wonderful,” he added. “There’s nothing better than a room of smart actors who are really engaged with the script and who ask the right questions, so it’s been amazing to continue to develop the script with these really talented teammates. … It’s really humbling to come into a room and see so many people who are really inspired and invested in the script and who are coming at it from angles that I have no skill or talent in, bringing their enormous abilities to the script in costume, set, lighting, projection, sound to create this world and to bring it to life.”

Throughout the development stage, El Coquí has seen many iterations. At one point, the main character was arrested for dressing up as a superhero, and there was an interrogation scene.

“The play has taken on a lot of forms since 2008, but it started to take its current form maybe five or six years ago,” he said. “Some of the characters have changed in their motivations and how they interact with the main story. Since the beginning of this process, it’s mostly been a question of trimming and refining and making sure that the play is saying what we want it to say.”

What does Barbot want the play to say? For him, it has always come down to that issue of identity.

“I hope that when people leave the play, I want them to be thinking about identity and how they define themselves and how they define other people and to think about the stories they tell that have shaped who they are and how they think about the world,” he said. “As a writer, I’ve always been very interested in story and the power of story, not just as a storyteller myself but within the stories that I tell. I’m interested in myths and comic books and video games and religion and the way that we kind of interact and define ourselves with story, and I think in this play, Alex, the main character, has created a story in the superhero of El Coquí to help him struggle with his own questions of identity and feelings of not belonging.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom is currently playing at the Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey. Click here for more information and tickets.