Toby
and Abigail Sail the High Seas is a children’s play written by renowned
Spanish playwright Luis Araújo. It tells the story of two kids who
become embroiled in a fantastic adventure with a pair of pirates. In the
course of their search for a lost treasure, they encounter mermaids, sea
hags, the ocean god Neptune, and a mysterious moving island.
It was the first time the play was performed in North America.
A talk-back session followed the performance, where audience members had the chance to ask Evans-Corrales about how the play was written, the creative process, as well as the process of translation.
Cast List
Justine
Julian (Sea Hag) is a "super-sophomore" at Pitt-Bradford, majoring
in human relations. She recently appeared as Claire Zachanassian, the lead
in the Pitt-Bradford production of The Visit. Justine hails from Mt. Jewett.
Jeff Carson (Toby), BLT’s VP for membership, appeared as Seymor in October’s Little Shop of Horrors and was part of the award-winning ensemble in Pippin. He also recently appeared on stage in this year’s Kiwanis Kapers.
Rick Frederick (Spitglass), a professor of history at Pitt-Bradford, is best known for his work as the author of Kiwanis Kapers. He has performed in numerous shows, including BLT’s The Fantasticks. Last year, he read the lead role in Heart-Beat by R.G. Rader, Season 2000’s writer-in-residence.
Richard Marcott (Redsplotch/ Neptune), a BLT board member, is a long-time veteran of the Bradford stage. His most recent BLT performance was as the field marshal in Pippin. He performs annually with Kiwanis Kapers and he sings with the local barbershoppers.
Katie Yurick (Abigail) is a junior communications major at Pitt-Bradford, hailing from Warren. She has appeared in a number of Pitt-Bradford shows, most recently in The Visit. This is Katie’s third year performing as part of BLT’s writer-in-residence program; last year she played opposite Rick Frederick in R.G. Rader’s Heart-Beat.
Stage directions were read by the director.
(In the photo, from left: Mackowski, Yurick, Julian, Frederick, Carson,
Marcott, Evans-Corrales. Photo by Lisa Wright.)
A
member of the so-called "Eighties Generation" of writers in Spain, Luis
Araújo is a playwright, director, and actor. He was born in 1956.
Araújo acted with several groups before founding Tres Tristes Libres with the intention of staging children’s plays that would offer a certain depth of ideas and performances worthy of their intended audience. At the time, children’s plays in Spain were usually produced in unsuitable spaces—often without seats, for example—and were treated as a minor genre, often being ignored by critics. They also tended to be puritanical and unimaginative.
Tony and Abigail Sail the High Seas is Araújo’s first work, and he himself acted as Toby in the first production, which premiered in November 1983 in Madrid. The play won a national award.
Following that, he went on to study in Paris and Montreal; he also authored a study on contemporary Canadian playwrights. In 1991, he returned to Spain from abroad to begin a career as an instructor in theater. Araújo has served as General Secretary of the Spanish Playwrights Association and acts as a visiting lecturer in translation at Louvaine University in Belgium.
The author of several cutting-edge plays for grownups, five of which
have been staged, his work is characterized by several simultaneous layers
of possible reality.
About the Translator
Carys
Evans-Corrales is an associate professor of Spanish and chair of the Humanities
Division at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.
She was raised in Singapore and Malaysia, spent three years in Jamaica, instructed English for twelve years at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and likes to visit Puerto Rico.
Dr. Evans-Corrales specializes in contemporary Spanish poetry, Hispanic narrative, and translation, and she is a member of the American Translators’ Association.
Apart from scholarly work in translation studies and Spanish theater,
she has published several short stories in Galician—a language spoken in
northwestern Spain—and has translated a book of Galician prose-poems. Her
translations of work by Spanish authors include two sets of children’s
plays, one by Alfonso Sastre and the other by Pilar Enciso and Lauro Olmo.
From the Director by Chris Mackowski
Remember
when we were kids—in the world of cops-and-robbers and cowboys-and-Indians,
the worst of the worst "bad guys" were those bloodthirsty pirates.
Ah, for simpler times. Since September 11th, we’ve all come to a new understanding about how complicated the world is.
But by that same token, we should take time to appreciate the sense of wonder we can find all around us everyday. I find Toby & Abigail a treasure in these troubled times because it’s full of that sense of wonder and adventure kids so easily tap into, whether their adventures are real or imagined.
It takes courage to imagine. In a time when it might be easy to give in to fear, let’s instead strive to encourage in our children their sense of imagination and wonder.
(In the photo: Director and BLT President Chris Mackowski 2001-2002 writer-in-residence Carys Evans-Corrales. Photo by Lisa Wright.)