Scherzo (Dialogue with a Statue) by Rafael Guizado, in my translation, will be the opening production of The Asylum Theatre‘s 25th Anniversary season! This event marks The Asylum’s return to the Winchester Dondero Cultural Center, the return of live theatre in Las Vegas, and the start of a partnership between The Asylum Theatre and Out of the Wings.
“We are pleased to bring local arts to the world stage through an exciting new collaboration with the Out of the Wings Festival in the U.K. Scholars from across the globe have supported Gigi Guizado with earlier workshops of the script and look forward to our staging. It is an honor and a great pleasure to celebrate a local Latina playwright who has made a Colombian master’s work a part of the contemporary English-speaking American Theatre through her translation.”
Sarah O’Connell
Artistic Director, The Asylum Theatre
As The Asylum’s Playwright-in-Residence, I will continue a journey which began in 2015 with researching my grandfather’s radio plays. Having collected several of them, Scherzo amazed me with it’s timelessness and keen observation of politics and human nature. Further research into translation led me to Out of the Wings‘ online resource of plays translated from Spanish into English. With a bit of moxie and luck, I connected with Professor Catherine Boyle via email and was invited to share my translation of Scherzo in an Out of the Wings workshop reading. The feedback I received during that workshop was priceless, and propelled me forward into further development of the translation.
I also continued researching, collecting, reading, and translating the scripts written and recorded for Colombia’s first national radio station by a grandfather I had never known. Doing so captured my imagination as a theatre artist, and helped me piece together the mystery of my family history. Over time, I saw themes emerge in my grandfather’s work: love, loss, family, career, music. Inspired by reports of his experimentation with new forms of theatre, I adapted four individual one-acts by Rafael Guizado into a full length stage play, Symphony for Six Actors. Scherzo is included as the penultimate movement of the symphony. My adaptation received further development in the rehearsal room at King’s College London and onstage at London’s Cervantes Theatre in Out of the Wings Festival 2017.
So, it feels only natural that Out of the Wings should partner with The Asylum Theatre to see Scherzo through it’s next phase in production at the Winchester Dondero Cultural Center in Las Vegas. Arts advocate extraordinaire, Sarah O’Connell, will direct. We hope you will join us for this truly international theatrical event with pre-show chamber music performed by the Nevada Chamber Orchestra. Two shows only, June 25, 2021 at 7 PM & June 26, 2021 at 2 PM.
Sarah O’Connell assumed the role of Artistic Director in 2003. Originally from San Francisco Bay Area, she served as the Associate Artistic Director of Impact Theatre. She holds a Master of Drama degree in Directing from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS). Her work has been performed throughout the US, UK, Europe, and South America and includes several regional and world premieres. She is an alumnus of the Director’s Labs in L.A. and Chicago, and La Mama ETC in Umbria. In addition to teaching at UNLV, she has worked at American Conservatory Theatre, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and Glasgow’s Theatre Cryptic. She is the Founding Executive Director of EatMoreArtVegas.com, the VP of the Producers Alliance of Southern Nevada (PALSNV), and the Executive Director of the Henderson Symphony Orchestra.