Carla Navarro’s Fragment/o/s of Air/e is making its world premiere at OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista, running through August 17th. This bilingual family drama, rooted in Chile’s history and haunted by memory, confronts the lasting scars of dictatorship with urgency and heart. Navarro is a San Diego playwright, and Fragment/o/s of Air/e is a homegrown work nurtured through OnStage’s development process into this world premiere. The value of supporting local artists and theatres has never been more clearly demonstrated than in this powerful piece.
Set in 2005, Chilean immigrant Nina (Valeria Vega) has lived and raised a family in the US by distancing herself from the painful trauma of the dictatorship she and her husband had fled years before. Now, those memories are haunting her with increasing frequency. On this evening of what should be a fun and easy family dinner, she finds that some ghosts cannot be ignored forever.
Her now ex-husband, Armando (Arturo Medina), has arrived with paperwork to sell her family’s home in Chile, and the hopes to rekindle the spark of their long-faded marriage. Their daughter, Chivi (Maya Sofia Enciso), who is in law school and intends to be a human rights attorney, craves a connection to her Chilean roots and has some plans to make that happen. Older son Flaco (Lester Isaruiz) would prefer to sell the family home back in Santiago and focus on the present instead.
Written by Carla Navarro and directed by James P. Darvas, the play is anchored by a searing performance from Valeria Vega. Her Nina carries her survival like a wound that never closed, so she has adapted to life, ignoring it. Even so, it is visible in her shaking hands, when she blinks and suddenly finds herself reliving a memory from Chile, and then, with another blink, is back in the present day, and in the sudden pauses where words turn to silence.
Maya Sofía Enciso’s Chivi is effervescent and stubborn, a law student determined to learn the truth who feels validated in pushing her mother’s boundaries in the quest for information she feels she deserves to know. Lester Isariuz plays Flaco with a coiled restlessness, the son who wants to build a life here and now, and unlike his sister, is more concerned with rights being taken away in this country than fixating on what is happening in another one. Together, Enciso and Isariuz have an excellent sibling chemistry, both funny and antagonistic, and then seamlessly switch into more threatening shadow figures from the past and back again.
Arturo Medina gives Armando a tender melancholy, regretful for past decisions and hoping to make up for them in the future. The character could do with being a bit more fleshed out, but his love for his family and yearning for what he had with Nina is evident.
Navarro’s writing balances the fact that this is a family bound by love, even as silence and history threaten to pull them apart. The sibling banter, the familiar love and irritation by an ex who knows you too well, all feel familiar and real. The frequency of the flashbacks is well-paced and integrated to get to the long-buried memory. Spanish flows easily through the script, adding another layer of warmth, rhythm, and authenticity without impacting the story for anyone who doesn’t speak the language.
Scenic design by Patrick Mason creates a spacious and lived-in feeling home, while Jaden Guerrero’s sound design and Ginger Chody’s lighting make the jolting shifts between Nina’s two realities.
A short program note on Pinochet’s Chile would help give some context to anyone coming in with little knowledge of the dictatorship. And a content warning feels important, the climactic sequence in Chile is staged with unflinching honesty, and it will shake some viewers.
Through Nina’s fractured memories, Fragment/o/s of Air/e explores love, identity, exile, and the inescapable grip of history. Bilingual without pandering, poetic without pretension, it honors voices silenced by history and insists on listening now. It reminds us that exile doesn’t erase memory and that silence, too, can wound.
How To Get Tickets
Fragment/o/s of Air/e is playing at OnStage Playhouse through August 17th. For ticket and showtime information, go to www.onstageplayhouse.org
Phot Credit: Credit Daren Scott
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