Hartford Stage readies for premiere of deeply emotional father/daughter drama ‘Simona’s Search’
The writer and director of a new play premiering at Hartford Stage have a shared desire for fluid movement, deep dialogue and intense theatricality.
Martín Zimmerman’s TV credits include being a writer and story editor on the acclaimed series “Ozark.” He’s also a respected playwright, and his latest play, “Simona’s Search,” is having its world premiere Jan. 18 through Feb. 11 at Hartford Stage.
“Simona’s Search” is the latest of several new (and very different) Hartford Stage shows rooted in Latino culture, following “Quixote Nuevo,” “Kiss My Aztec” and “Espejos: Clean.”
Hartford Stage artistic director Melia Bensussen, who’s directing “Simona’s Search,” has been planning to do the play for years. It was originally announced as part of the 2020-21 season before the COVID shutdown.
Asked to compare her involvement with “Simona’s Search” with the last new play she premiered at Hartford Stage, Kate Snodgrass’ “The Art of Burning,” Bensussen explained the various ways a play can get developed.
“With ‘The Art of Burning,’ I first read it when it was just 10 minutes of material, we worked on it together and I was the only director involved with it. With this, Martín sent me a whole play, and we have the privilege of doing the world premiere. It’s had one workshop. This is the first full production.”
“This play is near and dear to my heart,” Bensussen said. “I love how intelligent it is. It’s about the pieces of ourselves we know, and the pieces we don’t know.”
Zimmerman said “Simona’s Search” came to him when he read an article about a scientist and found himself thinking about their upbringing. The play concerns “a young woman and her relationship with her father. She comes to realize that the man she thought he was is not who he is. He suffered a lot of trauma but spent his life trying to protect her from it,” Zimmerman said. “What does a parent owe a child? What does a child owe a parent? It’s ripe territory for exploration.”
“It’s an insightful piece that takes advantage of how theater tells a story,” Bensussen said.
Zimmerman and Bensussen have not worked together before. Zimmerman said he knew of her as a prominent Latina theatermaker, “someone to know about. We’d been circling each other for years.” He said he knew many people who had worked at Hartford Stage, and when Bensussen became its artistic director in 2019, they started talking.
Bensussen praises Zimmerman as “a playwright who makes room for the production. He makes room for humor, movement, improv. We’re physicalizing the text rather than just saying the words. It wouldn’t be the same if it were a radio play.”
She said it is a relatively big production with projections and lighting effects that still retains the energy of the actors on a thrust stage with theater happening right next to you. It is in “constant motion, a 90-minute wild ride, very theatrical.”
“It’s about what is real,” Bensussen added. “We’re exploring that.”
UConn’s Connecticut Repertory Theatre staged a different Zimmerman play, “Seven Spots on the Sun,” directed by Tlaloc Rivas, in 2022. That play, published in 2018, is about a mysterious plague and gained resonance from being staged after the pandemic. “SImona’s Search” plays differently after COVID as well, Bensussen said. “The questions about identity, about nature versus nurture, seem even stronger now. These are more salient topics than they were four years ago.”
There are just three actors in “Simona’s Search.” Bensussen said she last worked with Al Rodrigo, who plays Simona’s father, on a production of her translation of the Federico Garcia Lorca classic “Blood Wedding” at New York’s Public Theater in 1992.
Christopher Bannow, who plays Jake and others in the show, grew up in Connecticut and graduated from the Yale School of Drama (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale) in 2014. In the decade since, he’s been on Broadway in “The Elephant Man” (starring Bradley Cooper) and in both the Broadway and touring versions of Daniel Fish’s radical rethinking of the musical “Oklahoma!”
Alejandra Escalante, who plays Simona, is active in the same Chicago theater scene as Zimmerman. She has worked at some of the most important regional theaters in the country, including the Goodman in Chicago, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the A.R.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has been in many Shakespeare plays but in just as many new works.
Zimmerman is aware of the distinctions between writing for theater or television or writing novels, which he’s also done.
“A TV series is the highest bar for complexity of a story over a period of time,” he said. “Characters have many different possibilities. The highest bar with theater is the style of the storytelling. The life of a play is more than one production. You have to make a case for why it must happen in front of an audience. There has to be something inherently theatrical about it. This play has a stylistic playfulness, an abandon that wouldn’t work so well on the screen.”
With “Simona’s Search,” the playwright said he is intent on the broader sweep of the play. “There’s so much movement.” He’ll be attending rehearsals and previews right up until opening night and expects he will do some rewrites while he is in Hartford.
“My plays can be theatrical in a different way. I appreciate directness,” Zimmerman said. “I feel that good stories are ones that appear to be about one thing but become about something else. It’s also important to have whimsy because of how heavy it can get.”
“Simona’s Search” runs Jan. 18 through Feb. 11 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. There is no Saturday matinee on Jan 20. On Feb. 7 there’s a 2 p.m. performance instead of an evening one. $20-$100. hartfordstage.org/simonas-search.
