¡Ahí viene Jenyvette Vega!​

by Montserrat Mendez

The Wedding March
By Judith Ortiz Cofer’s
Pregones / Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre
Directed by Rosal Colon
​Tickets Here

From left to right and up the steps. Jenyvette Vega, Fernando Contreras, y Gabriel Leyva.

When I was growing up on the island, before moving to New Jersey, I remember the nights when the television would turn on and someone, usually my dad or a cousin, would say, “Ahí viene Iris Chacón,” referring to the singer, dancer, actress, and variety-show star known as La Bomba de Puerto Rico and La Vedette de América. I was too young then to understand the appeal. But now I do.  Because there was a particular charge in that sentence, a whole room preparing itself for someone who did not merely appear on screen, but took possession of it.

The force that made the adults in my childhood turn toward Iris Chacón is the same force I feel watching Jenyvette Vega perform. In The Wedding March, now closing this weekend at Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, Vega has that rare theatrical power: once she enters, the room belongs to her. The evening is brief, about 75 minutes, but it gives her just enough space to draw us completely into her Jenyvette-verse.

The Wedding March is not a play so much as a staged memory, adapted from Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. It opens into a world of memory, womanhood, family, and the complicated inheritance of being a Puerto Rican woman. The production understands something profound: that we never fully know the Puerto Rican women in our lives. They carry multitudes. They keep secrets. And sometimes, if we are lucky, they let us close enough learn them.  And often times those stories don't come until the very end. 

I wish I could neatly summarize the stories, but The Wedding March is built from memory, and memory does not move in straight lines. It circles. It interrupts itself. It remembers one woman and suddenly finds three more standing beside her. The play draws from Judith Ortiz Cofer’s deeply personal story, from stories of her mother, from the lives of other women, and from that essential Puerto Rican ingredient: gossip. Poor Marino, or Marina, perhaps, though good for him for landing the girl.  

And it works because the production understands that stories are not decoration. They are inheritance. They are how we know who we are. When Puerto Ricans are cut off from our stories, we do not simply lose information; we become smaller, thinner versions of ourselves. The stories here move from the traumatic, including a girl’s first period and the fear and shame surrounding how it was treated at the time, to the wonderfully comic and precise. Rosa Colón keeps the evening focused and alive, never allowing its nonlinear structure to become shapeless. The María Sabida section is particularly magical, and it gives Vega’s stage partners room to shine: the wonderfully elastic Gabriel Leyva, whose command of physical comedy is a pleasure to watch, and the deeply grounded Fernando Contreras, who brings a steady warmth to the stage. Together, they deliver moments of humor and romance that feel rooted in a Caribbean truth.

Here is where I found myself both keeping up with the play and falling behind it. While I was laughing at María Sabida, some other part of me was busy filing through stories I thought I had forgotten: Juan Bobo, the ghost stories of Roberto Cofresí, the pirate legend I grew up hearing in Rincón, and all the tales my father, God bless his soul, used to tell me.

I realized, sitting there, that I should write them down. Because no Puerto Rican story is ever told the same way twice. The version of Maria Sabida I knew, had an ogre and the devil. These stories, the ones that existed before Iris Chacon came on the screen were passed down through the telling, so it all depends on the teller, on the room, on the wounds (and this evening shares some), on who is listening, and on what the storyteller has survived. That is why our culture must keep telling its stories. If it is going to survive colonization, erasure, and the slow forgetting that comes with distance, then we have to put it all down, pass it forward, and make room for as many Wedding Marches as we can. 

The rest of the team helps shape what becomes a wonderful evening. The live musical accompaniment is especially beautiful, with Ali Bello, Sergio R. Reyes, Maggy Simon, and Marisol Espada giving the production its pulse, its breath, and its ache. Musical Director Desmar Guevara gathers those sounds into something that feels both intimate and ancestral.

Set Designer Omayra Garriga Casiano and Costume Designer Eliana Jost create a world that is simple without being plain, evocative without being fussy. And Lighting Designers Lucrecia Briceño and Emmanuel Delgado give the production an authentic glow, the kind of light that seems to come not only from the stage, but from memory itself.

And Congratulations to Rosal Colon, who keeps the evening focused and brought out of her performers a sense of clarity and truth.  I can't wait to see what she directs next. 

And then there is Jenyvette Vega, holding it all together with that rare force that makes a room lean forward, until you can almost hear someone whisper, “Ahí viene Jenyvette Vega.”