'Marisol' debuts as staff member's first production at WU
Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 2:50PM 
The cast of Marisol will be performing in the days to follow Valentine’s Day. Photo provided by Laura DoughertyBy Adam Lamberts
lambertsa@mytjnow.com
When playwright José Rivera gave his commencement speech at USC’s Theatre graduation in 2010, it was doubtful that he had anticipated that his speech would have an outreaching impact on other theatre graduates across the country – but that’s just what happened.
One of those non-Trojan graduates who heard Rivera’s speech was assistant theatre professor Laura Dougherty (now in her second year of teaching theatre at Winthrop), who is scheduled to direct her first Winthrop production Marisol, which happens to be a play that Rivera himself wrote.
Dougherty said the reason she chose to direct Marisol was because she was inspired by the commencement speech José Rivera gave during the same year she received her doctoral degree from Arizona State University.
“Rivera has a way with words,” she said. “His speech was very poetic and touching. After reading it I wept. I wanted to read more plays that he wrote since then.”
Apart from Rivera’s inspirational speech, Dougherty also chose to direct Marisol because it is a play that everyone can relate to.
“It’s a play about a Puerto Rican woman’s struggle to find a sense of belonging in New York,” Dougherty said. “She discovers this belonging through the friendships that she makes – not a romantic relationship, but a strong friendship with another woman living in the city.”
Since the play does not involve the main character finding his/her self-identification through falling in love, Marisol offers audience members who do not have a significant other with a more unconventional plotline that tells how a sense of belonging can be achieved without romantically belonging to another person.
Dougherty said the non-romantic play, which opens the day after Valentine’s Day, provides a refreshing outlook on belonging that is easily relatable to anyone who has ever viewed February 14 as National Single Awareness Day.
Dougherty said she has high hopes with what the Marisol production can achieve for the audience.
“I want the audience to think about what they saw and to discuss with others what resonated with them,” she said. “I want the audience to think of things they never really thought about before.”
It is no strange phenomenon that Dougherty’s hopes for the audience arevery similar to the joys of theatre that José Rivera mentioned during his commencement speech at USC.
“[When] a perfect stranger comes up to you after the show to say they never felt so transported in the theatre before and they understand something about life they never understood until tonight,” Rivera said in his 2010 commencement speech at USC’s Theatre graduation.
What Rivera was referring to is, essentially, what every theatre artist strives to accomplish, which Dougherty said she and her cast will be looking to accomplish February 15 – 19 at 8 p.m. Wednesday – Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday.
