‘Kita y Fernanda’ sweeps audience along on moving bicultural journey

In “Kita y Fernanda,” the moving bilingual play that opened Friday at Mo’olelo Performing Arts Co., the Spanish language serves its characters as both a refuge and a prison.

More than a third of Chicago playwright Tanya Saracho’s bittersweet comedy-drama is in Spanish, the native language of the play’s four Mexican women living in luxurious isolation in a Texas border town. For non-Spanish speakers, it can be frustrating trying to comprehend the sometimes lengthy untranslated passages — and that’s Saracho’s point. For 90 minutes, the audience can experience the frustration, fear and hopelessness that shape these women’s lives.

Codirected by Mo’olelo executive artistic director Seema Sueko and Robert Castro, “Kita y Fernanda” is a memory play that begins in March 2006, when more than 100,000 marchers flooded Chicago’s streets for immigration reform. Caught up in the human tide are Kita and Fernanda, who grew up in the same home but whose lives are now long divided by class, citizenship, time and misunderstandings. After a 14-year estrangement, their eyes meet across Daley Plaza and memories sweep them back to their turbulent childhood.

It is 1982, and Fernanda is the ultra-spoiled, grade-school-age daughter of a wealthy Mexican family in McAllen, Texas. Her never-seen father provides a home but none of his time or love, so Fernanda serves as translator and sole companion to her lonely, pill-popping mother, Dona Silvia. Their lives brighten with the arrival of new maid Concha, an illegal immigrant, and her young daughter, who Fernanda quickly nicknames “Kita” and adopts as her private plaything and confidante.

Over 10 years, the girls’ relationship develops and frays. Fernanda is accepted into McAllen’s white society and will one day marry a gringo, but she is fearful like her mother, and only comfortable in the carefully cultivated “little Mexico” she has built at home with Kita, telenovelas and Mexican banda music. But brainy tomboy Kita feels trapped in Fernanda’s world. She owns nothing, not even her name, and she itches to escape and establish her American identity.

As Fernanda, Gabriela Trigo is mercurial, needy and ebullient, while Cynthia Bastidas plays Kita as cautious, reserved and independent. They’re vinegar and oil, a mix that works during their interdependent youth but never truly bonds. To suggest the growing socio-economic and psychological gulf between the two characters, the two actors rarely touch, playing intimate games with a wide stretch of stage between them.

As Fernanda’s mother Dona Silvia, Melba Novoa is elegant and dignified but drips with despair. The versatile Olivia Espinosa completes the cast in a trio of roles — Concha, the quiet and dutiful maid; Chela, Kita’s activist, pot-smoking Chicana friend who spurs her to escape; and cheerleader Jessica, Fernanda’s shallow, self-absorbed classmate (a performance that’s very funny but tonally out of sync with the rest of the play).

David F. Weiner’s evocative scenic design creates a splendid cage for Kita and Fernanda, as well as their shut-in mothers, who speak no English. A sterile, windowless room is their world, book-ended by intimidating three-tiered walls of faded red doors that seal off the outside world. These walls come down in only one scene, colorfully lit by Jason Bieber, when the four women finally connect through Mexican dance music.

The Spanish in “Kita y Fernanda” may intimidate some theatergoers, but it’s like watching Shakespeare. Thanks to clear direction and good performances, it’s easy to follow the enveloping sweep of this touching story.