UCLA alumna and former Daily Bruin contributor Barbara Mujica, a professor of Spanish at Georgetown University, has extensively studied the life of the Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Ávila, whose life inspired her 2007 novel, “Sister Teresa.” This novel has since been adapted into the theatrical production “God’s Gypsy” under Coco Blignaut of The Actors Studio.
The show opened Nov. 29 and will play through Jan. 12 at the Lillian Theatre in Hollywood. Mujica spoke with Daily Bruin’s Andrea Seikaly about her role in the production of the play, how it relates to her novel and what she hopes audiences will take away from it.
Daily Bruin: What is the story of Teresa of Ávila?
Barbara Mujica: It’s important to remember that she was a Catholic nun. … She started developing a different kind of prayer, which required individuals to recollect, which means, in a religious sense, to move inward. It’s that movement inward into a place of quiet, divorced from the outside world and all the distractions, where we can really discover our own spirituality.
DB: What was your role in the production of the play?
BM: I went out to Los Angeles a number of times and worked with Coco. She sent me scripts, and I saw rehearsals. I direct theater myself so I’m familiar with what a theater production looks like. I made comments and corrections. What I was really concerned with was the historical accuracy … I didn’t want Teresa to be misrepresented and I didn’t want the period to be misrepresented.I made very extensive comments and corrections at the beginning, and I also found that the play at the beginning was fragmented, and Ms. Blignaut agreed. So she reworked it and reworked it and reworked it and, until the end of last week, I was making comments and corrections. I wanted the integrity of the novel to be respected and the integrity of the character, who is after all a historical character and somebody who is meaningful to me.
DB: It seems like the story of Teresa of Ávila really resonates with you.
BM: It’s a (spiritual) message that resonates with all kinds of people of all different types of religions, because what Teresa really teaches is finding God within, through meditation and interiority. We can all find the spirit within ourselves. It is significant that she developed this kind of spirituality. She wasn’t the only one – it was this whole reform movement – but she was probably the most colorful. … She’s the one who impacted me the most.
DB: How does your novel translate into the format and style of a play?
BM: When you do a play, you only have a maximum of three hours, and it’s better if it’s only two hours. So that means a lot has to be condensed. You can’t get into all of this background material. There’s a lot of background in the book. … When you write a play, you have to highlight certain things. The book is not a heavy-duty book on theology; it’s a novel with characters and episodes and lovers and high points and all the things you expect from a novel. When you distill this into a play, you have to choose certain things. So Coco chose some of the funny parts and some of the highly dramatic parts.
DB: Which scenes from the novel are featured in the play?
BM: There’s a funny part in the novel in which Teresa and her friend Angélica try chocolate, which was imported from the New World and which was considered a great luxury. It was going to be condemned by the church because the authorities thought it was too stimulating. So they’re drinking chocolate and then they try tobacco, so you have the scene of the two nuns smoking. That’s in the book, and that’s the first scene that I saw her dramatize at The Actors Studio. … (Blignaut) dramatized some of the really sensational scenes. Angelica is raped by a priest. That scene becomes almost the centerpiece and the pivotal moment of the play because it’s very violent and very graphic.
DB: What do you want audiences to take away from this production?
BM: I would like the people who see this play to come out saying, “Wow, that’s the kind of spirituality I could really practice.” … What it means is finding your spiritual core within yourself and giving yourself the time and the luxury of cultivating it and realizing that it’s not self-indulgent. If you take care of your own soul, you will be better able to help other people in your daily life. You’ll just be a more sensitive person. If you don’t take care of your spiritual self, you may be missing a very big part of your own humanity. I would like people to realize that there’s a message here for everybody. I hope that they will come out with a sense of who Teresa was and what kind of spirituality she taught.