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Can you enjoy the new Arden play that’s part English, part Spanish? Sure, says the Cuban-Irish-American playwright.

Iraisa Ann Reilly says you can follow the whole story of her bilingual world-premiere, "Good Cuban Girls," even if you don't know both languages. Approach it like opera.

Good Cuban Girls at Teatro del Sol, with (from left) Yajaira Paredes, Lorenza Bernasconi and Frank Nardi Jr.
Good Cuban Girls at Teatro del Sol, with (from left) Yajaira Paredes, Lorenza Bernasconi and Frank Nardi Jr.Read moreTanaquil Marquez

Jane M. Von Bergen’s “Theater Beat” rounds up news and notes about theater in Philadelphia and the region.

Playwright Iraisa Ann Reilly was older than you might expect, like in college, when she figured out that most people don’t grow up interpreting between Spanish and English at the dinner table as she did as a youngster in Egg Harbor City, N.J.

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“I realized it was a story worth telling when I was in college,” said Reilly, now 30, who is half Cuban American and half Irish American. (She went to Notre Dame, of course.)

Part of Reilly’s own story shows up in the world premiere of her play Good Cuban Girls, the inaugural play of Teatro del Sol’s yearlong residency at the Arden Theatre Co. The four-character, multigenerational play is in English and Spanish, with the grandmother speaking only Spanish and her granddaughter’s boyfriend speaking only English.

Good Cuban Girls opened Saturday and runs through Oct. 13 at the Arden’s Bob and Selma Horan Studio Theatre. (Ragtime is on the main stage, now extended through Oct. 27.)

“I compare it to opera,” Reilly said. “Opera is in a different language, but you understand what is happening in the story because of the emotions and the way the actors are telling the story with their bodies and their voices.”

At home, Reilly would often serve as the go-between for her grandmother, who spoke Spanish, and father, the one with the Irish name, who spoke English. She and her mother could go either way.

Sometimes, Reilly said, someone would feel left out, but after a while, “my grandmother would say something in Spanish and my father would answer her in English.”

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Laughing while angry

Prolific South Philadelphia playwright Bruce Graham says he’s one of the few playwrights he knows who has never been in therapy. “Most of my plays come from what gets me angry,” he said. “I get it all out in my plays.”

What gets him angry now is what he considers to be society’s ridiculous dependency on technology, personified by reliance on smartphone assistants Alexis and Siri, who, by the way, aren’t persons and therefore can’t actually personify anything. Maybe Gary, the assistant devised by Graham in the world premiere of his comedy by the same name, will somehow be different.

Graham said he drew inspiration from Day of Absence, a 1965 play by Douglas Turner Ward. In that play, all the African Americans disappear from a small Southern town and “the idiot white people don’t know how to do their laundry or drive their cars,” Graham said.

Same idea here — as humans, how much of our competency are we surrendering to technology? Will we be able to set our own clocks, change the thermostat, and adjust the air-conditioning? Will we even be able to talk to each other? Maybe not, Graham worries, and it angers him. “I’m the least technical person in the world,” Graham said. “You are lucky I answered the phone.”

Gary runs through Oct. 13 at the Eagle Theatre in Hammonton. Graham said he had been appearing as an actor in the Eagle’s 2018 production of Moonlight and Magnolias when managing and casting director Ed Corsi and producing artistic director Ted Wioncek 3d asked him what he was writing. He told them about Gary, and they wanted to stage it.

Graham, a former stand-up comedian, enjoyed writing Gary. “I’m just having fun going back to my roots and writing jokes.”

More Bruce

Graham’s 2012 family drama, The Outgoing Tide, won honors as Chicago’s “best new play,” when it was staged there. Now the play, set in a cabin on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay, is finishing its run, through Oct. 6, at the Montgomery Theater in Souderton.

Departures

Bristol Riverside Theatre founding director Susan D. Atkinson, the woman who championed the metamorphosis of an adult movie house in Bristol Borough into a professional theater 33 years ago, is stepping down at the end of the season. She and artistic director Keith Baker, who is also leaving after 28 years, are part of a generational shift of regional theater leadership happening locally and nationally.

JaneVonBtheater@gmail.com