Pittsburgh City Paper – Megan Monaghan Rivas and Tlaloc Rivas married five years ago but have often been apart: She teaches drama at Carnegie Mellon University, while he teaches at the University of Iowa and makes theater internationally, specializing in Latino theater. When Quantum Theatre asked them to create a show, they were drawn to a comedic drama about an imperiled marriage. Renaissance playwright Lope de Vega’s Peribañez depicts a newlywed rural peasant couple, Peribañez and Casilda, whose happiness is threatened by a military officer’s obsession with Casilda. “That pulled us in personally,” says Megan Rivas. She and her husband co-direct this rarely produced two-act, which stars CMU drama students Siddiq Saunderson, Isabel Pask (both pictured) and Freddy Miyares. Peribañez is staged outdoors at a favorite Quantum spot, Mellon Park’s woodsy Jennie King Rose Garden, on a unique, three-platform stage partly enclosed with chicken wire meant to evoke both garden plots and animal pens. Tanya Ronder’s translation trades the original verse for lyrical prose, and Quantum’s ensemble wrote their own music for the script’s several folk songs. Megan Rivas emphasizes that this 1613 play’s stalking motif remains sadly relevant: “What happens to Casilda in this play is still happening.”
