Whitewater Arts Alliance

Featured Artist - Isabella Virrueta

We had the opportunity to interview Isabella Virrueta, the director of the recent production Shoe. We dove deep into her inspirations, reasons for artistry, and process in the creation of her theater art.

When asked about what inspires her, Virrueta responded, “In relation to theater and the art that I do, my peers and colleagues inspire me to do the work that I do. When I was in college, it was my professors and my friends in the theater department that inspired me to do my best work and be as good as I could be. In community theater too, I got to know really beautiful people in Madison that became like another family for me, in a way. My family was far away. Coming into Whitewater, and getting to work with Matt [Denney], it was kind of that same thing again where I met a new friend, we did theater together, and just felt so inspired by Matt and his passions and stuff. I think the people around me really inspire me to do my best work. When I don’t have that community, it’s hard to access that part of me. I need that boost, that friendship boost.”

We asked Virrueta why she creates the work that she does. “I do the work that I do because, I don’t know, because I love it. I was that dorky theater kid in high school, and that continued on my whole life. I think theater is such a powerful, beautiful tool. I think it can do so many different things: it can make you feel your feelings, it can be a distraction, it can be hilarious and kind of dumb sometimes, and it can be really meaningful and impactful. So I feel for me, it’s the ultimate expression. It makes me feel like I’m doing something kind of real, which is funny, because I feel like a lot of people equate acting with pretending. But I think any true performance that anyone’s seen that they’re really in awe of is real and genuine. I always loved theater since I was very small, like seeing my first play and being amazed that anyone could remember all those words! I just love it so much. I think, too, there’s a really cool feeling, like when you can see the effect that you’ve had on other people. Something I miss a lot from in-person theater is the community you build with people in the cast as well as your audience. There’s a really great back-and-forth you get with an audience, especially when a performance is going really really well, that you just kind of miss out on with the virtual stuff. Granted, I’m really glad we could do it, and there’s still theater existing in some form, but there’s some stuff that you miss. Connecting with others is so real. And even thinking about a fictional character for that 90 minutes, it’s their real life for them, and you kind of bring that into life. That community feeling is irreplaceable, and I’ll be really excited when we can get back on stage again.

Virrueta went on to explain how she creates her work. “I think it depends. Right now, obviously, virtually. Zoom is a really big thing. We use this really cool hosting site that works through zoom to present different shows. I’ve done a lot of stuff with Matt because I’m part of his virtual ensemble, and we have to find a way to create that work together, but not together. A lot of hard work goes into it and not even just the acting side, there are editing directors out there editing, directors practicing with us running lines,and creating a vision for something that isn’t going to be seen in-person I think is hard. That was the thing that was hard for me when I was doing the read-though with the dream scholars; I could see it in my head and how I would want to block it on-stage, but we didn’t have that option so I had to really focus in on ‘how do I get their energy out through the screen?’ ‘How do I get them to connect with each other when they’re not even in the same room?’ You have to really switch up the things that you would normally do in the show, and the community building has to be a lot more verbal and theoretical. You can’t just play ‘Zip Zap Zop.’ I mean you could, you can play it on zoom, you’re just not going to get the same results as you would like a physical warm-up in-person. I also feel like I had to do a lot more of a dive into the script than I normally would do in a in-person show, because with an in-person show you have the benefit of finding all that content together with people in real-life rehearsals, and then some spontaneous things happen in it that are amazing. But in virtual, it’s just a lot more rigid, so if they do find a genuine moment, I have to hone in on that and bring it to the surface. That was something that was really easy to do with our folks in the dream scholars, because they were so passionate about this project. They were willing to stay an extra 20 minutes so we could work something out. They were willing to add another rehearsal so we could get it right and build the relationships. Acting is a lot of trust-building, like trusting that your co actors are going to know their lines, that they’re going to have your back, and when you can’t do that community building in-person, it’s a lot of risk-taking, like ‘I’m going to put my faith that you’re doing your best’. And with this too we had a little flexibility that it was a read-through, so I wasn’t expecting everyone to fully memorize 100+ pages of dialogue, because that’s hard enough to do in-person. We had the scripts available, and in this situation I’m more concerned that we get the story right….we have a limited time together. This writer just wrote the most beautiful play. I think one of the most beautiful plays I’ve ever read…[I wanted] to get it right. This is one of the shows where I’m like ‘I’m going to do this in-person someday.’ I want to be in this play.

Virrueta then took a moment to ponder what she’s trying to say with her work. “It depends on the story, but I think generally what I’m trying to put out with anything that I do is that someone’s story has validity. I think everyone has a story to tell. I’m trying to say that we need to acknowledge that, I guess. For example, with Shoe, every character in that show has their own life story, and can easily be read as good or bad depending on the context in which you’re looking at them, right? If we think about Iliana the younger sister, spoiler alert, who gets pregnant and was supposed to go to college and do all the things that her older sister Marta didn’t get to do because their dad left, you could easily classify her as spoiled, young, irresponsible, but I think it’s a lot more complex, and people are a lot more complex than just good or bad. And I wanted to see Iliana from her point of view. She’s been under this pressure her whole life, especially from her older sister to do all the things she never got to do, spent her whole life getting good grades and being on time and all these things. So when she felt like she had a little flexibility, I mean everyone’s kind of had that time in their life where they screwed up a little bit, we’re human. Then if we look at Marta, we think “poor Marta, she had to take care of everyone, her mom treats her bad,’ we could classify her as a victim and just kind of write her off, but I think Marta is a lot more powerful than that, and I see her as someone who is trying to live with the things she was given and trying to persist on, who finds her voice and finds her power through her computer. So when she leaves at the end of the show as Iliana is giving birth, people, even the cast, like when we did the first read-through one of them audibly gasped ‘Marta left? How could she do that? How could she leave her family? Their dad left and she was so mad at him for that.” And I said ‘Was she though? Let’s go back and look at the script. Was she really mad at her dad, or was she sad that he left?’ She was always the one being compared to being the most like her father. To me, when you think about the fact that she didn’t get to live her life, the fact that she’s almost 30, it makes sense. It doesn’t mean it was the right choice for other people, but it was the right choice for Marta. What I’m trying to say is every story that I put out there, every show that I do, there’s a person behind that, the words, the prose, and there’s always a story to tell and always something to learn. We all have our vices and our good and bad things...That’s not to say that every character has a good story. There are some characters that are straight out just awful, but I think that’s still valid to, like try to understand why they’re such terrible characters. Like think about Richard III. He’s awful...He’s a king and a tyrant, has someone murdered, it’s a whole thing, and people paint him as a villain, but the way he’s described in the play, he’s mocked for a physical deformity and has awfulness put onto him, so it’s like, ‘yeah, I think I would probably be a jerk if people were horribly discriminatory towards me because of a part of my body….as soon as I’d have power I would seize it too, why not?’ I’m not excusing the behavior by any means, but it’s complex. Richard III is a mean character for sure, and he definitely ‘gets his’ by the end of the play.

Next, Virrueta discussed her favorite work. “One of the best things I’ve ever got to do was this play in Madison back in 2015/2016 called The Clean House and I got to play the lead. Her name was Matilde, it’s Portuguese, and I had to learn Portuguese to do part of her lines. The opening monologue was all in Portuguese, and I had to learn how to do a genuine Brazilian accent. The character is a comedian, but her mother just died, so she’s like ‘I can’t be a comedian anymore’ so she moves to the U.S. to work and stuff, but it’s funny because the play opens with her telling a joke, a really raunchy sex joke, but it’s all in Portuguese and I would always laugh because every night when I opened the show with that monologue, everyone would laugh along with me, and I’m like ‘You don’t know what I’m saying…’ but I think my body language and the things I was doing to convey ‘this is a funny story’ reads even if you don’t know what the language is, but that always made me laugh because it’s in Madison, and I’m like ‘How many of you actually really speak Portuguese?’ That character was just amazing, and I got to work with these super experienced, phenomenal actresses, and actually one of the actors is a professor at Whitewater. He’s awesome in that one too, and he’s also phenomenal. I was so young 23/24 maybe, and working with all these professional people and feeling really lucky that I get to work with these experienced actors, directed by Betty Diamond who also was faculty at Whitewater for a long time and she is amazing. It was just a really good experience. It was so wonderful. And also telling the story of a woman who is grieving, her mother died, she felt like she couldn’t tell jokes anymore, and being a comedian was all she ever wanted to do. But if your mom dies, the whole world kind of stops being funny. But then she finds her humor again through all the weird shenanigans that everyone in the play is getting into. One of the character’s husbands leaves her for another character in the show, but then they all end up becoming friends at the end. It’s that woman empowerment and like that community to rise above even ‘her stealing your man’ kind of thing. I thought that was cool because an easy plot is to turn women against each other over a guy. To have them come together and be friends, and there’s this scene where we’re all eating ice cream together, that was one of the promo pics that went all over the place, and it’s just so sweet. We all look so cute and happy and I love it. At the beginning of the show, the house is very meticulous, on-brand, very clean, and by the end of the show it’s just a mess. It’s kind of showing that life is messy and you can’t always keep it-it’s not always going to go the way you think it is. Another part is that Matilde is supposed to work in the house and clean the house, but she’s terrible at it. She forgets things, because she’s a comedian, not a cleaning lady. She took this job because she needed the money, but it’s funny because the sister of the house owner is the one actually doing all the cleaning and Matilde just talks about her mom, all the jokes she wants to tell, how sad she is. It’s so funny because she’s not good at cleaning at all. So yeah, I think that was my favorite one, and selfishly, I got to be a lead and that was really cool, and I think we all like those moments where we get to be in the spotlight. Of course feelings of ‘Ah! I’m young’ and those feelings are there, but it’s how you take it. If you go in like ‘wow, these are professional folks and I’m just a small twenty-something,’ I think you can go either way and I would rather be inspired and motivated to do better work than be like ‘Oh God, I can’t do it’ It’s just not serving anyone and that’s not why Betty cast me in that show.

When asked if there were any other subjects of importance not covered by our questions, Virrueta responded “Support your local artists, regardless of what they’re doing if it’s theater, painting, photography, music, anything. Support them, because it has been a really, really hard time for creative folks, not being able to perform, take photos, perform concerts, be on stage, or open a gallery. Support them because it has been really hard.

Thank you Isabella for giving us your time for the interview and allowing us to feature you on our page!