Masha Without Mourning

A perspective on playing the beloved Russian lady as a Latina
actor
Francesca Santodomingo

In 2016, I arrived in New York as a wide-eye 19-year-old woman who wanted to tell brave bold stories that portrayed complex and nuanced women on stage. Yet, it was indeed 2016, and for Latina actors then (and now), it was rare to come by stories that allowed us to
exist without speaking of identity every three lines on the page. It seemed as if unless the story spelled out ‘Latin’ on the front page, there was no place for us on the stage.
It was 2016, before playing Bad Bunny at the club was cool, before Medellín was a hot spot to visit, and before arepas got gentrified, and just around the time I was told by my first acting professor in university that no one would ever hire me with my accent. Well, I was hired, but I was only allowed to play feisty ladies and all the other good old stereotypes that made my existence on stage palatable and easily tokenized by the outside eye when needed. The only place I could exist was within the confines of stories about immigration, poverty, violence, and trauma. Those stories, though at times necessary and important, and even sometimes fun and pleasurable, became the only space available,
and quite frankly, it became suffocating.
Back then, I remember looking at the ‘canon’ and the ‘classics’ with skepticism, thinking that unless someone rewrote a version of Doll’s House with a Cuban or a Puerto Rican Nora, there wouldn’t be a chance or a point for me to explore such character, there wouldn’t be a chance for me to portray a character who was not made in my image. At the time, I thought that for me to be able to play Nora, I needed to contort myself in a Nordic shape for it to be correct. These characters seemed out of reach, too foreign, too revered and feared, too Anglo-Saxon, too European, etc.
And then things started to shift in 2020, I played my first Shakespeare, as Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. In 2022, in graduate school, came Nina in The Seagull. Through these processes, I began to feel a sense of freedom within me, a sense of possibility that who I was and where I had been, these women had experienced too and if I hadn’t experienced it myself, I had met plenty of women in my life who had, and who never had the chance of seeing themselves in all the extent of their dimensions on screen or on stage.
And this year, came T3’s Seagull with Masha. It clicked then that even though these narratives were written by European men in the northern hemisphere, and far far away from the warmth of the Equator where I grew up. Something was being said about women at that time, something kept bringing it back, a self-fulfilling prophecy: with every generation of women, there’s still something to be won, more to be done. Even more important, that womanhood is, in some ways, a universal experience, and my body, my accent, and the fullness of my individuality off and on stage could only expand what that means (without making that the center of the story).

Masha allowed me to be a three-dimensional woman with a rich inner life with disillusions, mistakes, plenty of flaws, and poor choices. A woman trying to overcome the fate of repeating her mother’s mistakes, of desperately trying to banish love and trying to build a life in the wrong places, someone who lacked choices, or rather, perhaps, wasn’t strong enough to find them. Someone who loved with fierce and unwavering loyalty to her detriment, and whose spirit withered in the hands of the small world she was confined to live in. I was a whole human not just the identity labels thrust on me since I arrived in this country, and that was liberating and refreshing. I thought of my friends back home, of my grandmother, of the young women in Colombia whose dreams and desire to love and live a life of beauty perish amid survival. I, unknowingly, brought the aspects of my memory, of my specific brand of Latinidad, I brought the fullness of who I am to a beloved theatre character and I hope that it honored the real Mashas out in the audience, and the Mashas of my life.
In this reminiscing of my time as a Russian farm girl, I acknowledge that there are many questions about the validity of continuing to produce and tell these stories— couldn’t we amplify emerging writers from all backgrounds to tell stories that discuss the same
ideas or that write even more complex women that mirror our times? How do we change what “canon” represents?
And while I believe that, yes, all theatres could create more platforms and allow for more opportunities so that other perspectives can be heard and seen. I also believe that the value of these stories is their high degree of malleability and the incredible creative
opportunity they provide for actors and creatives to live in the depths of these characters whose lives went beyond their place of residence or nationality, and that could now be reimagined to allow us to bring and inhabit them in all of our truth. Because, as the world turns out, most of their reality continues to be ours or is simply disguised as something else.
Their lives and their three-dimensionality only make more and more sense, insofar as we allow creatives and actors of all kinds to dissect these stories and let them decide what they want to say about these characters today. For me, the question has become how can we blow these narratives off the page and use their bones to elevate the unsaid? Mr. Anton may have inspired Masha in his sister Marya, and I still wonder what life was like for her in 1895 Russia. However, I also take Ms. Masha and all these Russian, Scandinavian, and English ladies as blank canvases with which I’m choosing to honor women like my grandmother and the women before her. Women whose lives and legacies
were built in ancient times, and are now forgotten. All these women are always on stage with me without speaking or pointing. I take these characters as a chance to awaken where we come from with presence. So that people like them, people who came before me, and
other Latinas can see their essence and presence, women with rich, intricate details without any strings attached—not trauma stories not just as an opportunity to extricate our countries’ histories or traditions for a foreign gaze— but rather to make people in the audience look back at the women in their families, look at themselves, and recognize a full woman whose personhood is not sacrificed or defined by its country of origin or their suffering in this one, but simply by who they are, who they are still becoming, the dreams they left behind and the dreams they continue to sow.

If we can take our personal stories and our imagination and run then I think these women on the page are worth saving, for they are now just vessels that open the door for us to bring our unique kind of experience, of womanhood, personhood, and to be seen for
more than the boxes we check.