The Denver Center is a-humming.
In the theater company’s largest house, Emma Woodhouse — to her own gentle comeuppance — is winking her way through Kate Hamill’s delightful adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma.” (See if before it closes Sunday.) Downstairs in the Singleton Theatre, things are positively loopy. Or rather brilliantly looping, as a young, Latina music-maker sets about crafting a mixed tape of her life in the hip-hop-influenced “Where Did We Sit on the Bus?,” directed by Matt Dickson. It runs through June 2.
So convincing is Satya Chávez (who uses the pronoun “they”) in the role of “Bee” Quijada that the audience is likely to assume it’s their life as the fourth child of Salvadoran immigrants that will be recounted for the next fleet, entertaining 80 minutes. It’s not; it’s writer-performer Brian Quijada’s.
Bee Quijada (Satya Chávez in a star turn) speaks to the audience from the deep of mom Reina’s womb. (Jamie Kraus Photography, provided by the Denver Center)
Chávez’s intimacy with Quijada’s story might have been earned during the time they spent working (along with Nygel D. Robinson) on the concert series “Songs from the Border” at Colorado Spring’s Fine Arts Center during its 2021-22 season. But the vibrant poignancy and tangible intimacy that Chávez created with the opening-night audience feels very much their own.
Chávez skillfully utilizes the tools of hip-hop and spoken word for the show’s layering of sounds and, more vitally, personal and cultural history: rap’s diving and arcing rhymes, an iPad with a Bluetooth connection, four loopers, and her voice. But Chavez, a talented musician, also plays a keyboard, guitar, ukulele, guitarron, bass, caña, a harmonica and more. And they sing.
Oh, how they sing, warmly, wittily, sometimes plaintively. Chavez punctuates parts of the storytelling with a wordless refrain that soars and wails — just a little — during its exploration of belonging.
“Where Did We Sit on the Bus?” takes its title from the question a 9-year-old Bee asks her elementary school teacher during lessons on Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement. Defying the reigning black-white dialectic of the nation, little Bee wonders about her place as a brown kid, the child of immigrants, in this American life. Bee and her next oldest brother, Marvin, were born in the U.S. Older brothers Fernando and Roberto were born in El Salvador.
The show is disarmingly personable and cleverly participatory as it goes from Bee’s conception and birth (their time in mom’s womb is bathed in red light) to her childhood living first in a trailer park outside of Chicago and then in a suburban neighborhood adjacent to Highland Park, with its large Jewish community.
They share their love of Michael Jackson, an early role model — until he started to tarnish his reputation by what seemed to be a drastic repudiation of his skin color. But they find their emotional place when they become involved in theater.
Chavez wears a monochrome outfit, a richer shade of army fatigues. They begin at a breakneck pace, then find a lively cadence of trust and familiarity, at times teasing the audience with the sly rapport of a lounge singer.
The production design of the show feels like a departure for the theater company, not in quality but in tone. The set by Tanya Orellana (who also created the costumes) and Pablo Santiago’s playful and geometric lighting design recreate the spare intimacy of a black box theater that can also offer a neon-lit portal into Bee’s past. How far back it goes speaks to (and reverberates, thanks to Alex Billman’s sound design) the show’s joys and imagination.
Satya Chávez as Bee Quijada. Jamie Kraus Photography, provided by the Denver Center
There’s ample sweetness to this journey and little argumentativeness in Quijada’s script — until there needs to be, when nagging quandaries about belonging boil over. Because “Where Did We Sit on the Bus?” is a theater geek’s coming-of-age saga, Bee had described theater as their church. Late in the show, they take us there, to an ongoing, rancorous national conversation about immigration in which immigrants bear the brunt of ire.
And so, Bee takes an extended moment to preach a gospel of inclusion, one inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, but also confesses the kind of hurt and disappointment that comes from witnessing a nation fail its ideals. The nation may falter in moving toward a better and welcoming future, but Bee doesn’t.
“Where Did We Sit on the Bus?” began with Bee telling us that she popped the question to her beloved, who is Austrian and Swiss, in Mexico. It ends with an expansive answer to the question of the title.
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Lisa Kennedy is a Denver-based freelance writer who specializes in theater and film.
IF YOU GO
“Where Did We Sit on the Bus?” Written by Brian Quijada. Additional compositions by Satya Chávez. Directed by Matt Dickson. Featuring Satya Chávez. At the Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex, 14th and Curtis streets. Through June 1. For tickets and info: 303-893-4100 or denvercenter.org.