The Nine O’Clock Novella: A Comedy with Lyrics

By Herminio Vargas-Tollents and Dr. Carlos Manuel Rivera

The Nine Oclock Novella is a first sample of Herminios written work for the theater. It was first presented in Spanish at the Gershwin Auditorium in Brooklyn College (CUNY) in the spring of 1973. Later, it traveled, in an incipient English version, to the Henry Street Settlements New Federal Theater (NYC); and, in the summer of 1979, to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Out-of-Doors Festival. From there, it travelled to various off-Broadway settings and to Puerto Ricos Teatro Bellas Artes and the Dominican Republics Teatro Nacional aside from its presentation in other states.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524542917

Herminio Vargas-Tollents

Author Herminio Vargas-Tollents was born in Puerto Rico in 1944. After concluding undergraduate work with a BA in education at age twenty-one, he traveled to New York where he attended Columbia University for an MA in the same field. He later transferred to New York University, where he finished all course requirements toward a PhD concentrating in sociology of education. He worked at different capacities with the New York City Board of Education for a total of nineteen years and taught at the college level for twenty-three years, mostly with City University of New York, conducting courses with the School of Education at Brooklyn College and the Department of Puerto Rican Studies. He also taught a course in method acting for prospective teachers with the Theater Department. Having chosen the theater as his extracurricular activity since the inception of his career, Herminio participated in different activities connected with various local Hispanic community theaters in the area by acting, directing, writing, and assisting in the creation of new groups. The Nine O’clock Soap Opera, presented originally in Spanish as La Novela de las Nueve at the Gershwin Auditorium in Brooklyn College, was one of his first plays. The title was later changed, considering the word “novella” sounds more like the Spanish word for TV soaps. An incipient translation into English was later presented at the Henry Street Settlement’s New Federal Theater and at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ Out-of-Doors Festival in September of 1979.

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COPYRIGHT © 2016 BY HERMINIO VARGAS-TOLLENTS.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER:      2016915127

   ISBN:      HARDCOVER      978-1-5245-4253-5

         SOFTCOVER      978-1-5245-4252-8

         EBOOK      978-1-5245-4291-7

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 09/12/2016

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To my dear nephew Francis Rodriguez-Vargas who was about to graduate with a 4.0 average from the School of Engineering when the fatal accident happened.

INTRODUCTION

By Dr. Carlos Manuel Rivera, PhD*

It is well known that television soap operas in Latin America, and among Latinos in the United States, eventually reached an international cultural boom of sorts quite evident to this day. Considering the impact that these have had in general audiences, Puerto Rican writer Herminio Vargas wrote his comedy The Nine O’clock Novella (1973) in an effort to have them standout in a rather unique way while at the same time, and to a certain extent, to satirize and make fun of them while pointing at their influence and their particular impact on Puerto Rican and other Hispanic women in New York City who seem to live for watching their dreams, achievements, and failures as emulations of these essentially unrealistic television stories. The author also emphasizes on how these used to promote a subordinated position of women by bombarding them with commercials aimed at enforcing their roles as mere housewives.

This play, originally titled La Novela de las Nueve (The Nine O’clock So Opera) is written in Spanish originally, was staged in various off-Broadway locations in New York City in its incipient English translation during the seventies and early eighties. To a great extent, the general public, friends, colleagues, and others in the theater business still remember and talk about its originality. It’s also worth clarifying that subsequently, it would continue to be presented in Puerto Rico both in English and Spanish as a yearly tradition for a few years. Notwithstanding, in it, we not only may visualize a representation of its genre within the Hispanic cultural productions which promoted a source of employment for Latino stars and actors in the Latin American international world but also that through this type of work, there is an introduction of these types of subjects and characters that may also be found in the peripheries of the large city, thus reaching a social and cultural epiphany within an invisible and unknown sphere in those geographical areas.

It is of widespread knowledge in the history of our culture since the nineteenth century in Spain, and within its colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America, that there was the existence of a quite popular genre of fictional fantastic order by mail novellas of strong melodramatic character. Writers like Pedro Alarcon, Vicente Blasco Ibanes, Jose Maria Pereda, and even the most valued canonical novelist in Spanish letters Benito Perez Galdos, just to name a few, entered this genre carrying their cultural input across the Atlantic to reveal further diffusion of their work to an international level.

On the other hand, from a so-called fem canon in the English-speaking world that bit by bit also gained an international level, erupted a group of feminine writers who, from the standpoint of their womanhood and from a growing source of an interest of the time to protect themselves from the current patriarchal society of the time accompanied by their interest in protecting their particular and differently established subjectivity, were able to develop a romantic melodramatic and perhaps naturalistic trend, making their novels reach a maximum acceptance. Some of these novelists were ladies from the British bourgeoisie like Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley and, in the United States, others like Virginia Wolfe—although she lived in England—Louise May Alcott, Susan Wagner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, also just to name a few. Having an input of the popular culture of TV type soap operas, we have today all over the world, were those published sometime even on a monthly bases, the brochure type of novels whose authors we prefer not to mention.

This genre was expressed from a melodramatic romanticism that touched certain classical themes as impossible love, class struggle, triumph of good over evil, and death just to name some as they imposed on their readers a climate of suspense and intrigue that they could not get rid of, or resist, being practically forced to order by mail the following chapter.

Notwithstanding, due to the greatness of this genre within all social classes of the times, and of these who were already able to read and write during the twentieth century, and with the following brought about by the radio, it also created further precedents. In other words, the genre of this type of novel, the so-called feminine novels, was then transformed into radio scripts that would be known as the radio soap operas. These radio versions captivated many who during morning, noon, and night would enjoy