Emvergeoning

Fri, Sep 25
7:00 pm	to	8:00 pm

Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story – airing Saturdays at 3 p.m. on KSTX 89.1FM – is renowned for breathing life into the written word.

Each week, Selected Shorts showcases acclaimed artists of American theater and film reading distinguished pieces of short fiction, from classic masterpieces to works from new and emerging literary voices.

Experience literature in performance as Selected Shorts, a production of Symphony Space in New York City, returns to San Antonio for a live performance on September 25, in commemoration of Hispanic Heritage Month.

Producers have paired acclaimed Latino actors with works by a diverse trio of contemporary Hispanic writers. Joining Selected Shorts host Isaiah Sheffer will be Soñia Manzano, known to the young and young-at-heart as Maria from Sesame Street, and San Antonio-native Jesse Borrego.

The Program

Selected Readings from John Phillip Santos and Frances Santos

“Don’t You Blame Anyone” by Julio Cortázar
read by Isaiah Sheffer

“Two Words” by Isabel Allende
read by Soñia Manzano

“The Man Who Found a Pistol” by Rudolfo Anaya
read by Jesse Borrego

About the Actors

Isaiah Sheffer

Isaiah Sheffer is co-founder with Allan Miller of Symphony Space and serves as its artistic director, now preparing for the theatre’s 30th anniversary season. At Symphony Space, Sheffer hosts and directs the long-running hit series “Selected Shorts” — live, on tour and in its PRI radio incarnation across the country. He also stages the annual James Joyce celebration “Bloomsday on Broadway,” as he has every year on June 16 for the past 26 years.

Sonia Manzano

Sonia Manzano is known to millions of children and parents through her role as Maria on Sesame Street, a character she has played since 1971. Her theatre credits include The Vagina Monologues, The Exonerated and the original production of Godspell. She has won fifteen Emmy Awards as a writer for Sesame Street, received the 2003 Hispanic Heritage Award, and in 2005 was awarded an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Notre Dame University. Closer to home, she is proud to have been inducted into the Bronx Hall of Fame. She has written for the Peabody Award-winning Nickelodeon series Little Bill, is the author of the picture books No Dogs Allowed! and A Box Full of Kittens.  No Dogs Allowed! has been turned into a musical. She is currently working on a memoir.

Jesse Borrego

San Antonio-native Jesse Borrego is a Mexican-American actor known for playing Cruz Candelaria in Blood in, Blood out and later guest starring as George King in Dexter. After graduating from Harlandale High School, Borrego studied theatre and dance at University of the Incarnate Word and acting at The California Institute of the Arts from which he earned a degree in Performance in 1984. About the same time, he attended an open audition for the TV Series Fame where he won the role of “Jesse Velasquez”, a role he would play from 1984 until 1987.

Borrego returned to the stage appearing in productions at the noted Joseph Papp Theatre in New York City and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. In addition to performing on stage and in films such as Follow Me Home, New York Stories, Con Air.

NOTE: Hector Elizondo was previously advertised as a performer in this year’s program. However, scheduling conflict arose, making him unable to participate.

About the Authors

Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the magic realist tradition, is one of the first successful women writers in Latin America.

Born in Lima, Peru, her Chilean diplomat father and her mother divorced and she lived with her mother and grandparents. She worked first as a secretary and then as a journalist in print, on television and in movie documentaries.

After the overthrow and assassination in 1973 of her uncle, Salvador Allende, president of Chile, Isabel Allende and her husband and children left for safety in Venezuela.

It was in her exile that she began to write The House of the Spirits, her first novel, which was based on her own family and the politics of Chile.

She continued to produce novels based in part on her own experience, often focusing on the experience of women, weaving myth and realism together. She has lectured and done extensive book tours, and has taught literature at colleges in Virginia, New Jersey and California.

Rudolfo Anaya

Best known for his 1972 novel, Bless Me Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya is considered one of the founders of contemporary Chicano literature. Anaya’s works live and beathe the landscape of the American Southwest, a powerful force, full of myth and magic that is integral to his writing.

Anaya lives and breathes the landscape of the Southwest. It is a powerful force, full of magic and myth, integral to his writings. As a Hispanic, he is fascinated by cultural crossings unique to the Southwest, a combination of Old Spain and New Spain, of Mexico with Mesoamerica and the anglicizing forces of the twentieth century.

Today, Anaya is the most widely read author in Hispanic communities. His works are standard texts in Chicano studies and literature courses around the world, and he has done more than perhaps any other single person to promote publication of books by Hispanic authors in this country.

Julio Cortázar

Argentine writer Julio Cortázar is one of the great masters of the short story whose work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges. His stories follow the logic of hallucinations and obsessions, often focusing on the quest for identity, the hidden reality behind the everyday lives of common people, and existential angst.

Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1914 to Argentine parents, Cortázar spent years in his home country working as a educator and literary translator before moving to France and gaining duel-citizenship.

He published poems and plays in the thirties and forties but achieved his first major success with a book of stories, Bestiario, in 1951. His novel Rayuela (1963; translated by Gregory Rabassa as Hopscotch, 1966) was widely praised and won Cortázar an enthusiastic international following.

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