Posted in Essay The Long, Wondrous Adaptation of Oscar Wao How a Playwright Translated Junot Díaz’s Beloved, Epic Novel of Dominican Dislocation for the Stage Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X After meeting novelist Junot Díaz at a book signing, playwright Marco Antonio Rodriguez embarked on a journey to adapt Díaz's beloved novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," for the stage. | Mario Peguero as Yunior, left, and Reynaldo Romero as Oscar. Credit: Courtesy of author. When The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao burst onto the scene in 2007, it cracked open what a “Dominican story” could look and sound like. Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel blends history, sci-fi, magical realism, Spanglish, and heartbreak into a chorus of voices that span generations marked by love, dictatorship, and diaspora. At its center is Oscar de León—a sweet, awkward, endlessly romantic Dominican nerd from New Jersey who dreams of writing epic fantasies and finding true love, all while battling the intergenerational curse known as the fukú. The book told Dominican Americans like me that our stories could hold both comic book universes and Caribbean ghosts, that nerdiness and nostalgia could live beside brutality and beauty. When I set out to adapt and translate the novel for the stage, it required me to get to the heart of the thing: Oscar’s heart. And, in the process, my own. Act I – The Encounter I first met Junot Díaz in 2011 at a book signing in Dallas, Texas, just as my first full-length play, La Luz de un Cigarrillo, was about to premiere in New York. I took a chance and invited him to see my play. To my surprise, he showed up—and loved it. In conversation afterward, we discovered we shared the same sense of dislocation, though in reverse. Junot was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. I was born in New York and sent to live in the Dominican Republic. That mirrored experience, and a shared love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sparked the idea of a stage adaptation. The rights weren’t available at the time, but we remained in touch and built a friendship. The itch to adapt Wao for the stage only got stronger, especially as my own work began wrestling more deeply with intergenerational trauma and the supernatural. Six years later, I woke up with a feeling telling me to reach out once again. This time, the “zafa” finally arrived: The rights were available. Before saying yes, Junot wanted to hear my take. Most people see Oscar as tragic. To me, Oscar is a superhero. His fight for the right to give and receive unconditional love is a true hero’s journey. In the novel, we mostly hear about him through other narrators. On stage, he needed to be at the center—alive, active, leading with love. That vision sealed it. Junot was in. And that’s when I realized: holy fukú, now I actually had to adapt Oscar’s story! Act II – The Adaptation The weight of expectation was real. Adapting Oscar Wao meant stepping into a storm of opinions: Don’t touch a masterpiece. Keep every line! Make it cinematic. Make it literary. Stay faithful. Don’t mess it up! How do you honor something sacred without being trapped by reverence? The key, I realized, was to focus less on recreating the book and more on finding myself inside it. Or, as Junot told me with a grin, “Don’t write the novel, bro. Write your play.” I re-read Oscar Wao in both English and Spanish. Because the production would premiere at New York’s Repertorio Español, it needed to be written in Spanish. But to preserve the rhythm and bite of Díaz’s voice, I drafted first in English, then translated—an act that was less about literal language conversion and more about returning the story to the island’s roots. Writing the first pass in English felt instinctive; that’s where the humor, the rhythm, and the Spanglish pulse naturally lived. Certain culturally charged words—fukú, zafa, diache—remained untouched. I kept the code-switching intact. The result wasn’t a purely Spanish or English text, but a deliberately hybrid one. That in-between language, the mix of English and Spanish, where Dominican Americans truly exist, became the heartbeat of the play. For the stage, I kept the story stripped to essentials. No clutter. No spectacle. The language and emotion had to lead. A few lines from the novel remained: The beauty! The beauty! And passages where Díaz describes fukú: The curse first came from Africa, carried in the screams of those who were enslaved. It was the death bane of the Taínos, uttered just as one world perished and another began. They felt like spells—alive, untouchable. Repertorio Español performs in repertory, switching between shows daily, so I had to keep the staging practical. The fantasy couldn’t overwhelm the humanity. Instead of special effects, I used stylized superhero transitions. These small gestures grounded scenes, subtle but charged: an actor’s hand brushing through the air as if parting dimensions, a sudden shift in light as characters crossed memory and time. The supernatural fukú became less a ghostly curse and more a living metaphor for trauma passed through generations, something we could name, face, and perhaps break. This became Oscar’s journey through the play. As I wrote, I saw more and more of myself in Oscar—his yearning, his outsider-ness, his relentless belief in love. Like Oscar, I’ve often felt suspended between identities. Too Dominican for Americans. Too American for Dominicans. I also wanted the play to confront colorism and the colonial obsession with mejorar la raza—the idea that lighter skin equals beauty and progress. Oscar’s mother, Beli, faces rejection as a dark-skinned child then unleashes her fueled anger towards her dark-skinned daughter, Lola, mirroring the cycles of racism and shame that persist in so many Caribbean families—my own included. Equally vital was preserving how Díaz’s characters deconstruct stereotypes. Oscar’s awkwardness, his virginity, his tenderness all defy the myth of the Dominican Casanova. Yunior, Oscar’s roommate, embodies that machismo yet we see moments of authentic vulnerability. Through Oscar, we see another kind of masculinity: vulnerable, loyal, full of heart. The women, Lola, Beli, La Inca, represent the fierce, complex Dominican women I grew up surrounded by: survivors, poets, truth-tellers. And no adaptation of Oscar Wao would be complete without the shadow of Rafael Trujillo. His dictatorship haunted generations of Dominicans. For Oscar’s family—and mine—that history is not abstract. My uncle was murdered by the Trujillo regime for suspected rebellion, forcing my father’s family to immigrate to New York City. Act III – The Legacy In 2019, Repertorio Español obtained the stage rights to the novel and set the premiere date for October of the same year. I would be writing and directing. I had just six months to draft, translate, and edit the script before rehearsals began. When La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Oscar Wao premiered at Repertorio Español, it felt like both a homecoming and a revolution. The production, now celebrating five years Off-Broadway, continues to sell out, drawing audiences of all ages and backgrounds, many experiencing live theater for the first time. Some return multiple times with family and friends, hungry to see themselves reflected on stage. That’s the real magic. For them, as for me, fukú is not just a curse from the past. It’s the power we give to our fears, our inherited pain. But, like Oscar, we can reclaim that power in the name of love and transform it. That, to me, is the most wondrous part of all. Marco Antonio Rodriguez ’s stage adaptation of Junot Díaz’s La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Oscar Wao recently celebrated five years Off-Broadway at New York’s Repertorio Español (Spanish Repertory Theatre); performed in Spanish with English supertitles. The English version will have its world premiere at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in February 2026 . Primary editor: Talib Jabbar | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard upcoming experience Source: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/long-wondrous-adaptation-oscar-wao/