Stormfire Productions
Andrew Sianez-De La O, creator and writer of 'The Ortiz Twins are Coming Home'.
As long as stories have existed, they have been told out loud. Andrew Siañez-De La O grew up hearing his first stories at his grandmother’s knee in a house caught between a train track and a highway overpass in El Paso, Texas. His grandmother used hand-crafted puppets to teach him to look beyond the noise and pollution. Life in a border town was defined by literal and figurative barriers, and magic was the passport.
“I think so much of sci-fi and fantasy was imagining what life can be like on the other side,” Siañez-De La O said. This kind of imagination helped him in his trailblazing career as a playwright.
And this kind of imagination is the basis of the invitation to his newest project, an audio drama adaptation of his play, “The Ortiz Twins are Coming Home,” produced in collaboration with local audio production company, Stormfire Productions. The first episode of the audio drama will premiere this Saturday.
The play was first written and produced in 2019 for Pipeline Theatre Company in New York City. Siañez-De La O’s elevator pitch for the story is “James and the Giant Peach, but everyone is Mexican.” It’s about two twins who live on the U.S.-Mexico border and discover a secret about their family that propels them on an adventure through the underworld.
“It's a story about reconnecting — not just with your heritage — but also your family, your parents, where their heritage comes from,” Siañez-De La O said. “All dressed up in this fantastical play about puppets and masks, and luchadores and magic.”
For Siañez-De La O, this story is a fantastical take on his own experience as a Mexican-American living on the border and uncovering pieces of his background that older family members had previously kept close to their chests. This rediscovery, for him, was a sort of magic.
But to bring that magic to life in a new medium, it takes a team. Stormfire Productions was started in 2019 by producer Lisette Alvarez, who rode the wave of renewed interest in audio storytelling with their first audio drama, “Kalila Stormfire’s Economical Magick Services.” Stormfire has since expanded into podcasts, like the experimental “Tales from the Hearth,” as well as consulting on audio projects ranging from live performance art to audio books. The team connected with Siañez-De La O after putting out a call for audio drama scripts. When the team reviewed the submissions, the “Ortiz Twins” stood out.
“There's something about certain stories that just open up a world to you,” Alvarez said. “And ‘The Ortiz Twins are Coming Home’ did that for us. It was the only one that truly sparked this magic.”
One of the inherent challenges of the “Ortiz Twins” project was translating a play, which had originally included visuals like puppetry, to audio. Alvarez and the Stormfire team referenced other child-centered storytelling, like the muppets, to imitate how sound is used to support the narrative. Some of that magic comes down to the sound designer, Deb Edattel, who was tasked with inventing new sounds for the fantasy world.
Edattel, who fell in love with sound after endless hours listening to the radio on long commutes in her hometown of Houston, Texas, finished a master’s degree in Audio Technology from American University in December. She is drawn to audio as an ancient form of storytelling that can also be innovative and immersive, allowing listeners to use their imagination to bring the stories to life.
“Audio storytelling allows us to create the visuals in our mind — like, we can't help it. And I love that,” Edattel said. “It's not like I'm being shown a story. I'm being given a story that I get to participate in.”
Sometimes innovation means creating sounds that don’t exist — what would the underworld sound like? Or perhaps it means consulting her trial audience, pulling up waveforms on her computer and playing segments of the story for her three young kids.
Compared to stage plays, audio drama is simultaneously more intimate, with the words whispered directly into the listener’s ear. However, it can also be bigger and more fantastical. On a stage, the underworld is limited to what special effects — and the budget — allow. But audio is limited only by the imagination of the producers, engineers, and listeners.
Siañez-De La O is grateful to the Stormfire team, who feel more like old friends than anything else after about five years of talking about this project. He said they encouraged him to tell the story he wanted to tell and helped him resist the urge to pull punches.
“If something on the page reminds me too much of myself, or feels too connected to my culture, I will shy away from that. I will still have the instinct to sanitize or whitewash my story for the sake of selling it,” Siañez-De La O said. “And I think the Stormfire team has been very quick to say, no, no, we're not interested in that version. We're interested in the version that excites you.”
Since the story is entrenched in a Mexican setting and mythology, it was important to Alvarez, who is half-Cuban and identifies as Latine, that the voice actors be of Mexican or Mexican-American descent. Alvarez wanted the precise inflections of the actors’ voices to be authentic, and wanted the actors to be able to draw from their own emotions and experiences.
For Siañez-De La O, his goal is to present a story that his younger sisters can hear themselves in.
“If I can make another kid like my sisters hear themselves for the first time, that's more than enough for this whole project,” Siañez-De La O said.
Stormfire Productions is hosting a release party for the first episode of the “Ortiz Twins” on Saturday, Feb. 24 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Alexandria History Museum at the Lyceum. The event will include a silent auction, food from local CDMX chefs, and a performance by local multimedia artist Arma Dura. The drama will play with both English and Spanish captions. Proceeds from the silent auction will help fund the 12-episode run, and 5% of the proceeds will also be donated to Tenants and Workers United, a nonprofit supporting low-income communities of color in Northern Virginia. For more information or to buy tickets, visit stormfireproductions.com/ortiztwins.
