Whatever happened to Maria?
How did the remainder of her life play out after Tony, the young white man she wanted, was shot dead by her fellow Puerto Rican-American Chino at the end of "West Side Story?" Maria, readers will recall, got the gun after Chino dropped it and threatened to use it to kill both others and herself, but couldn't pull the trigger. So there she was, still alive when the final curtain came down.
Sequels are all the rage these days. For instance, Irish author John Banville recently wrote a novel called "Mrs. Osmond" that imagines what happened to Isabel Archer. Isabel, the protagonist of Henry James' best-known novel, "The Portrait of a Lady," was last seen about to leave England after the death of her cousin Ralph. She had rushed to his bedside despite the opposition of her husband and the unanswered question was, would she return to Rome and her failed marriage and if so, what would she do when she got there?
Banville purports to have the answers.
Another example of this genre is Lucas Hnath's play "A Doll's House, Part 2." This jumps forward 15 years from the time Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's most notorious heroine, Nora Helmer, walked out on her husband and her three children, scandalizing theatergoers everywhere the play was performed. Well, in Hnath's play, she returns, but not to stay and during the course of a new standoff with her husband, the maid and one of her daughters, we discover what sort of a life she has led and what she needs to successfully continue it.
Why Lin-Manuel Miranda when it comes to Maria, who would presumably be about 80 years old today? When "West Side Story" debuted on Broadway in 1957, she was presumably about 18 years old, or slightly less in that story.
First, Miranda has two very successful Broadway musicals under his belt: "In the Heights" and his current smash-hit "Hamilton." But equally important, he is mostly of Puerto Rican extraction and identifies strongly with that U.S. possession.
The night before "West Side Story" concludes, Maria and Tony had slept together and one question has to be: was Maria pregnant? What might her life have been as a young, unwed mother, carrying a child her community might not have appreciated? Did she survive a then-illegal and risky abortion? Did she have the child as a legacy for Tony and in the process help bridge the cultural divide? Or perhaps she kept the child, but fled NY and found a new life and a sympathetic husband elsewhere.
Then again, perhaps she wasn't pregnant. How did she live in the wake of Tony's death and the death of her brother, Bernardo, in the rumble under the elevated West Side Highway that led to Tony being shot? Did she successfully "move on," or was her subsequent life somehow profoundly affected by such early, violent deaths? Did she become a reformer, perhaps even going into politics?
Whatever happened to Maria? What can you tell us, Lin-Manuel?
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