The work of Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is tremendously difficult to adapt to the stage, given Marquez’s signature style: a blend of fantastic and poetic elements, dreamlike or nightmarish scenes, a mixture of the surreal with the mundane. But GALA Hispanic Theatre is clarifying the complicated nature of Marquez’s “magical realism” in its production of “La Candida Erendira” (“The Innocent Erendira and her Heartless Grandmother”) in an adaptation by director Jorge Ali Triana and Carlos Jose Reyes.

“La Candida” begins in a strange, barren place. The set creates an inhospitable wasteland where a room with a rocking chair and an old-fashioned victrola becomes a prison in which fourteen-year-old Erendira must do her cruel grandmother’s bidding.