photo: Los Angeles Theatre Center/LATC
by: Luis Alfaro
(BMLTV) LOS ANGELES, November 29, 2017 - Sometimes you go to an event with the sincerest of goals; to get there; have a good time; possibly learn something; if its exceptional, walk out with the wonder of what theatre can do.
But never to fall in love.
Have I become so jaded that I imagine that love just isn’t on the agenda these days? And by love, I don’t mean a pheromone induced affair, but that amazing thing that is so hard to coordinate; the alchemic moment when all the elements come together and virtuosity soars in deep display.
These past three weeks there was an international theater festival downtown called ‘Encuentro de las Americas’ produced by and at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in association with the Latinx Theatre Commons, a consortium of artists nationally who have come together to transform the narrative of the American theatre.
No small feat.
Featuring companies from Cuba (Argos Teatro), two from Colombia (Compania Nacional de las Artes & Vueltas Bravas), Mexico (Organizacion Secreta Teatro), Peru (Ebano Teatro) and Canada (Nightswimming, featuring the great Chilean/Canadian actor/writer, Carmen Aguirre).
The festival also featured the work of companies in the U.S. as well, including Cara Mia Theatre Company in Dallas, Pregones Theatre in New York and Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio.
As if that wasn’t representative enough, the festival also welcomed legendary performance troupe Culture Clash, San Francisco monologist and comedian Marga Gomez, Los Angeles companies 24th Street Theatre and Ensemble Studio Theatre and the repertory work of the Latino Theatre Company itself in Evelina Fernandez’s play, Dementia.
And just to make sure ambition was on the agenda, a late-night micro-based theatre festival of twelve L.A. companies was performed, including the work of exciting emerging artists like Gabriela Ortega, Israel López Reyes and crowd favorites like Monica Palacios and Chicanas, Cholas y Chisme.
Don’t get me started on the films and live music that were curated too. Bravo to Jose Luis Valenzuela and the brave committee of curators who took this mammoth project on for the second time now.
It is an enormous gift to the city and not just Latina/o’s, but everyone.
I am exhausted just listing it all.
But I feel I must, because I am not so sure that outside of the artist circles that many of us move in, the majority of our citizens knew about this historic moment, which ironically was mirrored in an offering in the Midwest, the Chicago International Theatre Festival running at about the same time these past few weeks.
Our very visibility is in question here.
The shameful numbers that reflect our role in mainstream media is dispiriting, and one must take notice when a ‘Coco’ comes along to create some momentum towards real representation in the arts.
I always remember a lecture by the famed muralist from Venice, Judy Baca, one of the essential artists of Los Angeles, who stated “If you deny people images of themselves, you are committing cultural genocide”
.
I am hardly in a position to complain. I have two productions running and make my living as an artist. Still, this season I am the exception, not the norm.
For the last few months I have been running around the country trying to get these plays up, and find the audiences for them. I would have loved to have been here for this festival, but I build the audience in the same way I build a play; word to word, person to person.
If anyone ever tells you the only thing you have to do as a playwright is just write; laugh and know that you will do a lot of fundraising, audience events, interviews, donor events and cultivate relationships with folks nothing like you but who are inclined to support you.
photo: Los Angeles Theatre Center/LATC
I was just telling my students the other day about the time I whored myself out in the Bay Area by agreeing to do a poetry slam with teen competitors in exchange for trying to get this crowd to come to my play. When I won (thank you Jesus) I went up to get my prize; a free pitcher of beer in this Berkeley pub, and they introduced me as ‘the old guy... Ouch
Back to the festival.
I got back just in time in the last week to get a sense of the enormity of the Encuentro event.
So many of my colleagues in the field had come the week prior for a professional weekend, seeing shows, having conversations, pre-and-post play discussions and building community.
Still, the night I attended there was a wonderful energy in the grand lobby at LATC, all four theatres running and a sense of event going on in the crowd, everyone comparing shows and talking about what they were about to see.
I settled on seeing the Cuban company, Argos Teatro, as it was the performance that varied the most in response. Folks either loved it or hated it. Some loved the language and emotion of the story. Others complained that it was too literary and static.
The play, ‘10 Million’ depicts the life of a young boy who grows up in the tumultuous aftermath of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, torn between his communist mother and his alienated middle-class father.
The title refers to Castro’s 1970 campaign to harvest ten million tons of sugar as a way of reviving the economy, which failed.
The only prop is a blue duffel bag which the boy lugs around. When you enter the theater, there is an older actor, sitting on stage, at times standing, guarding said bag.
A few things happened in performance that were both jarring and exciting.
The play is performed in Spanish and there is something very beautiful about hearing Cuban Spanish and its halting rhythm and punctuation, it’s like a song. I started by paying attention to the translation that was following just above, but after a while, like what happens to me at a Shakespeare play, one relaxes into the words and the style and a different kind of listening starts to settle in.
Yes, the piece is loaded with language, a very literary text, and I, for one, loved it. It was a kind of story theatre piece in which testimonies masquerading as monologues took precedent and we heard about something rather than seeing it. I was fine with it because the words were so rich and full.
The young actor playing the boy, Daniel Romero, was electric in the part, he carried the weight of the show and of the narrative. You could see him age on stage in a profound way, through trauma.
But I wasn’t emotional about the show. It was a bit cold, it’s set plain and simple and the actors were more archetypes than fully fleshed characters that represented a period of Cuban history.
Then something odd and beautiful shifted.
There were only four performers; the son, the mother, the father and an older man who seemed to represent the regime.
As the piece progressed and we realized the emotional distance between the mother and father and their shared custody of the boy intertwined with the politics of the period, a danger took over.'
And emotion.
During a particular scene in which the father was explaining his relationship to the boy and a violent separation, the actor seemed to barely be able to get through the scene. The very struggle to articulate the language while he was wracked with so much grief and bare emotion, seemed overwhelming to me.
Then it happened to the mother, and finally to the boy. They were so overcome with erupting unplanned feelings, it seemed a strange way to direct this piece.
I have to admit I was sort of stumped watching it, and was so ignorantly arrogant that I leaned over to Jesus A. Reyes, who was sitting next to me and I said “Well, at least I don’t have to cry, they are doing it all for me…”
So, this is the way it went; deeply emotional, heartfelt (too heartfelt?) all the way to the end.
And right there, after a narrative that takes you through twenty years of a young man’s life, played with such innocence by this young actor, reflecting a political movement and the life of a country, something wonderfully and simply theatrical happens.
All of a sudden, the older actor takes over and one realizes that the story we have been hearing this evening is his. He continues the narrative filling us in the details of his parents and the politics of his beloved Cuba.
It grabbed me by the throat.
photo: Los Angeles Theatre Center/LATC
Such a simple conceit. Of course, he was guarding the duffel bag at the start of the play, it was his! I usually see these things a mile away, but I was so lost in the language!
This piece did exactly what it set out to do; emotionally destroy me through words, not actions. And the last little gestural action at the end, because there were so few, seemed enormous and powerful and loaded with meaning.
Still, overwhelmed emotionally, I did not cry. The actors, however, did.
All through their curtain call. They couldn’t seem to stop. I was less concerned by it at this point and became curious as to why they were in such a state.
Well, we were sitting way up high in the theatre, so we climbed up instead of down, and decided to take the elevator from the top.
We ran into some folks and they told us that this was their last performance.
Aha! Maybe that’s it.
But then, we were further informed that they came to the festival late because our newly repressive government, you know the one we live in right now that we feel so free in? It held their Visas, and it took a miracle to get them into the country. The beginning of such ignorant nationalism and an isolationist mentality. Well, now we know what it looks like.
But I was glad I heard this information.
I started to understand something about this piece and its meaning, and the desperation to get here to perform, to share this story, to make up for the time lost; all themes of the actual play itself.
I was flabbergasted.
We got in the elevator maybe it was fate, but it stopped on one of the mid floors, where I am assuming the dressing rooms are. The four Cuban actors, all still weeping, stepped in.
It was beautiful to see them. I welcomed them into the elevator as if I owned it.
I could feel how over whelmed they were. I thanked them in Spanish for their performances. I asked how they were feeling, which was silly, since they could barely talk, tears streaming down their cheeks.
The young actor, Daniel, looked at me, eyes red and cheeks ruddy and he said, “Devastado”.
He hugged the actor who played his father. It was so moving. In turn, the father hugged the actress playing the mother and they openly wept.
Here was the play being performed in the elevator after the show!
I told them we were devastated with them and as the elevator door opened, they were mobbed by the audience waiting for them.
This could only happen at an international theatre festival!
We stuck around for a bit and said hello to folks and then Jesus walked me to my car. We made our way out to a crowded Spring Street with its hipsters and homeless and everything in between.
As we walked down the street, I noticed the Cuban actors passed us, holding open boxes with their costumes and a blue duffel bag…
That’s when I fell in love with the theatre again.
Someone said they were being escorted to the airport.
I got in my car and wept.
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