by playwright/director Luis Alfaro
Re-Printed from beautiful ode to the the theatrical significance of Evelina Fernandez’s A Mexican Trilogy
I don’t know a lot of people who have the balls to mount a three-play six-hour trilogy about Mexican-Americans in America.
A trio of plays that dare to examine us as central to the fabric of American life and culture.
First, in the 1940’s as immigrants who contribute to the country through the building of industry and the war effort. Then, to see us in the 1960’s at the onset of becoming middle class before social upheaval and the Vietnam War give us an identity politics. And finally, in a contemporary light as a multi-generational community struggles to understand its multi-lingual identities and losses after 9/11.
If the subject matter wasn’t surprising and exciting enough, when you see the investment in production value, talent and the celebration of the single voice of a female woman of color playwright, I think it’s revolutionary.
Revolutionary?
It’s a powerful evocation that has received so little fanfare, the kind of thing that only crazy Polish wunderkinds do in warehouses throughout Eastern Europe. Not these indigenous looking local veterans who have been at the game of running their own repertory company on the West Coast for thirty years.
A company that runs an enviable four-space cultural mecca in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. A company that insists that we don’t live in the margins, but on their stage, we are always in the center. What a powerful place to imagine us being.
I think that’s because they have been there and are not ’emerging’.
They are seasoned vets who started their careers in the 1970’s Teatro movement as actors in El Teatro de la Esperanza. It’s important to point out that the wisdom, the investment, the failures and successes of the last thirty years have led to this moment, this wonderfully arrogant multi-level production moment.
Not to say that it was all my cup of tea (to be honest, when I sat at the top of the day I was thinking that this experience would take the same amount of time that it takes to fly to New York…)
There is so much to celebrate in this experience, especially in recognizing the multi-generational company of actors, although I have to say the grounding of seasoned vets like Robert Beltran, Sal Lopez, Geoff Rivas, Lucy Rodriguez and Evelina Fernandez herself who nearly walks off with the evening in a delicate little scene playing a mentally ill woman named Mari, who can’t seem to change with the turbulent Sixties as expected.
The company of next gen actors are led by Esperanza America, who grounds the play in all the hurts and disappointments of a series of familial characters who can’t get past their inability to move forward without struggle and failure. Xavi Moreno creates levity with out of body personas who are struggling to find themselves in a new and older America.
The second play has a deep and unsettled quality in which one of the daughters engages in phone conversations with world leaders to try and find her grounding.
There is a literal musicality going on in period songs, that although they pay off well in the first play, they land much more emotionally in the second, and by the time we reach the third play and Sal Lopez sits down with a lone guitar to wail Don’t Let the Sun Catch you Crying to a beautifully realized character motivation by Beltran, the rituals of the evening have announced themselves.
Congratulations to Jose Luis Valenzuela who orchestrates the six hours powerfully, and although I almost didn’t forgive him that the bar closed before the last intermission when I needed that coffee/coke/crack and Guisado’s closed minutes before the dinner break (I don’t know how that is JLV’s fault…)
You know what was most extraordinary? The presence of forty-five High School kids from Garden Grove, who given that the experience was six hours, were the most amazing audience members. In some ways, this event was for them, we were merely spectators watching the next generation own these plays.
In the end, it’s the art (and an audience of 45 Mexican kids) that lives on in memory.
And one I won’t soon forget.
This is the last week for A Mexican Trilogy. To purchase your tickets: http://thelatc.org/
Comentários