Lysistrata Unbound Opens June 9th and Runs Through August 4th Odyssey Theatre, West Los Angeles www.OdysseyTheatre.com
By Dale Reynolds
Playwright Eduardo Machado
Playwright Eduardo Machado, 65 on June 11th, a mature gay man, has a remarkable body of work: 55 plays in his long career, and a proven name in theatre. Lysistrata Unbound about the goddess inside of us all and how we must slight the patriarchy, both personally and politically, opening soon in Los Angeles.
Cuban-born, this intelligent and prolific artist immigrated with his family to Los Angeles as a nine-year-old during the tumultuous 1960s, when America opened its doors to fleeing Cubanos, settling in Los Angeles.
Lysistrata Unbound is a world premiere of his adaptation of 5th Century BCE Greek playwright Aristophanes’ satire, a production of the Odyssey Theatre, directed by John Farmanesh-Bocca. In it, an aristocratic Athenian matron (Brenda Strong), crushed by fateful events, transforms into the most celebrated anti-war activist of the ancient world.
Eduardo Machado and Lorinne Vozoff in “Speak to Me”
Written seven years ago for a reading at the Getty Museum that starred Oscar-winner Olympia Dukakis (Moonstruck and Cloudburst), it was she who asked him to adapt it for her as she wanted to explore the (mostly misunderstood) sexual mores of that period in Greek history, in addition to director Farmanesh-Bocca who wanted to investigate mothers who have lost their sons to war. For Machado, in addition to those ideals, it was to be an examination of the subtleties underpinning tensions between men and women, and how it has influenced USA’s wars.
One of his early drama mentors was the Cuban-American playwright, Maria Irene Fornés, but most of his influences happened during his years living and writing in NYC from the mid-1980s to mid-‘90s, including The Day You Loved Me, Stevie Wants To Play the Blues, Floating Island Plays,” etc. During that time, he taught playwrighting courses at Columbia U and, later, New York University and then quit theatre for a while to write for television, including HBO’s Hung and Magic City.
Not surprisingly, with an output as vast and eclectic as his, he declines to be labeled as a “gay” playwright. “I’d prefer to be written about as a ‘Latino playwright,’ as I want to write about human behavior from humanistic point of view.”
Coupled for the past eighteen-years to Detroit-born Michael Domitrorich, the duo now live in Hollywood. He credits some of his passion for writing on the late German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 film, In A Year of Thirteen Moons, about a transgender man-to-woman, what Machado refers to as an “uncategorized human being.”
His adaptation of Lysistrata got some of the same laughs as the original play does, but he wanted it to be more human, a new take on the heroine’s need to gather the women of Athens to go on a sex-strike in order to shut down war. “As we seem to always want these days to be at war with someone, I thought it would be fitting to cover it, especially with the warlike would-be dictator currently in the White House.” He firmly believes that we have to challenge the brutal racist thrust of this government, and the rudderless direction his foreign adventures have taken us to.
If there’s anything that this playwright elder is aware of is that his being Cuban-born and gay has meant he has always been the Outsider. “It was a challenge to always be a Latino to Whites, but a Cubano to L.A.’s Chicanos. I was married to a woman for awhile and no one asked about my sexual behavior; but when I came out, it’s often the number one question asked by journalists, which I find insulting as it distorts the purpose of the interview. This notion that I must somehow be sleeping with anyone famous [he’s not] is too much about my private life.”
During his formative years as a writer, there was a shortage of plays directly about gayness. One of the earliest for him was Miguel Pinero’s 1974 “Short Eyes,” a realistic view of men in prison. “At the time, white playwrights weren’t writing about gays in prison. And we forced the world to open up after AIDS decimated our communities. We demanded that everyone ‘look at me; I’m here,’ but instead we used our imaginations in our writing, not just assuming every play’s a documentary. You do put yourself into your work, but it’s not only about we writers.”
One of his seminal plays about AIDS/SIDA was 1988’s “Don Juan in NYC,” which no one at the time would review. The New York Times’ drama critic, Mel Gussow, “informed me that he was ‘saving me from myself.’ While today I think the play went too far for the time, I didn’t want to pussyfoot around the subject. Not sure if it will work for today, but…”
As is true of most standing art, Machado’s not writing for the here-and-now, but for a hundred years in the future. He’s been a theatre darling in L.A., due mainly to the support of the late impresario/director Gordon Davidson, who believed in him. After success at the Humana Festival in Kentucky, which essentially changed his life by making him more aware of the lasting power a play can command, he has pursued his work as a private issue and not just for praise from others. “If they get it, bravo!, but I’m writing now mainly for me.”
Out of that 55-play oeuvre, 48 have actually been produced, and he has also co-wrote (with Domitrorich) a painful memoir, “Taste Like Cuba: An Exiles’ Hunger For Home” (Penguin Press/1988), about his family’s move to America, and what is factual and what has been fictionalized in his upbringing, amid what wasn’t said out loud. So now, L.A. will once again get to judge his worth to the world of drama.
Lysistrata Unbound opens June 9th at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles, through August 4th. Tickets: 310.477.2055 ext. 2 or at www.OdysseyTheatre.com.
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