In 1997, Luis Alfaro was commissioned by a prominent West Coast theater, the Mark Taper Forum, to write a play. Since Alfaro is a Latino writer and performer and the co-director of the Taper’s own Latino Theater Institute, the topic he was given was “the immigrant experience.”
As Alfaro remembers it, the people at the Taper were expecting a play about the alienation of Mexican-Americans — probably something that took place in a dusty border town and involved Latinos expounding about their feelings of separation from the majority culture. After all, such celebrated Latino writer/performers as Luis Valdez and Guillermo Gomez-Pena have based prolific careers on discussing the mythical and literal intersection of geographic and racial borders. It’s not a particularly unusual liberal-minded leap to assume that all Mexican-American writers are concerned with such issues.
However, the play that avowed maverick Alfaro actually wrote was about an HIV-positive Englishman and his complicated relationship with his “mummy.” The main setting is Las Vegas, a borderless and culturally reductive city where everyone feels like an immigrant.
And did the Taper like it?
“They haven’t produced the play yet,” says Alfaro with a wicked smile. “What does that tell you?”
Now Alfaro’s work, “Straight as a Line,” will receive its world premiere in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre Studio, opening Tuesday night under the direction of Henry Godinez and with Guy Adkins and Linda Kimbrough in the lead roles. Until now the play, which won the 1998 National Hispanic Playwrights Contest, has been performed only in workshops.
“It’s always been people sitting around a table in cities like Minneapolis,” says Alfaro. “I have never before seen this work fully realized.”
The delay raises a complicated issue for Latino playwrights — not to mention other minority writers. Although many non-profit theaters — especially on the West Coast — have made efforts to incorporate Latino authors and audiences into their creative plans, writers like Alfaro say they often find they are expected to develop work similar to that most commonly associated with Latino artists. It’s far harder to break out of that mold and write about other cultures or about universal themes.
“People talk a lot about the importance of the participation of minority writers,” says Anna Shapiro, resident director at the Steppenwolf Theatre and an admirer of Alfaro’s work. “But then they often force minority writers into a very narrow range of creative expression. In many ways, that’s as racially insensitive as denying the participation in the first place.”
Difficult to categorize
There certainly has been nothing narrow about Alfaro’s career. Even though he is only 36, he already has written several plays and toured his performance pieces throughout the United States (much of his solo work focuses around meditations on the theme of “body”). His poetry and short stories appear in several anthologies, including “O Solo Homo” and “Twelve Shades Read.” His short film “Chicanisimo” was nominated for an Emmy. And, in 1997, Alfaro received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship — the prestigious, so-called “genius grant” that also was recently awarded to Chicago-based director Mary Zimmerman.
But it’s his thematic and formative diversity that makes Alfaro so hard to categorize — and thus difficult to fit into an artistic slot reserved for a Latino perspective on the world.
“Alfaro is a Latino artist in a truly comprehensive way,” says Shapiro. “He’s a community activist who’s committed to telling the world about his experiences. And everything he writes flows from his neighborhood.”
The city of Los Angeles (he was born right downtown) is at the core of much of Alfaro’s work. “Unlike Chicago where there are real neighborhoods,” he says, “if you want to have any sense of community in Los Angeles you have to really commit to making it. There’s always a sense there of being completely enveloped by something outside of your control.”
One of the strongest communities that Alfaro has forged is his Latino Theater Initiative at the Taper. With its 15 to 20 commissions a year to emerging Latino authors, the initiative is undoubtedly the most extensive development mechanism in the country for Latino playwrights. Alfaro has commissioned works from such important new writers as Caribad Svitch and Octavio Solis (author of “The Boiler Room,” produced last season by Steppenwolf Theatre Company). In last year’s National Hispanic Playwriting Competition, all three of the winning pieces began life as commissions from the Mark Taper Forum.
Yet it has proved tough for these same playwrights to find slots on the main stages of prominent American theaters (including even the Taper, about which Alfaro betrays considerable ambivalence). After spending a lot of time shopping Latino plays around the country, and watching the rejection slips pile up, Alfaro says he has changed his strategy.
“We have to better challenge the kinds of plays that the mainstream theater produces,” he says. “It’s vital that Latino writers create plays that 750 people per night want to see, and that means going beyond our own community. Latinos have a right to participate in a theater that reflects their own experience. We have to challenge what constitutes a Latino play — and write more, in English, about broad and universal themes.”
For Alfaro, the other side of that coin is that even as theaters confine Latino authors to small spaces, they also market to Spanish-speaking communities only when a play by a Latino writer is being produced.
“Theaters tend to ignore all the statistics,” Alfaro says. “At the Taper, we’ve done research that (shows) Latino audiences also want to see the great American plays — the same crowd that goes to my work would also like to see `Master Class.’ The music industry has figured out how to make a profit from middle-class Latino audiences who seek out programming with the sense of a major event. We need to learn from that.”
Alfaro’s point is particularly well taken in Chicago, where “event-oriented” Latino theater designed to attract large audiences virtually does not exist. Although both the Goodman and Steppenwolf theaters showcase Latino works from time to time (usually in their studio spaces), and Teatro Vista, the city’s only professional Latino theater, continues to produce provocative new plays, the community is still suffering the void left by a 1997 fire that destroyed the Bucktown theater space belonging to Latino Chicago, a company that no longer answers its phones and seems to have dropped quietly away. But even in its prime, Latino Chicago worked in a small room and mainly produced esoteric works more likely to appeal to arts lovers than to the community at large.
Few opportunities in Chicago
“I’m really not sure what’s going on in Chicago,” says Godinez, this city’s most prominent Latino director and one of the forces that got Alfaro produced at the Goodman. “The opportunities are too few and far between here. Latino writers have got to be allowed to transcend specific cultural issues and work with themes that are more universal. And too many of our actors are forced to go to Los Angeles or New York because they perceive no place for themselves in Chicago.”
“That lack of real opportunity,” says Alfaro, “extends deep into the psyche of the Latino actor. “They get really good at playing maids and gangbangers. Many of them would much rather be doing Shakespeare.”
Therein lies a tricky paradox. If Latino writers like Alfaro create plays about specifically British characters, for example, fewer Latino roles are being forged for the very performers whose careers they wish to develop and promote.
Alfaro says he wrestles with these conflicting responsibilities all the time. Godinez says he also has a troubled conscience. But both prefer to take a long-term view of the issue.
“We need a real commitment to Latinos as theater artists first and foremost,” says Godinez. “Theaters have to feel more at ease producing our work. That will eventually open up more opportunities for Latino actors — in every kind of play.”
