LATINO DIRECTOR TACKLES ISSUES IN ‘LA VICTIMA’

One recent morning, Jose Luis Valenzuela was stopped by police as he was walking home from the car repair shop in Alhambra. For Valenzuela, an assistant director at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (where his staging of “La Victima” opens Thursday), such a singling-out of Latinos represents a broad social antipathy.

And he fears it’s on the rise.

“With the new Simpson/Mazzoli bill, we have to carry an ID every time we ask for a job, just because we’re Mexicans,” said the actor-director, whose LATC Latino Actors’ Lab is presenting the work.

“So if you look Mexican, it’s not going to matter. You’ll have to show papers to prove you’re an American citizen. That’s going to include people like my wife, who comes from five generations (of Californians), who’ve never been to Mexico, who don’t even speak Spanish.”

Not coincidentally, issues of immigration and assimilation are at the heart of “La Victima,” a group-composed piece (by the Northern California-based El Teatro de la Esperanza), which was launched in 1976 and has played locally and internationally. Originally, it was a bilingual or “Spanglish” production (80% Spanish, 20% English); Valenzuela was one of the players. This time around, he’s adapted it into a full English script.

“We always knew we wanted to do it on a bigger stage, for a larger audience,” noted the director, 34, a Drama-Logue Award winner for his 1985 staging of “Hijos” (at Teatro Estudio Jorge Negrete).

“We have a lot of Chicanos or Mexican-Americans or Latinos--or whatever you want to call them--and they don’t (all) speak Spanish: They speak English.

And of course there’s the Anglo audience, which needs to know about the Mexican community, because it’s so big--and we all live together in the same place, the same city. People say, ‘Why do they come here?’ Well, there are a lot of economic reasons, and the play explores that.”

The action begins in 1910 (and later moves to different time periods), when 375,000 emigres arrived, fleeing the Mexican Revolution. “What I do is bring the (12) actors with their suitcases into the theater. In the suitcases they have their costumes, their props--whatever they’re going to use in the play. Then they build their little houses, their tables, their chairs.”

Although technically far more complicated than the original version (which utilized only two benches), many aspects remain the same. “The music--there’s a lot of it--is all (sung) in Spanish,” said Valenzuela. “It also uses a lot of Brechtian elements. It’s like a docudrama, with a quote from the statistics every 10 years. In the train station, I have little titles for each scene--and I have them in different media, like telegrams, newspapers, radio.”

Although he admits to a bit of a political agenda, the director (born in San Francisco but reared in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico) stressed that “I’m trying to work the play so that audiences will have a sense of having known the human side of the Mexican. Many people haven’t seen it before. We’ve seen stereotypes. Not only stereotypes, but I never feel we’ve gone inside the Mexican’s soul. They can cry and they can laugh and they can succeed. They have problems that are crucial to them. And all the things (American society does) either alienates or destroys them.”

Although secure in his present position at the theater center, Valenzuela (who’s also served as assistant director to Stein Winge in the LATC productions of “Barabbas” and “The Glass Menagerie,” plus a staging of “Pantagleize” in Norway last fall) knows firsthand those feelings of alienation--and of not being able to find work.

“When I left El Teatro two years ago and came here, the first thing I thought was, ‘Where am I going to act?’ I’ve been doing theater all my life (including 10 years with the San Jose-based El Teatro de la Gente), but when I got here, there was nothing . I finally found work doing accounts payable (for a furniture outfit) in Orange County. So I had to drive every day for an hour and a half just to be in accounts payable. I was going crazy.”

Actually, the experience paid off. Last year he was given the go-ahead to organize LATC’s Latino Actors’ Lab by agreeing to serve as their accountant (a job which eventually fell away as his creative duties increased).

“There were all these (Latino) actors I knew who were so talented, worked so hard--and there was no place for them to do anything,” he noted. “I said, ‘Come over here and let’s work. Let’s see what we can do. Did you ever play a leading role?’ Most of them hadn’t. So I put together small plays where they could play big roles, lines they could really work with. It’s been fantastic seeing them go into the process, doing those leading roles, taking pride--and being so strong.”

Bolstered by the approval for this staging (scheduled for just 12 performances), he’s already at work on a new Lab piece: “Our Lady of L.A.,” a real-life story about the censorship of two murals painted for the Olympics of 1932 (by David Alfaro Siqueiros) and 1984 (by Barbara Carrazco).

On Feb. 22, the director will take part in a LATC-hosted symposium, “Do We Have to Show You Our Stinking Badges?” where he’ll be joined by representatives from South Coast Repertory and the Old Globe in a discussion of the future of Latino theater.

“How can we create an audience who’ll come out and support us? Are there enough Latinos to do it? Do they want to go to theater? Do they want to pay? Are we going to be allowed to create new stuff and not do conventional, normal theater?” Valenzuela smiled. “I think we are. I’m very, very hopeful.”