STYLES OF HISPANIC PLAYWRIGHTS FIND NO ETHNIC COMMON GROUND

Nobody attending readings that will be given during South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project this week in Costa Mesa should try to draw quick conclusions from the program’s ethnic label.

That, at least, was the message that emerged from interviews with the three playwrights--Jose Rivera, 32; Estella Portillo Trambley, 51, and Ana Maria Simo, 37--whose works will be given public readings Friday and Saturday. Their plays offer a lesson in the limits of labels.

“I don’t know what a Hispanic playwright is,” said Rivera, whose somber expression becomes one of open delight when he shares an insight. “There are so many different types of writers. You have Dominicans and Colombians and Cubans and Puerto Ricans. It is such a broad tapestry of styles. I think that the one thing we will discover here is that we are going in different directions.”

The three’s works do have some similar geographical settings and references, and some common emotional colors show through the surface of their scripts--often the darkly glinting intensities of social despair. But when the SCR project’s professional actors read the works, audiences will be hard pressed to find commonalities in the writers’ styles--the lush theatricality of Rivera’s “Promise,” the discursive, myth-rich conversations of Trambley’s “Blacklight” and the anecdotal spareness of Simo’s “Passion.”

Shortly after the three sat Monday night in the front row of SCR’s empty Mainstage theater, weary after long trips to Southern California, they emphasized the different paths that led them to the project: Rivera and Simo had arrived from New York, where Rivera grew up in a Puerto Rican community on Long Island; the Cuban-born Simo moved to Manhattan after leaving Paris in 1973; Trambley’s journey brought her Monday from El Paso, where she was raised by a Mexican mother and an Italian father.

So there was not much about which they agreed, and their polite contentiousness produced moments of discovery. For example, Rivera eagerly acknowledged his debt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose work he read when growing up in a small town on Long Island.

Like Marquez, Rivera often expresses psychological and social realities through supernatural events. His play is a love tragedy, a densely woven tale of a wedding vow that two fathers-to-be make on behalf of their unborn children--and then break. A diabolical rooster commits murder. An old watch goes backward and preserves its owner’s youth. Corn bleeds. The dead come to life.

But Simo responded to her colleague’s discussion of Marquez by firmly saying that writers must go beyond the mixture of fantasy and reality--a style called realismo magico-- for which Marquez is famous. She said Americans too often assume that Marquez and a few other Latin writers who became popular in the 1960s and ‘70s represent a whole literary culture.

“I don’t want to be associated with this boom in Latin American writing,” she said. “I abhor the boom. I abominate magical realism. . . . My work has been very European. I read many writers, Saul Bellow and other American writers. In Latin America today no writer of conviction would be writing in that ( realismo magico ) style.”

Rivera listened intently. He leaned forward, his hands nervously pinching the fabric of his blue jeans above his knee. Simo--a dark-haired woman as compact and careful as her writing--was questioning the contemporary value of a literary approach in which her younger colleague had invested much energy.

Simo’s style, by contrast, is as spare as Rivera’s is effusive. Its small, tight scenes shape the story of a mother, her husband and daughter and the lover the two women share. Brief stage directions say the play takes place in Puerto Rico, just after a failed Nationalist uprising in 1950, the play’s most overt political reference.

But Simo denied that her wiry play’s romantic and erotic energy expressed political relationships. “Do not believe any of the program notes that come with my play,” she said.

Trambley, a somewhat gruff, self-deprecating, loquacious woman whose hair was an array of blond fronds--and who spoke candidly about her effort to purge her work of a philosophical style she absorbed by reading too much Aldous Huxley--interjected: “I want to say something in defense of our magical realism because, let’s be honest, we have been on the crest of that boom and it did give us all a push forward.

“Magical realism,” she continued, “has come up from something very instinctual. You are talking about a culture where people have come up from their agricultural roots. We are in tune with human beings as organic creatures. And this is very important.”

Trambley’s play is about the ties a Mexican immigrant family in El Paso has to its early roots. Her main character, Nacho, ridden with guilt after his brother’s death, appeals to a god named Itzamna for redemption. The main part of the play is contemporary but it opens, according to the stage direction, with “the sound of drum and reed” in “a primitive Mayan village . . . where people breathe the thickness of creation.”

The writers said exposure to other artists’ work and the chance to hear professional readings drew them to Costa Mesa. Project director Jose Gonzalez said in a separate interview that public readings at last year’s conference--the first such event at SCR--had led to SCR productions for two writers.

He said that representatives from several independent film companies and theaters in Los Angeles, Denver and elsewhere would be attending this week’s readings in search of material.

“There is a double-edged sword in the label ‘Hispanic Playwright,’ because it might imply lesser quality to some people, but this conference is a wonderful opportunity for all of us,” Rivera said.

“I sat next to Ana on the plane coming out here. I had never met her before, and we started talking right away.”

Trambley and Rivera have always written in English, but Simo wrote in Spanish until 1973, mostly short stories. Having a hard time writing the stories in English, she searched for another form in which she felt at home in the language. When an actress friend in New York suggested in 1977 that she try plays, it clicked.

Rivera and Trambley had to work harder than Simo to find the Hispanic part of their identity as Hispanic-American writers. It is telling perhaps that Trambley read Garcia Marquez’s “Hundred Years of Solitude” in the original Spanish, as part of a culture to which she belonged, and Rivera read it in translation, exploring one from which he was more detached.

“My influences at a very young age were almost totally American,” Rivera said. “There were very few Puerto Ricans in my high school. I grew up speaking English. After reading ‘Hundred Years of Solitude,’ I began to discover my heritage almost by accident. . . . I have been trying to find a better sense of where I come from.”

Trambley said: “I didn’t realize until the Chicano movement of the 1960s that I must go back and find myself in the Hispanic culture. . . . I didn’t grow up in the barrio. My father took us out. . . . I didn’t even realize it was there when I was growing up.”

When the interview ended, Simo approached Rivera and said she did not mean to offend him by her denunciation of magical realism.

“She said there was no offense meant,” Rivera said, describing the encounter. “I said there was no offense taken. But we are going in different directions, and she is older and I can tell she has a lot of integrity. I will have to think about what she was saying.”

Schedule: Jose Rivera’s “The Promise” will be read Friday, 7:30 p.m. Ana Maria Simo’s “Passion” will be read Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Estella Portillo Trambley’s “Blacklight” will be read Saturday, 7:30 p.m. All readings will be in South Coast Repertory’s Mainstage Theater. Tickets: $5 per reading; students and senior citizens: $2.