3 Playwrights Branch Out From Latino Roots to Universal Themes

With Latino arts being ballyhooed everywhere this summer--in magazines and movie houses, art galleries and fashion shows--the three emerging playwrights to be featured this weekend at South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project are wary of being pigeonholed by an ethnic label.

“I don’t think there’s anything particularly interesting about being Hispanic, anymore than being Chinese or black,” says Cuban-born Rafael Lima, 34, whose “Parting Gestures” will receive a public reading Saturday on the SCR Mainstage in Costa Mesa. “What interests me is being human.”

Lynnette Serrano-Bonaparte, 24, whose “Broken Bough” will be read tonight, goes further. “I don’t consider myself a Hispanic playwright,” she professes, though her Bronx heritage is largely Puerto Rican and her play takes Santeria, a religion with a widespread Caribbean following, for its central symbol.

Charles Gomez, 34, maintains that the Nicaraguan setting of his play, “Bang Bang Blues,” to be read tomorrow night as the project’s main attraction, is not even essential to its meaning. “The play is about (TV) network politics,” says the Miami-born writer, whose parents emigrated from Cuba during the ‘40s. “It could be set anywhere. The country is less important than what’s happening to the characters.”

The three writers look to such non-Latino playwrights as David Rabe, Lillian Hellman and Lanford Wilson as models. Yet all three contend that their Latino roots are inescapable and that everything they write is colored by their ethnic background.

Far from wanting to escape their heritage, they simply want to address broader issues. At least, that is how the director of the 3-year-old playwrights project, Jose Cruz Gonzales, 31, explains the seeming contradictions in their stance. “They’re trying to tap universal themes coming from their Latino experience,” he says.

For instance, the main premise in “Broken Bough”--that blind faith leads to destruction--resonates with the imagery of certain Santeria rituals but easily could have been illustrated by a religion more familiar to Anglo-Americans. “Just substitute fundamental Christianity,” Serrano-Bonaparte asserts.

Conversely, in Lima’s “Parting Gestures,” an autobiographical play about a son and his mother, there is virtually nothing to identify the characters as ethnically Cuban-American. Nonetheless, the nature of their relationship “stems from a Latin way of looking at the world,” Lima says.

The question of what defines a Latino play strikes an ironic note for Gomez, a longtime TV journalist who spent 4 1/2 years as a CBS correspondent in Central America. “There seems to be an interest in having playwrights produce work about the ghetto,” he says. “I’ve been told that I’d have been better off (getting a production) if my play had been set in a ghetto.”

Gomez, who grew up in middle-class surroundings, says that sort of reasoning results from the notoriety of such West Coast barrio plays as Luis Valdez’s “Zoot Suit” a decade ago and the more recent East Coast success of “Cuba and His Teddy Bear” by Reinald Povod.

“In New York,” Gomez recounts, “everybody came down to the Public Theater to see if the kid (in ‘Cuba . . . ‘) was going to stick a needle in his arm--and by the end of the first act he does. I’d like to think the climate is ripe to look beyond that for other things.”

In fact, “Bang Bang Blues” was in development for three years at the Public Theater but had languished there, the playwright says, until SCR decided to give it a Mainstage reading under Jules Aaron’s direction. Now, Gomez’s play will be the first cooperative venture between SCR and the Public, where it is scheduled in Joseph Papp’s “Festival Latino” later this month with the same cast and director.

Lima is reaping a similar benefit. Best known for his highly praised

“El Salvador,” now at the Gnu Theatre in North Hollywood, Lima says “Parting Gestures” was “like a child strangling on its own umbilical cord” when he sent it to SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch.

“All I expected was some advice on where it needed work,” Lima says. “He calls me back and tells me about this Hispanic workshop.”

In the meantime, “Parting Gestures” has been scheduled for a Second Stage production this fall at Circle Repertory in New York City.

Lima, who is also an actor, moved to Venice three months ago to turn “El Salvador” into a feature film for Columbia Pictures. With the writers’ strike over, Columbia has optioned the play, which is about free-lance journalists covering the war in El Salvador, as a TV series instead.

“They want to do something like ‘MASH,’ ” Lima says. “I’ll write the pilot, but I will not write episodic television. I don’t care how much money they offer.”

Such reluctance apparently has nothing to do with his wariness of ethnic stereotyping, since he has taken no offense at playing Latino druggies on “Miami Vice” for the past three years. But it has everything to do with distinguishing between art and commerce.

Scripting episodic television, Lima says, “would harm whatever writing talent I’ve developed.” In other words, the only pigeonhole worse than pretending to be a druggie on television is being a hack in real life.

The Hispanic Playwrights Project is at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Public readings will take place on the Mainstage. Tickets to each reading are $5; for seniors and students, $2. Curtain times: “Broken Bough” by Lynnette Serrano-Bonaparte, tonight at 7:30; “Parting Gestures” by Rafael Lima, Saturday at 2:30 p.m.; “Bang Bang Blues” by Charles Gomez, Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at the box office or by calling (714) 957-4033. Visa, MasterCard or American Express credit cards accepted.