THE BIG MIX : Stage : A Theater of Cultural Diversity? : Southland’s ‘minority’ theaters reflect--somewhat--a changing population

The idea of “minority” theater in Los Angeles sounds like an oxymoron.

How can such a beast as “minority” theater exist in a city where Asians, African-Americans and Latinos constitute its new majority? How can these individually diverse communities persist outside the mainstream, when each lays claim to its own universal theater traditions?

Los Angeles, after all, is the Pacific Rim city, civic boosters and cultural attaches proclaim; the combinatorial where the peoples of Asia and the far-flung Pacific converge with descendants of European, African and Latin American immigrants.

A quick glance of hometown theater marquees seems to reflect this diversity.

Cuban-born Eduardo Machado’s “A Burning Beach,” a drama which revolves around Cuba’s hero-poet Jose Marti, has just opened at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. And Machado’s translation of “The Day You’ll Love Me,” by Venezuela’s Jose Ignacio Cabrujas, recently closed at the Taper, Too, the Mark Taper Forum’s second stage.

Machado’s sojourn at LATC is no fluke. “A Burning Beach” represents the fifth LATC co-directing stint for Jose Luis Valenzuela of the theater’s 7-year-old Latino Writer’s Lab, which develops and showcases the works of Latino playwrights.

Last spring, playwright George Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” earned praise from critics and laughs from theatergoers for its irreverent look at black cultural icons. Taper staffers are gearing up for the March debut of “Sansei,” the culmination of a three-year project built around the lives of the Japanese-American rock-fusion group, Hiroshima.

The city’s multicultural vitality also manifests itself in a wild theater patchwork ranging from the bawdy burlesque of East L.A.’s Teatro Blanquita, overseas Kabuki at the Japan America Theater, to black experimental drama at The Corner Theater.

Looking southward, San Diego’s Old Globe Theater has begun to thrust Latinos to center stage with its Teatro Meta project, which is charged with developing playwrights and actors. And the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa is looking toward a fourth season of its Hispanic Playwrights Project in August. So far, the project has developed a pair of full-blown productions--”Birds” by Lisa Loomer and “Charley Bacon and His Friends” by Arthur Giron. Several other plays have jumped from the project to other mainstream stages.

“My whole push is to put (Latinos) on the American stage, and we are seeing that happen,” said project director Jose Cruz Gonzalez. “You can feel it on a national level. Other theaters are constantly calling us about the playwrights we work with.”

All of this diversity would seem to reinforce the image of Southern California as a center of a thriving, pluralistic theater, right? Wrong.

For many former “minorities,” Los Angeles’ promise of multicultural communion, of a new cultural synthesis, remains unfulfilled.

While minorities have made great strides on the neighborhood and mainstream stages, ethnic theater leaders claim these feats are in no way proportionate to their numbers or impact upon other media such as TV and film. Instead, they say, local theater’s dependence on upper class Euro-American patrons sustains an older, more provincial image of Los Angeles where class and cultural barriers as high as freeways still relegate the city’s new, multiethnic majority to cultural marginality.

“The people who control the purse strings are the mainstream people,” said Jorge Huerta, a University of California, San Diego drama professor who recently directed “Burning Patience,” a fictional account of Chilean poet laureate Pablo Neruda’s last years, at the San Diego Repertory. “There are very few theaters controlled by this new majority.”

“The principal function of mainstream theater,” adds C. Bernard Jackson, director/founder of the Inner City Cultural Center, a nonprofit theater that straddles the Pico-Union district’s Latino, Asian and black communities, “is to serve a white, middle-class audience, and anything else they do is a secondary to that function.”

Stephen Albert, managing director of the Mark Taper Forum, the mother ship of Los Angeles theater, rejects all such contentions. The forum has not only been responsive to the city’s ethnic diversity, Albert argued, but opened the door for minorities by commissioning works such as Luis Valdez’ “Zoot Suit” in 1978, its longest-running hit.

“We are all aware of the (ethnic) richness, and we are all attempting to mine it. But you can’t go out every time and duplicate an experience like ‘Zoot Suit.’ It’s like hitting a home run.” The forum’s obligation is to create world-class theater, instead of attempting to appeal to any one audience segment, he said.

“Our experience has been, when we have done things well, and had plays that speak to a particular audience, whether it’s the disabled, gays, ethnic or religious groups, the audience will find the work.”

And LATC has recently formed Asian and black theater labs to take on the task of commissioning and developing new plays and playwrights with a view toward someday combining the efforts of each of its labs in single, multiethnic production.

But if some ethnic theater leaders view the city’s mainstream stage as unequal and unreciprocating, they also face their own special quandaries. No where has this been more evident than at East West Players, a 24-year-old, Hollywood-based theater that has found itself redefining its mission as an Asian-American theater. The catalyst for the debate was last month’s resignation of Mako, East West’s founding artistic producing director.

Andrew Wong, chairman of the theater’s board of directors, said that one factor prompting the board to request Mako’s resignation was a belief that he had focused too much energy in staging plays portraying the Japanese-American experience.

Mako acknowledged that although he had tried to encourage productions about other Pacific Rim peoples, the works of Japanese-American playwrights have predominated.

“We have produced more Japanese-American pieces,” he said. “I don’t know if that has to do with me being Japanese-American. We have made every attempt to present a wide diversity of Asian minorities. But we haven’t been all that successful.”

But Mako wondered whether East West’s problems go beyond his administration to the theater’s tendency to favor a second- and third-generation immigrant audience at a time when the surge of new Asian immigrants has been too large to ignore.

Wong doesn’t worry about the new immigrants. He believes that the melting pot dynamic of assimilation will work its magic by prompting the kind of generational conflict earlier Asian immigrants endured with their parents.

“They will not become part of our audience until their children go to our schools and start thinking like American kids. Then they will understand,” he said. “We have to go after our younger audience because they are the ones going through this psychological and spiritual crisis. In any case, we can’t change what parents think.”

Mako said that he has shared Wong’s views about the great gulf that separates older and newer immigrants: “The old (Asian) immigrants came with nothing. They struggled for years to establish themselves against discrimination and racism. The new immigrants come with a handful of cash in their pockets. A lot of them see themselves as Chinese, not as Asian-American. It’s a totally different experience.”

The plethora of Asian languages also makes these audiences difficult to entice.

But it still may be wrong to write off an audience with strong ties to classical theater traditions and a willingness to view an uptown theater as a status- and class-affirming experience, he said. “When the Peking Opera or the Shanghai Acrobats come to this city, the Chinese immigrants will pay $200 a pop (for tickets) without a second thought.

“Maybe it’s high time we retraced our steps.”

East West isn’t the only community ethnic theater to have its goals and purpose questioned.

Although the Inner City Cultural Center helped launch the careers of artists like Mako, some community members wonder if the center hasn’t lost sight of its ecumenical vision and begun to exclusively favor productions staged by African-American community groups.

Rosa Maria Marquez, the center’s publicity director, said that production activity at the three-theater facility must be placed in proper perspective.

She acknowledged that the center has recently staged a number of successful black-themed plays such as “Checkmates,” but it has also produced Latino-oriented works such as “Calavereando,” a piece about Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebration. She added that the center also integrates its productions through nontraditional casting.

Even so, the center’s Jackson said, reaching out to a community in the midst of demographic turmoil and deteriorating social conditions hasn’t been easy.

“I have been witnessing a tremendous flux in a poor working-class community,” he said. “You see waves of people from El Salvador, Guatemala, but their influence is short-lived. You don’t have a viable community culture as yet.”

Nevertheless, Jackson maintained, the center is attracting multiethnic audiences by organizing open competitions in playwrighting, and eventually music, all without the benefit of large Latino and African-American middle-class patronage.

Two groups east of the cement-lined Los Angeles River--the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, a nonprofit community theater dedicated to performing classic and contemporary Spanish and Latin American plays, and Plaza de la Raza, a performing arts center with fine dance and theater facilities--have also come in for criticism.

The knock against both organizations has been their conservative aesthetic outlook, said Gronk, experimental artist and now sought-after set designer of the just-ended Milcha Sanchez Scott play, “Stone Wedding,” at LATC.

“My connections with Plaza are almost nil,” said Gronk, also a performance artist. “When you think of artists of my generation, when you see how many were nurtured at Plaza, you can’t point to very many. It doesn’t function as a showcase. Again, it’s the conservative part of the community that has trouble with new ideas.”

And when it come to the foundation, Gronk added, he doubts whether it would have commissioned him to design the set for a play like “Stone Wedding.”

Carmen Zapata, foundation director, said the criticism is misdirected. The stage and screen actress contends that the foundation has produced some experimental works, including last year’s staging of “Pedro Paramo,” a mythic epic based on Juan Rulfo’s classic novel. She said limited financial and technical resources restrict her options.

Zapata also finds that excessively negative reviews can be especially damaging to the young writers she works with. “It doesn’t help the writer. Because of that, I don’t do that many new works,” she said. “When I find something promising, I will take a chance.

“We are still not where we should be with our writers,” she said. “We need to help them along. We need to find funding for them. Just performing their plays is not enough. They need a dramaturge to work with them. If we had that kind of help we could go a long way.”

A community theater performing the works of Garcia Lorca or Lope De Vega in Spanish and English is as valid as one performing Shakespeare or Moliere, Zapata added.

But the foundation, she dryly noted, has a hard time competing with the likes of LATC’s Latino Lab: “Because of the reputation they have and their prestige and funding, any young writer will go to them and not to me.”

Jay Stephens Rodriguez, project director of Plaza’s Nuevo L.A. Chicano Theatre Works, agrees with Zapata: neither Plaza nor the foundation can be blamed for the failures of mainstream theater. That’s why Rodriguez plans to create a competition to draw out new playwrights. Manuscripts for one-act plays will be accepted beginning March 1, he said. Three winning plays will be selected and produced at Plaza’s Margo Albert Theatre.

The competition will only solicit the works of Chicano, or Mexican-American, writers from California. Rodriguez said the rationale for excluding other Latinos is simple. So far, he said, most playwriting competitions of this sort, have been dominated by non-Mexican Latinos who have benefited from a stronger East Coast theater tradition.

Waiting for U.S.-born Latino playwrights will take time, warned UC’s Huerta. Latinos therefore will go begging for scripts unless they can break down the mainstream theater biases against performing Latin American plays.

“Only our novels have been translated, but not our dramatic literature,” he said bitterly. “Mainstream theaters have continually put on bad or mediocre translations of European plays, but they will not accept mediocre translations of Latin American plays.”

And Huerta asserts that nontraditional casting is no panacea because ethnic communities would rather see plays about themselves than have a minority actor play King Lear.

But does multicultural nirvana await beyond workshops, translations and competitions?

LATC’s Valenzuela believes that the cultural dynamic of Los Angeles requires new aesthetic sensibilities: its playwrights and directors must first invent a new language.

“A lot of it has to do with finding another voice that is not just the linear, European way of thinking about theater,” Valenzuela said.

“We are the most exciting city in the country, so our theater has to reflect that. We are going to have to dare to say, this is who we are. There’s a lot of good energy and talent here. I am sure that they are going to make it happen.”