Type-Cast Players Cast Off Cliches, Lampoon Abundant Latino Stereotypes

Actresses Luisa Leschin and Diane Rodriguez began to realize they had fallen into the rut of playing Latino stereotypes when they looked at their resumes and noticed that nearly all the characters they’d played on television were maids or pregnant women named Maria.

“I began to become really expert at making tortillas,” said Rodriguez dryly.

So they decided to team up with two Latino actors, Rick Najera and Armando Molina, who had been cast primarily as gang members or drug dealers named Juan, Paco or Hector, and decided to write the type of show no one was offering them--comedy.

After all, as Najera intoned with mock seriousness, “There’s nothing funny about drug dealing.”

The show, their first together, is called “Latins Anonymous,” and it will be presented in a workshop production by the Old Globe Theatre’s Teatro Meta at the Progressive Stage Company on Sept. 1-3 and 8-10. Its next engagement, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center on Sept. 19-Oct. 29, will be its world premiere.

The name “Latins Anonymous” is a takeoff on Alcoholics Anonymous. The actors, who play characters named Rick, Armando, Diane and, for reasons to be revealed in the show, Nicolette rather than Luisa, each stand up and testify about the first time they realized they were Latino. (For Najera, who grew up in San Diego, that time came when he asked his mother if he could play with the Mexican kid down the block, and she told him if he wanted to play with a Mexican he could stay home and play with himself.)

In the course of the evening, their barbs fall on everything from the guilt of Latinos who can’t speak Spanish, like Najera and Rodriguez (the latter spent years faking what she heard on Spanish television stations), to the embarrassment of Latinos who change their names, as did Leschin, who changed her name from Luisa Josefina Gomez.

They wouldn’t mind their show being seen as a “a cousin” to “The Colored Museum,” the show that successfully lampooned black stereotypes.

The group’s success at hitting its mark can be measured in the favorable impression it has made on Southern California’s growing network of Latino directors working under the flagship of major theaters.

Jose Cruz Gonzalez, creator of the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theatre, Jose Luis Valenzuela, head of the Latino Theatre Lab at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, and Raul Moncada, program director of the Old Globe Theatre’s Teatro Meta program, all saw workshop versions of the show in Los Angeles last year. Soon after they checked it out, Gonzalez came on board as co-director with Miguel Delgado, who did the choreography for three of the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Teatro Sin Fronteras projects: “Burning Patience,” “Thin Air” and “Orinoco!”

Moncada signed them to fill the last remaining slot in Teatro Meta’s Latino Play Discovery Series. And Valenzuela urged Bill Bushnell, artistic producing director of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, to see the show. Bushnell’s approval led to the show being placed on the LATC schedule.

The show hit home for many of the Latino directors. Moncada reports having been “on the floor laughing” when the group did its number on changing names.

Moncada had changed his name back in 1970 when the Actors Equity union told him they had enough Latino actors out of work and didn’t want any others to join. So he joined under the name of Jeffrey Grimes.

“That lasted only three years, but they were three very schizophrenic years,” he recalled.

Jose Delgado, who is an administrator for the Latino Theatre Lab at LATC, said he relates to Rodriguez’s vignette about the burned-out Chicano activist who becomes a “huppie” (Hispanic yuppie) in the 1980s.

As for the group, their favorite part of the show simply seems to be the fact that it exists at all.

Their conversation just before rehearsal at the Progressive has the easy flow of people who have been writing together for a year and a half. They finish each other’s sentences. They take turns.

“This is therapy,” Leschin said of the project.

“We admitted truths on stage that we would never have admitted in real life,” said Rodriguez.

“We have participated in our own misrepresentation long enough,” added Molina.

“A lot of the roles misrepresenting us were written by non-Hispanic writers. L.A. seems to be behind the rest of the country,” said Najera.

“They are writing from their reality,” said Leschin of L.A. writers. “Hollywood writers are seeing their image of Mexicans as their maid or their gardeners. Rather than complain and moan about it, we decided to do something about it.”