Actors Weary of Typecasting Create ‘Latins Anonymous’

First there was Alcoholics Anonymous, then Gamblers Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous. Now, at last, comes “Latins Anonymous,” a show in which four Latin actors stand and come to terms with the fact that they are--what else?--Latin.

“The first time I realized I was Mexican,” says Rick Najera in the opening scene, “was when I asked my mother if I could play with the Mexican kid down the block, and she told me if I wanted to play with a Mexican I could stay home and play with myself.”

Like most of the stories in “Latins Anonymous,” premiering at the Los Angeles Theatre Center tonight it’s a true tale that goes for the laugh.

The idea for the show came from Los Angeles actors Najera, Luisa Leschin, Diane Rodriguez and Armando Molina, who kept running into each other at Hollywood auditions as their agents sent them out, over and over again, for the same handful of stereotypical Latino roles in movies and television.

The women compared resumes and noticed how nearly all the characters they played were maids or pregnant women named Maria. The men joked about how they were always cast as gang members or drug dealers named Juan, Paco or Hector.

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

They found they liked making each other laugh about their favorite Latino cliches: the Latin lover, the macho male and his obsession with blond females, the melodramatic Maria in “West Side Story,” and the chubby Chicana who says: “If God wanted us to be skinny, he would have made us gringos.”

Finally, they decided that they would use this material to write the type of show no one was offering--comedy.

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

The show marks the first time that the Latino Theatre Lab at LATC has sponsored a group that it has neither commissioned nor developed itself.

Part of what sold Jose Luis Valenzuela, the director of the lab, on the group was, simply, that they made him laugh.

“We haven’t been able to find a lot of comedy,” he said. “Everything else has been real political and heavy. This is actually fun.”

But the jokes have a serious side.

In the course of a workshop production of the show presented by the Old Globe Theatre’s Teatro Meta in San Diego, the barbs fell on everything from the guilt of Latinos who can’t speak Spanish (like Najera and Rodriguez), to the embarrassment of Latinos who change their names, as did Leschin, who was born Luisa Josefina Gomez.

The jokes struck a nerve with an influential network of Latino directors working under the flagship of major theaters, which have been carefully nursing the show towards its LATC debut.

Jose Cruz Gonzalez, creator of the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theatre, signed on last year as co-director with Miguel Delgado, choreographer of three of the last four Teatro Sin Fronteras projects at the San Diego Repertory Theatre.

Raul Moncada, program director of the Teatro Meta program, produced a workshop production earlier this month after falling “on the floor laughing” when the group tried out its number on changing names at Theater/Theatre in Los Angeles last February. Moncada had changed his name in 1970 when the Actors’ Equity union told him they had enough Latino actors out of work and didn’t want any others. So he signed up as Jeffrey Grimes.

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

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

None of them expected the attention they have received since they began their first workshop on Valentine’s Day in 1988 at Theater/Theatre.

They now have dreams of being recognized as writers as well as actors and of playing leads rather than supporting roles. But for them, the work is still more than a vehicle; it is, as Leschin called it just before a rehearsal in San Diego, “therapy.”

“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,” said Molina.

“They are writing from their reality,” said Leschin of L.A. writers. “Hollywood writers are seeing their image of Mexicans as their maids or their gardeners.

“Rather than complain and moan about it, we decided to do something about it.”