Final Play in Latino Discovery Series Marks Bittersweet Ending to Program

“Death and the Blacksmith,” the final production of the Latino Play Discovery Series, signals the death of the 7-year-old Teatro Meta program as an independent organization and the culmination of its absorption into mainstream programming at the Old Globe Theatre.

The play by Uruguayan writers Mercedes Rein and Jorge Curi, being performed through Sunday at the Progressive Stage Company, is a story of hope, said Teatro Meta program director Raul Moncada, who translated the work. That seems an appropriate way to end the Latino Play Discovery Series.

“Death and the Blacksmith” tells the age-old fable of a blacksmith who chases death up a tree. Moncada came upon the play in Santiago, Chile, in May, 1988. Dictator Augusto Pinochet was in power, and people were predicting that there would be no plebiscite, Moncada recalled in his office at the Old Globe.

“But at the end, when the character of the blacksmith stood up in the tree and said (that) as long as there is life there is hope in this world, the audience all rose as one and they cheered and they stood on their seats,” Moncada said. “It became a political statement dealing with the Chilean belief that the plebiscite was just around the corner and they shouldn’t give up the fight.”

Time will tell if the upcoming changes in Teatro Meta augur good things for Latino artists who made such great strides under a three-year $280,000 Ford Foundation grant, which runs out Tuesday.

Teatro Meta and Moncada will no longer be “an ancillary arm” of the Globe when the series ends, said Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien. Moncada’s new duties will involve a closer working relationship with the artistic executive staff. His job will be to help with casting and scouting for Latino plays to include in the Globe’s regular season.

But the price for this step is that the separate tents under which Teatro Meta has operated will fold. That means the Latino Play Discovery Series--readings and workshops involving plays written by Latino writers and performed by Latino actors this year at the Progressive Stage Company--will be absorbed by the Globe’s Play Discovery Series, a series of readings at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

The positive reason given for the change is a desire to mainstream the program.

The negative reason is economic.

Under the terms of the grant, the Globe committed to a program of nurturing and mainstreaming Latino writers and actors. Since 1986, it has presented more than a dozen workshop productions, as well as found “The Boiler Room,” which became the first Teatro Meta offering to become part of the Globe’s regular season last year, and “The Granny,” which will be presented Jan. 6-Feb. 18. Last season, 33% of all actors hired by the Globe were “people of color,” said Thomas Hall, managing director of the theater.

O’Brien looks forward to the mainstreaming of Teatro Meta as a positive step that will signal that “this program has come of age. It’s no longer on trial, it’s a fact of our lives.”

Moncada, who discovered and translated “The Granny,” “Made in Buenos Aires” and “Death and the Blacksmith,” is encouraged by the direction the theater is taking.

“The Latino Play Discovery Series is a wonderful experiment, but there seems to be an easier way of doing the job at hand,” Moncada said. “The objective is still to get these shows on the Globe main stage, but we will be approaching it as world theater, which I think is very healthy.

“It’s a big transition, and I feel very happy about it because it’s where I was always hoping we would head. I feel like the children in Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Childhood’s End,’ when they become part of the collective mind. I’m about to osmose,” he said, laughing.

Globe executive director Craig Noel, the earliest advocate of the Teatro Meta program, is more hesitant about expressing his feelings on the changes. Noel, who is directing “Death and the Blacksmith,” describes Teatro Meta as “a personal project.”

“I don’t want to predict tremendous success or be the voice of doom for the changes that are to be made,” he said following a rehearsal. “It depends on how it works and how committed we are to it. A lot of it is economics. We are just continuously so economically strapped. We don’t get enough money from the box office to make up our budgets.

“The money has to come from somewhere, and, honey, if you have salaries and staff and all those things, you have to find the money for it and it’s not easy. It all comes down to dinero in the long run.”

Noel said that part of his reason for directing “Death and the Blacksmith” is that “I have to put my time where my mouth has been; that’s why I’m doing this.”

The irony about “Death and the Blacksmith” marking the end of the Latino series is that 1989 has been such a successful year for the program in terms of finding plays that went on to be produced by other theater groups. The financial rub, of course, is that the workshops, done under Equity contracts, cost about $10,000 apiece, according to Moncada, and have brought in the most meager of audiences to the Progressive Stage Company. (The workshop program may yet continue in some form, Hall said; it is just not yet clear how many workshops the Globe can afford to present next year.)

On the positive side, “The Granny” has been picked up both as an Old Globe offering and by the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts in Los Angeles. The Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Manhattan Theatre Club have also recently requested copies of the script. “Made in Buenos Aires,” has been picked up by Gala Inc. Theatre in Washington for an April production and is still under consideration for inclusion in a later Globe season, Hall said.

“Latins Anonymous,” Teatro Meta’s first showcase of a production that originated elsewhere, moved successfully to the Los Angeles Theatre Center, which recently extended its run through Nov. 19.

Noel said he didn’t choose to direct “Death and the Blacksmith” because of any future it might have. He certainly didn’t choose it because it gave him the opportunity to do anything fancy.

In contrast to the last play he directed at the Globe, “The School for Scandal,” Noel is working with 14 lights instead of 200.

“These shows are produced so inexpensively. I’ve been curtailed in a lot of my ambitions. It’s impossible to create some of the phantasmagoria I had envisioned,” he said with a sigh. “But as long as I’m directing I’m happy. If it’s a big production or small scale or for Broadway, I don’t care. I can commit myself and have just as much fun on a small scale as on a large scale. In interpreting the play, that’s the enjoyment I get. And this is such a simple little story it works well with a simple interpretation.”

Moncada said, teasingly, that Noel wanted to do the story because he wanted to do something fanciful with masks and stilts and people climbing trees.

Noel said that what he wanted really was a play that had “some folklore to it rather than some modern play that had something to do with the social problems of urban society.”

“This blacksmith who gets death up a tree has something to do with the Hispanic fascination with death and the fascination with death that we celebrate more prominently as Halloween in this society,” Noel said. “There are skeletons and laughing at death and showing respect for death and death in the bullfights. It is about how death is always a challenge and how man’s fascination with death causes him to live on the edge. This is like a children’s story for adults. There’s a lot of humor and pathos and charm.”

Does it also strike a personal resonance? Noel, at 74, has considered that question as well.

“Am I doing this play at my age of life for some reason that I’m not completely conscious of? I don’t know if I can say yes, definitely. I have been fascinated with the bullring and with bullfighting, and I suppose that how man gracefully accepts death is something that I empathize with.”

But the larger reason is that Noel wants to show his support of the program. And it seems fitting that he should be ushering out what he helped usher in.

“I think progress has been made in educating the public and getting things started,” Noel said. “Change is slow. But change is happening. I’m happy that San Diego Rep has a Hispanic program. I welcome anyone to join in trying to improve the lot of Hispanic artists in theater as we are attempting to do.

“I think there’s such a rich culture out there and such a wealth of Hispanic literature, and isn’t it a shame that so few Anglos know anything about it?” he said.