Getting on Boards : Center Stage Awaits Latino Student Playwright and Actor

Rich: The other day, I called my brother, Al. I worry about him. . . . We’re so different. He still lives in Boyle Heights. . . . I just can’t understand why he doesn’t want to get the hell out of there. He calls it home. I call it the slums.

Al: What I can’t understand about my brother Rich is why he reacts that way when I tell him that I like it here. We were both born and raised here. But I stayed. Everything I have is here. . . . My friends and I: We hang out at the park. We go to church. . . . We cruise.

--From “Two Brothers” by Felix Cisneros III

Felix Cisneros didn’t grow up in Boyle Heights. He doesn’t have an older brother who spurned his Latino heritage for Anglo success. He doesn’t even cruise.

But the 17-year-old actor and playwright has been a quiet observer all his life, filing away incidents of clashing cultures and familial drama that strike a responsive chord.

During the day, that lies dormant, as Felix concentrates on being a high-achieving student. He studies electronics at Don Bosco Technical Institute, a Rosemead high school. He co-edits the school paper. He hones his oratory skills on the debate team.

But a different Felix emerges after school, when he heads for the stage. There, his dramatic side awakens, and he pens vignettes and plays characters culled more from “Zoot Suit” than “American Graffiti.” He has acted in 10 productions and has seen his own works performed.

Those who work with the young actor-playwright say the subjects of his works and the realism he brings to them are unusual for someone his age.

Cisneros, for his part, warns away would-be theater-goers who simply want to be entertained.

“My plays are for people who are open-minded and willing to think and be challenged,” Cisneros said. “A lot of the characters are racists and bigots, some of their language may offend people.”

On Dec. 15-16, Cisneros will star in Jaime Gomez’s “Smile Now, Cry Later” by the Teatro Cometa, a local theater group, at Fullerton College. Gomez said Cisneros, who plays a 16-year-old barrio kid seduced into joining a gang, radiates warmth and a commanding presence on stage.

“He really turns on the energy,” Gomez said. “He’s interested in crawling inside the heads of the (characters) he’s portraying.”

In his own works, Cisneros wants to crawl inside society’s head to whisper about the dangers of intolerance. This month several of his one-act plays were produced by the Orange County Coalition of the Theater Arts, a new alternative theater. The performance, a collection of 10 skits about prejudice, was called “Words Like These.”

“Hispanics should be creating opportunities for themselves,” said Cisneros, who is considering a career in the theater, although he has yet to be paid for his labors. “Nobody will do it for us, and they shouldn’t have to. It’s up to us.”

Growing up in La Mirada, a middle-class community in Southeast Los Angeles County, the fourth-generation Mexican-American felt a dissonance between who he was and what he saw around him.

“I’d go into . . . restaurants and the only other Mexicans I’d see were the busboys. . . . And I wondered why,” Cisneros said.

Sensitive and shy as a child, Cisneros turned to acting to open up. He played a chorus member in “Fame,” Prince Dauntless in “Once Upon a Mattress.”

But his aspirations leaned more to “The Elephant Man,” Bernard Pomerance’s spare and haunting story of an archetypal outsider.

“I like the idea of him being an outcast for something he had no control over, it’s almost like a prejudice story,” Cisneros said.

Another favorite was “Amadeus” by Peter Shaffer, in which actors address the audience directly, then step back into the story. Cisneros has used the technique himself.

But that wasn’t until last spring, when he saw a handbill advertising a theater workshop that sought to dramatize intolerance. Cisneros was intrigued. He met with Orange County Coalition members and slowly, things coalesced.

“We started with just an idea, not even a script, and we created the whole thing from the ground up,” Cisneros said.

In the process, a lot of forgotten observations came pouring back, of driving to his great-grandmother’s small, neat stucco home in Boyle Heights and seeing the home boys lounging around drinking beer, hair slicked back and wearing white singlets that exposed their tattooed biceps.

Cisneros looked into the shiny surface of their polished hot rods and saw himself. From that epiphany came “Two Brothers.”

Like most playwrights, Cisneros said he draws inspiration both from personal experience and observing the world around him.

In “Greg,” a college student encounters parental rejection when he explains that he is homosexual.

At first, Greg conducts an ideal conversation in which his parents accept his life style and reassure him of their love. In reality, his mother drops dead from shock and his father blames his son’s homosexuality on his vegetarian diet and banishes him from the family.

Steve Wilber, president of the Orange County Coalition, praised the work.

“A lot of times people will get preachy or start pointing fingers but Felix was able to present a sensitive issue in a way that’s going to make it accessible,” Wilber said.

Cisneros is not concerned that his works might be construed as agitprop theater. It’s too leavened with droll observations on the human condition.

And he is aware that at least for now, his plays do not have Luis Valdez, Sam Shepard or Vaclav Havel worrying about the competition.

He intends to keep writing.

“I want to get to the level where I can say, ‘Yeah, this is very good work and I’m proud of it,’ ” Cisneros said.