Grandmother’s Tale Inspired ‘Piano’

An 8-year-old girl is instructed not to play the piano. She does. She’s beaten.

That was one of the images that spurred the imagination of Anne Deavere Smith, whose “Piano” opens Saturday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Inspired by a woman’s story of her grandmother (as an 8-year-old) in Cuba and, later, seeing a picture of wealthy and peasant Cuban families, Deavere set her story in pre-Revolutionary Cuba--where the societal and household dramas are witnessed by 8-year-old Rosa.

After researching the Spanish-American War, the writer-actress (she played the hussy in LATC’s 1989 production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”) realized the only character she knew going in was the little girl. “But it was funny--the other characters came to me by intuition. They just popped up, an automatic writing response to the photo.” They include Alicia and her sugar-plantation owner husband, Eduardo; his brother, a sadistic general named Antonio; Santeria-worshiper Susanna; servant Chan and Rosa’s 11-year-old cello-playing brother, Carlitos.

“Music is very important in the piece,” said the Bay Area-based Smith, who developed the piece at LATC’s Women’s Project Lab and in a workshop last year at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre (ACT). “First of all, it was the original metaphor--’Don’t play the piano’--that was disobeyed. But also, music is expression, and there’s a certain amount of privilege we give to it: what ideas we’re allowed to express, who has that privilege.”

Bill Bushnell directs.

THEATER BUZZ: At the end of every year, each of Drama-Logue’s theater critics submits a list of favored shows and artists, drawn from the productions reviewed by the individual critic, and everyone on the list receives a Drama-Logue award. But at this year’s award ceremony, Jan. 15 at the Pasadena Playhouse, there was a problem: two critics--former editor Lee Melville and T. H. McCulloh--left the trade paper’s staff before the end of the year, under unfriendly circumstances, and refused to file award lists.

Editor Faye Bordy responded by assigning award choices to Melville and McCulloh, in absentia, and having their names typed on the certificates presented to “their” choices. “There was nothing unusual about what was done,” Bordy contended. “Since they didn’t submit lists, the theater editor and publisher went through (their reviews) and made the lists.” No note was made of the critics’ absentee status on the certificates, she allowed: “Their names are used, yes, but only as the critic. They didn’t give the award. The award was given by Drama-Logue.”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: The four-person “Latins Anonymous” has been performing a series of sketches spoofing the plight of the Latino in Anglo-land, at Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Theatre 4.

Said Dan Sullivan in The Times: “True, it helps to be from East L.A. to enjoy ‘Latins Anonymous.’ But everybody knows what it’s like to feel excluded and to want to belong, and that’s the basic subject here--how far we’ll go to sell out what we are.”

From Ed Kaufman in the Hollywood Reporter: “Nothing is sacred outside the limits of ‘Latins’: Latino clothes, the Latin lover, macho males, the melodramatic Maria of ‘West Side Story’. . . . Still, underneath the laughter, there’s a true story to be told.”

Wrote the L.A. Weekly’s Maryl Jo Fox: “It’s impossible to keep a straight face when these gifted co-creator/performers zoom through their 20 high-energy, irreverent sketches . . . that send Latino stereotypes into deep space, akin to what ‘The Colored Museum’ did for black stereotypes.”