‘La Negra Ester’ Breaks the Mold : Stage: Roberto Parra’s celebrated love poem to a prostitute borrows elements from both traditional and avant-garde theater.

In the year of the plebiscite, two months after Chile went to the polls on Oct. 5, 1988, the theater world welcomed “La Negra Ester,” (“The Black Ester”), a poem by Roberto Parra adapted for the outdoor stage by Andres Perez.

People’s minds changed collectively. Chile fell in love with a prostitute and told the world its story. Before long, the 29-member El Gran Circo Teatro was giving five performances a week throughout the country and taking its tale to festivals in London, Paris, Switzerland, Scotland, Ireland, Colombia, Argentina and Canada.

The history-making spectacle that premiered at O’Higgins Plaza in Puente Alto, near Santiago, will make its West Coast debut Wednesday, a month since it closed its Santiago season. The performance will take place in a circus tent at the Santa Monica Pier as part of Los Angeles Festival.

Set in a 1940s brothel in the port city of San Antonio, Perez’s “La Negra Ester” is a love story of the poet and musician Roberto, who is racked with visions, and the exhibitionist prostitute La Negra Ester. Staged in the current avant-garde Chilean theatrical style, the celebrated production features actors in clownish makeup and experiments with many universal folk-theater techniques, including mime and commedia dell’arte. International critics have also cited such influences as Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx.

Perez said his inspiration began in 1988, with his return from Paris, where he had been working on a mask project at the Theatre du Soleil under Adriane Mnouchkine.

In an outgrowth of his collaborations with other professional actors and directors and his experiments with clown techniques, Perez gave his actors the chance to search for their feelings and translate emotion into poetic expression.

“We represent the efforts of several theater groups,” Perez said. “We were not the only ones around; there were lots of people and actors working in communities doing popular theater. Those who were promoting theater as a reflection of what was happening to us as a society allowed the public to judge with a critical mind. The success of ‘La Negra’ is that attitude which we represent.”

Historically, theater had been a weapon of opposition to the Augusto Pinochet regime, said Chilean professor Juan Villegas, chairman of the Spanish and Portuguese department at UC Irvine. In 1973, the year of the Pinochet coup, oppositional theater sprang to life, then gradually disappeared. Playwrights had to ask for permission to publish their work.

“But there was a lot of theater--theater for small populations, educated theater sponsored directly by the government, and the theater of entertainment,” Villegas said. “The story of ‘La Negra Ester’ came from the low life to the middle class, re-creating the street as site of a popular theater. The Chilean government did not censor the theater very much. They thought censorship would make theater the center of attention instead of neutralizing it, so from 1978 to 1990, the economy did much better and, of course, protest diminished.”

In the beginning, the troupe rehearsed during afternoons and late nights in a drama-department warehouse at the University of Chile. Simultaneously, the first musical chords were composed and the idea of its staging was born.

Roberto Parra’s poem, written in decimas, or 10-line stanzas, is full of the allusive slang for which he is known. It became a play from the desire to tell a story of Chile that was incidentally a love story.

Daniel Palma’s staging left behind the square walls and the velvet chairs as “La Negra” took to the streets in the form of the circus, hoping to perform the history of the present. The three-hour performance is sometimes staged in a circus tent without a top. More often, it has been staged in parks and plazas.

The atmosphere of “La Negra Ester” lies somewhere between traditional stage and street theater. “Evidently we broke the mold with something that never was done before,” Perez said. “It was the encounter of what the spectator wanted to see and what we wanted to do.”

Roberto Parra is the younger brother of the late Violeta Parra, a folk singer who committed suicide in 1967, and poet Nicanor Parra. If Violeta’s “Gracias a la Vida” and the “anti-poetry” of Nicanor symbolized Chile in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Roberto’s “La Negra Ester” represents the Chile of the ‘80s: its older generation caught up in nostalgia for easier times, the whole society burdened with unspoken sorrow and frustration.

“La Negra Ester” is filled with music, but it is not a musical in the American sense. The play reflects how music permeates the daily lives of the Chilean people. Some songs are by the Parra family, and the boleros, cuecas, tangos and waltzes are composed and arranged by Jorge Lobos, Guillermo Aste and Alvaro Henriquez.

It was evident, producer Andres Garcia said, that the roles of La Negra Ester and Roberto themselves chose actors Rosa Ramirez and Boris Quercia, not vice versa. “In our theater, the role is the one who chooses the person to play it,” he said.

The musical comedy was written in Spanish and will be performed in Spanish with an English synopsis provided.

Under the provisional title “Gran Circo Teatro Presenta al Gran Circo Teatro de Chile,” the actors are rehearsing a new play that chronicles Chilean history between 1969-73, set during the socialist rule of Salvador Allende, but crosses the past with “flashbacks to the future,” Perez said.

Both “La Negra Ester” and the historical work share the colorful, exaggerated, street-theatrical style, but “La Negra Ester” was “done at a time of democratic process in society, when it did not matter to Chileans if their theater talked about politics or not,” Perez said.

“We want to remember those things in Chile’s history we do not remember any more,” Perez said. “We want to know those things that we never knew.”

“Gran Circo Teatro de Chile” will be performed Saturday and Sunday at Santa Monica Pier at 7 p.m.