The Voices in ‘Echo Park’ : Playwright Paul Hidalgo-Durand, in a battle with AIDS and fleeting time, writes anywhere and every day to tell the stories reflecting his heritage

The visitor to St. Luke’s Hospital on New York’s Upper Westside expected the worst. He was not disappointed.

Paul Hidalgo-Durand resembled a corpse: mouth open, eyes closed, a swollen blood-clotted leg propped on a mound of pillows. Only the rhythmic drip of IV solution into his arm gave any hint of life--that, and a laptop word processor resting upon his chest, its screen flickering with dialogue.

But no Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, the skin’s purple badges of AIDS, were visible--yet. Hidalgo-Durand still looked his age: 29.

Hidalgo-Durand’s eyes opened. He stared at his visitor from Los Angeles. Then he quickly moved the laptop to a bedside pile of recently revised pages, opened a table drawer--revealing a stack of bound scripts he’d written since being diagnosed--and dragged out a tape player.

“Let’s find a quiet place,” he whispered, mysteriously adding: “I want you to hear something.”

The visitor pushed Hidalgo-Durand in a wheelchair down the halls, the IV-bottle clattering on its tripod, searching for a quiet oasis.

At last a calm waiting room was found in the coronary unit. Hidalgo-Durand thrust the player into his visitor’s hand. His throat too sore to speak, he maniacally signaled.

The mystified visitor, fearing the patient was succumbing to dementia, turned on the player. A piano’s music echoed. Voices erupted, formed a chorus--it was the opening song to “Echo Park,” Hidalgo-Durand’s latest work, his 10th play in the three years since being diagnosed with AIDS-related illnesses.

In the spirit of his beloved magic realism, Hidalgo-Durand’s proud grin eclipsed the bleak surroundings, the New York hospital seemed to magically vanish, and the Mexican-American-tinged music from “Echo Park” emotionally transported both visitor and patient back home to Los Angeles.

Six months later that magic has become real, thanks to the Mark Taper Forum’s interest in “Echo Park.”

Hidalgo-Durand, recovered from that battle with pneumonia but still engaged in his war with AIDS (lesions now are visible on his face), walks with purpose out of an airplane and into the LAX terminal.

A finalist for the Taper’s 1991 New Works Festival, “Echo Park” was ultimately rejected only because the budget couldn’t afford a musical. But Taper Resident Director Oskar Eustis “finally found a way” to finance a recent developmental workshop of the show, plus the expenses to fly out Hidalgo-Durand and his preferred director, Mel Marvin, who had first alerted the Taper to “Echo Park.”

Expenses were further reduced by the fact that “Echo Park” composer Megan Cavallari had already moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of film work. “(Agent) Richard Kraft warned me that he only knew four women working in the industry--and two of them used to be men,” said Cavallari. “But Hollywood’s still a more fertile environment than New York. Nothing’s happening on or off Broadway.”

With New York no longer supplying new musicals, the lifeblood of American theater, regional theaters must develop their own product. The minimal risk and expense of a workshop enabling Taper staffers to accurately assess the potential of a musical like “Echo Park” seemed to Eustis a wise investment.

“Somehow we have not followed up on the promise of ‘Zoot Suit,’ ” Eustis explained before Hidalgo-Durand’s arrival, referring to the Taper’s sensational 1978 Luis Valdez hit, also a Mexican-American musical set in a Los Angeles neighborhood.

“We have had an embarrassing absence of Latino work on the main stage in the years since. But we’re taking that omission very seriously and hope to correct it. We are actively looking for pieces that speak more to the Latino community. And this piece speaks to this city in an unusual way.

“I’ve always been interested in his idiosyncratic writing and this is the piece that has the most potential to reach a mass audience,” Eustis explains. He notes that two other Hidalgo-Durand plays were also finalists for the 1991 New Works Festival (“Common Pursuit,” “Trailer Park of Dreams”). “Paul has a remarkably fearless, open-hearted way of confronting the most painful and difficult obstacles that face us as humans.”

Hidalgo-Durand is speaking to Eustis from an airport pay phone, discovering that the shadow of death has followed him to sunny Southern California. Eustis needs to move the musical’s final presentation to the Monday afternoon of Martin Luther King Jr. Day--because he must attend a friend’s funeral in San Francisco.

Hidalgo-Durand laughs, then dials his mother to let her know he’s arrived in L.A. His mother informs him that a relative has died. Can he attend tonight’s wake? No doubt his mother will entertain, singing boleros and rancheros along with the mariachis.

Again Hidalgo-Durand laughs and explains that, no, there is much business to do for the workshop. “In my family there was the wake,” he says, hanging up, “there was the funeral, and then there was the party. It’s very Latin--and very funny.

“ ‘Echo Park’ evolved out of the stories that I grew up with. Its characters are a mixture of all the Latinas that I’ve ever known, including my mother, who was a big-band torch singer in my father’s Latin orchestra.”

Perhaps that explains Hidalgo-Durand’s good humor following his seventh hospitalization in less than three years. But what can explain his “miraculous” recovery? Six months ago he was in a wheelchair, five months ago on crutches, four months ago on a cane.

While waiting for his baggage, the playwright offers a one-word explanation: “Perseverance. I just make myself walk on my bad leg. I wear a half-size larger shoes than I did before.

“My drugs (cost) somewhere around $4,000 a month,” he continues. “The (chemotherapy) alone runs anywhere from $4,000 to $8,000 for one month.” He waves his latest writing achievement, a screenplay. “I need to sell a movie script so I can afford to be sick,” he jokes.

Vowing to eat Mexican food every meal while in Los Angeles (“It is what I miss most--you cannot find authentic Mexican food in New York”), he chooses a restaurant for this interview. Between guacamole, taquitos and frijoles, Hidalgo-Durand discusses what it is like to be a young Mexican-American playwright from Los Angeles with infinite promise but indefinite time.

“There are lots of avenues to take once you have AIDS,” Hidalgo-Durand explains. “Some people fight by becoming AIDS activists. Some people do it by submerging themselves into AIDS information. There are others of us who just go from day to day, trying to do our work in the hope that we’ll maybe leave something valuable behind. What is sad, however, is how much work it took to get to the point where I write as well as I do.”

His bandleader father and torch-singing mother divorced when he was 4, and his stepfather, a construction worker, “was totally abusive. He kept beating up my mother, me, my older brother, my sister.”

Consequently, Hidalgo-Durand began living with relatives throughout Southern California. At age 17, he left the family.

“I felt like I had a lot of obstacles,” he remembers. “All that abuse as a child. . . . But the problem became finding my identity at age 17, while being on your own and being gay and getting lost. And I got lost.”

He considered a career as a professional dancer, adding “Durand” to his family name. He danced in the film “Grease II” and television series “Fame.” But live theater was more compelling so he auditioned for the Latino Theatre Lab under Amy Gonzalez at Los Angeles Actors Theatre in Hollywood. There he began writing sketches and, most significantly, met LAAT consulting director Alan Mandell.

“I could not be writing what I am now if it wasn’t for Alan,” Hidalgo-Durand says. “That was my start. Alan insisted that I go back to school. I went to UCLA and I learned how to read classics and learned about history. Alan said, ‘You can break all the rules as long as you know what the rules are.’ I didn’t know them.”

Hidalgo-Durand’s real education began. Mandell invited him to work on various LAAT productions. When LAAT became Los Angeles Theatre Center, he assisted director Reza Abdoh on “Minimata.”

In the summer of 1987, the apprentice writer found a new mentor at the annual Padua Playwright’s Festival: Maria Irene Fornes. The Cuban-born New Yorker’s writing workshop helped immeasurably. Fornes also secured him a scholarship to her course at Off-Broadway’s INTAR theater. For eight months, Hidalgo-Durand attended the Fornes workshop in Manhattan.

After his residency, while working again in Los Angeles at Padua, he received a phone call from an administrator at New York University’s musical theater program. Despite never having received a bachelor’s degree, at age 26 Hidalgo-Durand was awarded the prestigious Oscar Hammerstein Fellowship: all tuition paid plus a stipend to the only graduate musical theater program in the country.

So Hidalgo-Durand found himself back in New York in 1988, lauded by envious fellow graduate students as the golden boy from California.

“I got there in September,” Hidalgo-Durand says between bites of a tortilla. “I was in class and I got a sore throat. It had been going on for a couple of weeks and it was the first week in October. And it got so bad that I couldn’t swallow. The school nurse got really scared and called an ambulance and said, ‘We have to get you into the hospital, you’re bleeding from your throat.’ ”

Hidalgo-Durand was admitted to New York University Medical Center. He had a viral condition that needed to be attended to and would have to remain in the hospital. He thought he’d be there overnight, but it turned into six weeks. Initially there were no rooms available, so he was given a bed in a hallway.

“I lay in the hallway for four days. I didn’t have a room. I didn’t have a phone. I didn’t have a doctor. People had to roam the hallways to find me.

“Questions started coming about AIDS. They did more tests and more tests. But my blood count was too unbalanced to give accurate readings.”

He hoped it was just an infection--until late one Friday night in the fifth week.

“The doctor stepped just inside the door to my room that night and said, ‘Oh, you have AIDS.’ He added that he was going on vacation for two weeks, but another doctor would take care of me. And I sat there by myself in the room and it was pretty scary.”

But the next doctor who came into his room was Dr. Robert Press, clinical assistant professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division, NYU Medical Center, whom New York Magazine recently listed among Manhattan’s outstanding physicians.

“Paul asked me how long he had,” Press remembered by phone of their initial conversation. “Two years? I told him he probably had longer and should plan on at least five years.”

“He came to my side and took care of me and pulled me through,” Hidalgo-Durand says. “If he hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have made it through that year.”

Later, Hidalgo-Durand would express his gratitude by dedicating “Echo Park” to Press. But at the time of that initial diagnosis, playwriting was his last thought. Upon his release after six weeks in the hospital, he plunged into depression, drugs and liquor.

“I was suicidal,” he says. “I had three overdoses, my stomach had to be pumped twice. I slept for days. Somehow I started to drag myself to school. Then I’d get home and pop sleeping pills. I was addicted at one point. Finally, I was verbally abusing everyone--my doctor, my lover--everyone.”

Then there were no more calls from concerned friends. He had succeeded in burning his bridges, in isolating himself. The scene was set for a last torch song, the final curtain: his “successful” suicide.

“I was in my apartment and by myself and they had all agreed they weren’t going to save me anymore,” he says. “And it was really scary, because I could really do it.”

For the first time in the three months since his hospitalization, Hidalgo-Durand opened one of his notebooks. He hadn’t written a word in all that time, but that night, on the verge of suicide, Hidalgo-Durand’s shaking hands turned the pages of a notebook he’d kept the previous summer during a Padua Playwrights Festival workshop. He read:

“She bites me.”

“Where?”

“Here and here. See, the chunks are missing. Big chunks right out of my side.”

Hidalgo-Durand read on, amazed. The character in the sketch was describing an ambiguous, invisible, lethal invader. His subconscious must have known what was attacking his body well before the diagnosis.

“It’s really weird to get in front of the mirror and just see the changes,” Hidalgo-Durand says. “It’s like you’re not looking at yourself anymore. You’re looking at something that’s just taking over. You fight. But you can only fight what you see. It’s like Vietnam. They’re attacking you from places you can’t expect. Then the question is, ‘Should we be here?’ Maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

But the power of language to unveil the hidden world captivated him. Hidalgo-Durand had to write.

“The next day I dragged myself to school, hung over from the pills, and threw myself into writing.”

In six months he wrote three full-length plays. That Padua sketch became “The Trailer Park of Dreams,” its first draft written in a single 30-hour marathon. His second play, “Common Pursuit,” and third, “Rooms for Rent,” also described mysterious, alien forces. But in none did AIDS make an overt appearance. His style wasn’t sociological dramas like “As Is” or “The Raft of the Medusa.” He belonged firmly in the contemporary Latin American tradition of magical realism, what Hidalgo-Durand describes as “sur-real--just south of real.”

And then for his thesis production he embarked on the most ambitious task of all: writing the book and lyrics for “Echo Park.”

Hidalgo-Durand’s concept was to focus on a young Mexican-American girl who believes the only way to realize her dreams is to escape her Echo Park neighborhood.

“She doesn’t realize the value of where she lives,” Hidalgo-Durand says, “that you can take somewhere like that and turn it around for you. My culture and background and family are what’s helping me in my writing, now. I rejected it for a long time, like my heroine, but it’s only when I embrace it that I can really write.”

Impressed by his first draft, the Elisabeth Marton Agency in New York signed him to a theatrical contract, fully aware he was infected with AIDS-related diseases.

And they were virulent diseases. Kaposi’s sarcoma. Blood clots. Spots appeared on his lungs. Lymph nodes in his groin became malignant, but soon responded to chemotherapy. But the cure became worse than the disease when it made him too sick to write. While working on “Echo Park,” he sometimes chose not to undergo the chemotherapy. The writing came first.

Mel Marvin, composer of the musicals “Tintypes” and “Elmer Gantry,” was the producing director at the musical theater program of NYU during Hidalgo-Durand’s thesis year. He decided to personally supervise “Echo Park.”

“Paul was unbelievable all year,” Marvin said from his New York apartment. “I’ve just never encountered anybody in that situation who seems to be so focused. I would go up to his hospital room and he’d be writing in bed, and just really, really ill, and he would pull it together and be completely focused on his piece. I would come home just blown away by his ability to function under stress and death.”

To finish “Echo Park,” Hidalgo-Durand ignored his body’s ravages. His leg grew so swollen that he had to prop it on a chair during rehearsals. He refused to see Press, his doctor, because “I knew the moment I went in (to the hospital) I wouldn’t come out.” Instead, he took painkillers and worked. His family and many friends flew out from Los Angeles for the thesis presentation of “Echo Park.” Press attended as well.

“The next day,” he says, “my family had returned to L.A. and I looked around and said, ‘Well, I guess it’s time to go to the doctor.’ ”

But he’d waited too long. There were no beds available at NYU. He was in the first stages of pneumonia. He was quickly admitted to St. Mark Hospital’s emergency room--the prototype for Paddy Chayefsky’s “Hospital” script--and spent the next four weeks in the hospital.

“I’d caused more damage to my body than necessary,” he says. “But if I’d gone in earlier, I wouldn’t have rewritten the show and couldn’t have seen it and the whole year would have been a waste. In a lot of ways, ‘Echo Park’ pulled me through.”

During the Taper rehearsals, Hidalgo-Durand sat crouched over his laptop, rewriting while his eight-member cast labored under Mel Marvin’s exacting eye. “You’re not taking care of yourself,” Marvin gently scolds when his playwright coughs. Hidalgo-Durand merely sighs, “When I get back to New York I’ll see Doctor Bob.”

Word spreads fast through the Los Angeles Latino community of artists. Actress Ivonne Coll, who portrays the heroine’s mother, says “Latino actors are all very excited and surprised that the Taper is doing this. Paul writes with an honorability. There is no ghetto language, no ghetto stereotypes, no ‘bato’ or ‘ese.’ His is a real barrio.”

On Martin Luther King Day, Hidalgo-Durand forgets all his aches and pains. For the presentation, his mentor Irene Fornes flies in from San Diego to attend. His friend Reza Abdoh flies in from New York, where he’s preparing his latest work. His agent Tonda Marton attends. So does Alan Mandell. His mother and family and friends crowd into the Taper Annex rehearsal room, the same large space where “Zoot Suit” was developed. And they hear his cast sing: “I will always be around/ Look around my tree/ You have set me free.”

“In a weird way,” Hidalgo-Durand says, “AIDS has improved my writing. Now I write anywhere, every day. And what I write about now I feel is somehow influenced by what I’m going through. It’s not like I have a series of AIDS plays, because I don’t. In fact, something I actually discovered was humor. I was never funny before.”

However, Hidalgo-Durand isn’t in a mood to celebrate either his writing achievements or even the satisfaction of being invited to the Taper for “Echo Park.”

“I’m famous for my midnight calls to the West Coast,” Hidalgo-Durand says. “At 3 a.m. in New York, I can still call friends like (playwright) John Steppling or Alan Mandell without being too rude. I have these nightmares. They don’t go away. It’s a very scary, scary thing. I can’t sleep many hours. Like they say, each day dies with sleep. What I want more than anything, but can’t have, is time.

“While making my New Year’s resolution, I was trying to think if I would prefer a funeral or a memorial,” he says. “It’s really sad to be 29 years old and thinking about that, but seeing all the changes that the body’s going through, this year is it. This is the end of it. It’s starting to feel different. It’s not feeling like it did last year. And I’m not trying to be pessimistic. I’m just trying to be realistic. And I was thinking on New Year’s: What would happen to my work? Would it just sit there? I think that probably worries me more than anything.”

Not to worry. After the workshop, Eustis predicted: “I’m sure ‘Echo Park’ is going to find its way to the stage really soon. I’m sure it will have a long life.”