Cult Heroes Elvis and Che Say Hello : Set in the ‘50s around a Latino family, Sol Biderman’s play examines myths and conflicts

Rocker meets rebel in the title of Sol Biderman’s slightly serious comedy “When Elvis Met Che.” But the meeting isn’t as surprising as it may seem at first glance.

The play, which opens at the Whitefire Theatre on Saturday, has gone through a number of changes since Biderman did a first draft more than 30 years ago. Elvis Presley was at his peak and the sole icon in the play. Then Biderman went to Cuba to cover the revolution there as a free-lance journalist and met Che Guevara. “What if. . . ,” the playwright mused as he began another draft.

Biderman, speaking via telephone from his home in Sao Paolo, Brazil, says the final version didn’t get written until the ‘80s, when the memory of his daughter’s 15th birthday party helped him tie all the threads together.

“I was fascinated by the myth of Elvis Presley,” he says. “My Aunt Fanny, who was as cold as ice to her husband and her son, cried her eyes out the day Elvis Presley’s mother died. I was fascinated by the hold Elvis had over my Aunt Fanny. She didn’t get the affection she wanted from her son, so she believed that Elvis was the ideal son who sent his mother flowers every day.

“Then I met Che and Fidel Castro, and Che became a cult hero, and I visualized the meeting between him and Elvis.”

Other layers were added to the story. In the 1970s, Biderman was teaching students who were predominantly Chicano at San Jose State University in California. “They would occasionally skip class to strike with Cesar Chavez,” he says.

But it was his daughter’s desire for an expensive coming-out party at 15 that tied it all together. The play, which won Brazil’s Pirandello Prize, tells of the generational and cultural gaps pulling at a Latino family in Denver in the 1950s. The daughter idolizes Elvis and the father, vice president of the Colorado Communist Party, idolizes Che Guevara.

“I wanted to contrast the two different types of kitsch,” Biderman says, “the Elvis kitsch and the Che kitsch. I remember when Che died, I was in Brazil and there were clandestine posters all over the walls with Che in a crucifix position, as though he were Che Christ.

“I met him in Havana and in Montevideo; he had a very strong, charismatic personality. I remembered a phrase he used: ‘You have to become hardened, but never lose tenderness.’ ” He says with irony: “If you’re going to kill people, it’s hard not to lose your tenderness.”

Guevara died in 1967. “The fact that he died when he died made him a cult hero,” Biderman says. “Otherwise, he would have assumed the proportion of a dictator. Fidel Castro has lived too long to become a cult hero. When Che died, it was convenient for his myth. If he’d lived as long as Castro has, his myth would have become tarnished. And the fact that Elvis died relatively early, that’s the same thing. You have to die early to become a myth.”

Setting the comedy in the 1950s was dictated by the image of these two myths at that time.

“I also wanted to set up, on another level, a conflict in the Anglo and Latino values in a Chicano family. There’s another level of the political conflict between the left and the American media machine. There’s also the conflict between Latino music and the music of Elvis Presley,” Biderman says.

Although he has written other plays, which had student productions at Yale Drama School in the ‘70s, and at Loyola University in New Orleans, this is his first professional production. He also has written a successful novel, “Bring Me to the Banqueting House,” published in 1969, and is vice president of the Overseas Press Club in Sao Paolo.

After his niece, Karen Biderman, produced Marsha Norman’s “Getting Out” at Hollywood’s Complex last year, the playwright asked her to produce this play. She, in turn, consulted with her production’s director, James Burke, who won high praise for his direction of the long-running “Borderlines” last year at the Fountain Theatre and later at the Skylight Theatre.

Burke, 30, who had acted with Karen Biderman in New York, remembers: “When Karen brought the play to me, I thought it was very interesting. It speaks about heroes, Elvis and Che, subjects which may seem to be so disparate. The more I thought about it, the more I realized they are the same person in that they represent our need for freedom and freedom of self-expression.

“They were two men who were able to express themselves regardless of what anybody else thought,” he says.

The playwright places the play in the 1950s to look at this idea of hero worship. “It was also important that it was a Latino play. And it’s a comedy, dealing with some very important issues, such as what it was like being a Latino family in the United States in the ‘50s,” Burke says.

Besides producing, Karen Biderman, 26, portrays the daughter in the play. Hector Elias plays her father.

Elias was in the prize-winning Broadway production of “Stick and Bones,” and has since been working in television and films. The 55-year-old actor wanted to start the new year acting, which he says you can’t do much on television.

“I guest on a lot of TV shows, and I get sick and tired of playing crooked Mexican police captains. How many times can you say, ‘You are under arrrrrrest; you move and I will keel you!’ I look at myself and say, ‘My God, I’m doing a caricature of myself .’ This play offers a wider vision, larger scope.

“When Che died,” he adds, “and that famous picture was spread all over, I read that he received the same kind of adulation that a pop star would get, with the youth. The people adored Che as much as they adored Elvis.”

“You can make arguments,” Burke says, “about the watering down of this revolutionary spirit as Che becomes Elvis Presley, this music icon. Isn’t it interesting who our heroes are today? We have this political apathy that is going on, and the Madonnas are our heroes. The music icons become the heroes, the people that we follow with this fervor. This Elvis Presley, who moves his torso, becomes the hero. It’s a little scary that these musicians have become the heroes.”