STAGE REVIEW : Women Continue Empowerment Theme

On its final laps around the Freud Playhouse at UCLA, the National Women’s Theatre Festival continued Thursday to accent diversity of experience and the empowerment of women.

There are a couple of ways to do that: by impersonating the women who, historically, have been pioneers in the field, or by creating strong, signature statements of self-affirmation.

Adilah Barnes chose the former to kick off Thursday’s program, plucking from history (and her own one-woman show) Sojourner Truth, the young Zora Neale Hurston and larger-than-life poet Maya Angelou. The portraiture was spirited and her version of Angelou’s slow, salacious laugh, which suggests a woman at once bemused by the world and furious at it, was beautifully re-created. But it was secondhand indignation.

Nobuko Miyamoto and Theresa Chavez, whose pieces followed, made their contributions firsthand.

With warmth and grace, Miyamoto combined text, music, slides and dance to tell us about the internment camps, her truck-driver father who loved classical music and the traumas of growing up as Joanne and being confronted by the first name Nobuko . The chain reactions all had to do with identity, racial and female, and moved up--not inconsequentially--to the recent disturbances in L.A. What’s in a name, she asked as the piece trailed away, what’s in a name?

Chavez had no problem answering that, asking first, “Why should I remember? Why not be an American mongrel? Mexican-American? Chicana? Latina? Mestiza? California?” By far the most assertive of the three pieces, her “L.A. Real,” staged by her and performed by Rose Portillo, is a play on a lot more than words.

Through Portillo, Chavez asks us to “listen to the Earth” before it is terminally paved over. She is descended, she says, from the Lugos, a family that moved to Southern California in 1771, thanks to a land grant accorded a soldier-ancestor that covered six cities and spanned seven generations. He received 29,000 acres and his cattle grazed on what are now Bell, Lynwood, Montebello.

In “L.A. Real’s” emphasis on Southern California ranch history, there are analogies with Joan Hotchkis’ “Tearsheets,” which opened the festival July 24. But Chavez is speaking of a Mexican aristocracy, the people of Sonora and Sinaloa reclaiming the land.

The approach is radically different, laced with a kind of pragmatic irony that never takes itself too seriously, full of rancor for the savaging of the land, imbued with the richness of the past, poetic but never so lyrical as to be out of step with present reality.

Where Chavez/Portillo excel is at distinguishing between subtleties of tone--the Spanish language used as a “language of command,” the absent-minded reduction of local history to street names (La Brea, La Cienega, etc.) and, in a masterful bit of video magic, a TV advertisement that turns the tables on the Spanish Inquisition. “Don’t reinvent me,” warns the Mestiza, “on your salsa bottles, your wine labels, your tract home logos.”

“L.A. Real” is slated to be expanded and performed in Pasadena in April. One can hardly wait.

The festival, which has had the good sense to use local artists, concludes tonight, having perhaps learned the hard way that the cavernous Freud Playhouse is not the friendliest of environments for this event. It will take money to bring it back next year, says producer Katie Goodman, money that’s ever harder to find.

Now if she could commandeer the dollars spent on UCLA’s $5 parking tab and move to Highways (or a similar venue), she just might be on to something.

National Women’s Theatre Festival, UCLA, Freud Playhouse, MacGowan Hall, Westwood. Today, 8 p.m.: “976-DEBB,” comedy with Deb Margolin; Monica Palacios in “Latin Lezbo Comic”; Roberta Kastelic in “Shakespeare”; Jennifer Vally & The Urban Pioneers, in “Barbie,” a skewed look at a cultural icon. Ends today. $12; (310) 825-2101.