Theater : A Revolutionary’s Dilemma

Gloria is an ex-Sandinista who begins to find her place in the United States, but only after many anguished discussions with her friend, Angela Davis, and a three-hour Victoria’s Secret shopping spree.

“The Correct Posture of a True Revolutionary” is both as interesting and as sketchy as its premise sounds.

In Theresa Chavez’s play, part of the Loco Motion series at downtown’s Los Angeles Theatre Center, Gloria (Rose Portillo) is a poet and writer who fought the good fight, helping to rid Nicaragua of Somoza, but she has since grown disillusioned with her movement’s dismissive treatment of women.

She comes to Los Angeles to finish a book on feminism and the revolution for Random House, only to find the publisher backing out because “Nicaragua is no longer hot.”

But Gloria’s immediate existence is not threatened. She is staying, one presumes rent-free, in the comfortable home of an absent friend whose collection of Central American art is so fine that Architectural Digest is clamoring to photograph it. Here Gloria has the time and space to find herself, after breaking from a movement that didn’t allow for personal introspection.

What’s not entirely clear is the attitude of the play toward its heroine, a Marxist who feels comfortable initiating a heated discussion on the failure of the revolution while being served by the compliant Salvadoran maid in her friend’s very nice home.

True, the other characters have opinions about Gloria. Sara, the maid, expresses private hostility. Angela Davis (played with impressive, silken authority by Irene Wiley) is encouraging, tolerant and mentor-like. And an ex-comrade, Francisco, now a chic and successful gay muralist who emigrated primarily to come out of the closet, finds Gloria’s speechifying tiresome, though largely because she prickles the guilt he thought he had closed the door on long ago.

Under the direction of Ellen Sebastian, this production’s view of Gloria seems a bit too forgiving, given her self-admitted hypocrisy. But the audience may have its own reservations. Her posturing, as she herself observes, boils down to a rather spoiled insistence that she wants the revolution back because she liked the way it made her feel.

As the fashionable muralist, Ric Oquita seems to be trying to emit a kind of smoldering sexuality through kinetic eyebrows, and he listens to others with an insincere intensity, as if he were going to sell them something.

Liane Schirmer has very good moments as the compliant maid who, when alone with her thoughts, is less of a doormat but every bit as sweet-natured.

Portillo plays Gloria with a straight-forward dignity that remains untroubled by the character’s newly acquired and fast-encroaching hypocrisies. Gloria insists that her adopted country has effectively corrupted the meaning of the word revolution by overusing it in advertising (such as in “the fashion revolution”), even as her own interest in clothes grows more and more intense.

“The Correct Posture” raises interesting questions about whether the desire for creature comforts and sexuality is essentially at odds with the revolutionary spirit. The heroine’s anguished debates about the fight for justice, frequent as they are, never directly address these questions, although the impressively chic Davis seems to have resolved them comfortably. At one point, she advises a distressed Gloria to do something nice for herself--to go shopping.

Gloria’s moment of transcendence comes after much contemplation of the poetry of writer-revolutionary Augusto Cesar Sandino, usually accompanied by the music of an onstage flutist (Ruben Rivas), and after spending hundreds of dollars on lingerie, which she leaves strewn around the apartment for Sara to clean up. Chavez asks us to take very seriously Gloria’s soul searching without having the character herself examine fundamental questions about the integrity of her own revolutionary impulses.

Can the desire to be attractive coexist comfortably with a need to fight for justice? Gloria comes to think that it can. Apparently there is more than one correct posture for a true revolutionary.

* “The Correct Posture of a True Revolutionary,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m. April 23, 2 p.m. Dark April 16. Ends April 23. (213) 485-1681. $13. Running time: 90 minutes.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Playwright Theresa Chavez is married to Daily Calendar editor Oscar Garza.