‘Faces’ Was ‘Remarkable’

I want to address Scott Collins’ review of Will & Company’s “Faces of America” (“DeLeon’s ‘Faces’ Skims Ethnic Surface,” Calendar, April 1).

I saw this remarkable piece of work at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in which Fran DeLeon, in a one-woman show, portrayed nine characters with beautiful clarity and intuitiveness. DeLeon captured the essence of each character, staying true to playwright Colin Cox’s pithy script in weaving the common thread through the vignettes: that the many races and cultures that make up our America are so diverse and not understood by one another; that each culture has a need to express its traditions and lifestyles and that this expression is often persecuted rather than honored.

I read Collins’ review after I saw the performance, and I wonder if we saw the same play. “Superficial”? “Caricature”? And “gallery of minority victims whose suffering can always be traced back to the crimes of dead white males”? “Positive, self-flattering (stereotype)” of a Chicano teen-ager? Disturbing and also poignant, yes, but how does one get “positive” and “self-flattering” from that kid’s story? And how does the suffering and imprisonment and rape of cultures make the people of those cultures “virtuous and squeaky clean”? And how about “Seldom does one of these faces display irony or real wit. . . .” The audience I was in laughed and cried throughout the entire performance.

KAREN TARLETON

Los Angeles