Setting the Latino Theatre Company Stage

When Jose Luis Valenzuela graduated from school in his hometown of Los Mochis, near Mazatlan, Mexico, he was only 15. Yet he wanted to go to college in Mexico City along with his older brother.

He shudders now as he describes how he obtained his parents’ consent--he climbed to the roof of their two-story home and threatened to kill himself.

It worked. He spent the next four years in the capital, studying theater and playing a bit role in some of that era’s public theater--the 1968 student protests.

Political and cultural conflict have been constant themes in his theater career--themes that will continue to be explored by Valenzuela’s Latino Theatre Company, which opens its first full season tonight at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. The group is reportedly the first U.S. Latino theater company to schedule a full season on an Actors’ Equity contract.

It’s also the first mid-size theater company to open an L.A. season since the late LATC company opened in 1985--an appropriate distinction, for Valenzuela’s company grew out of the Latino Theatre Lab at LATC.

The company plans to use the LATC building only for “Luminarias” this season. The next two shows are slated for the company’s home base--the 202-seat Margo Albert Theatre at Plaza de la Raza in Lincoln Park, which is under renovation.

Valenzuela said that, as a matter of policy, he hopes many of his productions will play other venues as well as the Albert--just as the company’s “August 29” traveled to UCLA last year after a run at the Albert. That way, he said, the company will cross L.A.’s well-known barriers.

“This city is going to create the culture of the 21st century,” Valenzuela said. “We’re so polarized here, but that tension produces explosive creativity.”

Valenzuela’s path to L.A. also was filled with barriers. Although his mother was born in Tempe, Ariz., her family was repatriated to Mexico in the ‘30s, and Valenzuela spoke no English when he began studies at San Jose State. He also “had no idea that Chicanos existed,” he recalled. Courses in Chicano studies and English began to enlighten him.

Before long, he was thrown into the heart of the Chicano movement, touring with the San Jose-based, heavily political Teatro de la Gente from 1972 to 1977.

He then joined Teatro de la Esperanza in Santa Barbara. In 1984, when the company decided to move to San Francisco, Valenzuela and his L.A.-reared wife, actress and playwright Evelina Fernandez, came to L.A.

When Valenzuela arrived in atomized L.A., he had to find a new way of doing theater. He started auditioning as an actor--to no avail. In 1985, he and Fernandez put their savings of $150 into an Esperanza-developed play, “Hijos,” staged by Valenzuela at a tiny theater in East L.A., where it was seen by Bill Bushnell and Diane White, who were putting together the LATC company. At first they had money to hire Valenzuela only as an accountant, but they authorized him to build the Latino Lab after hours. Then the Ford Foundation chipped in $200,000, and the Lab produced a series of works on LATC’s main stages.

After the LATC company folded in 1991, the Lab moved to the Mark Taper Forum, where Valenzuela directed the Taper’s well-endowed Latino Theatre Initiative. But he wasn’t happy there: “They’re so well-established, and the monetary risk is so high, it becomes complicated to try to change anything.” He left in 1994.

Now that he’s running his own company, he’s launching his season with “Luminarias,” a play by Fernandez, his wife. “Luminarias” takes an approving view of romances between Latinas and non-Latino men, Valenzuela said, and “this is a tough proposition for our audience, because in most of our plays we’re victims.” But he believes “the Latino population is transforming every day” and that his company’s plays should take note.

Meanwhile, back in Los Mochis, Valenzuela’s mother “thinks I’m a hippie and that I’ll find my way back.” She probably shouldn’t count on it.

* “Luminarias,” Los Angeles Theatre Center Theatre 3, 514 S. Spring St. (213) 485-1681. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends May 26. $16.