Latino Playwrights Inch Slowly to Center Stage

No major theater has made as sustained an effort as South Coast Repertory to bring works by Latino playwrights to American stages. But even with that commitment, Latino dramatists’ progress into the mainstream remains frustratingly slow.

This week the Costa Mesa theater extends its effort: As part of its 15th annual Hispanic Playwrights Project, currently in session, it is publishing an anthology of seven plays by Latino writers.

The plays, culled from more than 50 honed at the SCR workshops over the years, are by American writers of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican and Bolivian heritage. Four of the writers are veterans--Octavio Solis, Jose Rivera, Luis Alfaro and Cherrie Moraga. Cusi Cram, JoAnn Farias and Rogelio Martinez are relative newcomers.

The theater wants publication of “Latino Plays From South Coast Repertory” to increase exposure for the works on stages and in classrooms across the United States. Only a handful of anthologies of work by Hispanic American playwrights exists.

Disappointment Noted

But along with praise for SCR’s commitment comes a strong undercurrent of disappointment, from at least some observers, that America’s regional theaters--SCR included--are not moving swiftly and forcefully enough to bring Latino voices onto mainstream stages.

Since 1984, eight plays by Latino authors, plus an adaptation of Aristophanes’ “The Birds” featuring the Culture Clash comedy troupe, have been produced at SCR. Those represent a small number of the roughly 170 works produced in that time--pieces ranging from the restaging of classics such as “Death of a Salesman” to award-winning presentations of new works “Golden Child” and “Wit.”

The rate at which works by Latinos are being staged at SCR has picked up recently with one in each of the past three seasons--not counting Solis’ “La Posada Magica,” a fixture that has played the Second Stage each Christmas season since 1994.

The push to bring Latino voices forward in American theater was launched 35 years ago by Luis Valdez and his politicized farm workers’ ensemble, El Teatro Campesino. Today, plays by Hispanic Americans still face daunting obstacles to being staged, and some of those hurdles seem even higher because of problems facing American theater in general.

How can a group often perceived as “the other” get a chance to show that its writers’ imaginations flow naturally into the broader stream of contemporary American concerns?

How can Latino artists avoid being pigeonholed, wonders Juliette Carrillo, the stage director and SCR staff member who oversees the Hispanic Playwrights Project.

And how can opportunities for an underrepresented minority--the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S.--increase when the tastes of the established, predominantly white theater audience give producers a strong incentive to stick with proven works?

“None of the major regional theaters have many Latino and African American subscribers,” said Jorge Huerta, a veteran theater director and professor at UC San Diego, who also assesses theaters for the National Endowment of the Arts.

Huerta wishes South Coast Repertory would go even further in its support of Latino writers. That said, he doesn’t discount the importance of the playwrights project in developing Latino writers’ careers. Even if SCR doesn’t stage many of the plays, it gives a variety of producers a chance to see and hear new works.

Carrillo, who has directed the Hispanic Playwrights Project since 1997, said about 60% of the plays presented during her tenure have gone on to be produced somewhere else--though usually not at the bigger regional theaters. Only one of them, Rivera’s “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot,” has been staged at SCR.

Competition Is Stiff

Since 1998, the Hispanic Playwrights Project has been tucked under the larger umbrella of SCR’s new-work showcase, the Pacific Playwrights Festival.

It’s a double-edged development for the Latino playwrights: More producers may have an opportunity to see their work, but the writers face stiff competition for festival slots.

In the current session, three new plays by Latinos are being presented in workshops and readings that are open to the public.

Each year, Carrillo sifts through about 70 submissions and proposes a list of finalists. Her bosses, SCR founders David Emmes and Martin Benson, pick two to four for development at the workshop.

The fact that few of the workshop plays go on to full productions at SCR doesn’t mean the program isn’t working, Emmes said.

Part of the point is to tackle promising but problematic scripts. If the play blossoms into something irresistible--great. If the workshop is just a learning experience that pushes the script forward or helps prepare the writer to do better next time, it also has served its purpose.

“We don’t have double standards” that change with ethnicity, Emmes said. “We are interested in doing good plays by diverse voices in the American theater, and we would stand on our record.”

At the same time, he said, “I completely sympathize” with the frustrations of Latino writers craving more room on stage.

Besides the annual workshop, SCR has issued nine of its current commissions--about one-third of the total--to Latino writers, Emmes said.

It is part of what he describes as the theater’s “commitment over the long haul.”

Solis, a Texas-raised Mexican American based in San Francisco, said he owes “a lot of my career” to SCR’s Hispanic Playwrights Project. The just-published anthology includes one by Solis.

Additionally, two of his plays, both produced at SCR, are included in previous, more general anthologies of SCR plays. His “Man of the Flesh” and “La Posada Magica” reside between paperback covers with such luminaries as Craig Lucas, Richard Greenberg and Pulitzer winners Margaret Edson and Donald Margulies.

That his works were included in the general anthologies--and made it into production--tells him the plays stand on their own.

But he says the marginalization of Latinos remains commonplace in the theater. He tells of being ignored by New York theaters and of seeing one of his plays, an edgy crime epic called “Santos and Santos,” fail to receive productions even after it was published in American Theatre magazine, a periodical that probably reaches the desk of every major artistic director in the country.

“We’re pitted against each other because we are Latino, competing for one little slot,” Solis said. “We deserve to be produced as American playwrights, and not to be ghettoized in that way.”

Alfaro, co-director of the Mark Taper Forum’s Latino Theatre Initiative and author of a play in the new SCR anthology--said professors at UCLA and UC Riverside already have told him they plan to teach from the SCR book.

Jose Cruz Gonzalez, a playwright and director who was the founding director of the Hispanic Playwrights Project, now teaches at Cal State Los Angeles and introduces drama to classes that are heavily Latino. In most cases, he said, students in his general education classes have never seen a play.

“These kids are not hearing their stories,” Gonzalez said. He hopes the anthologies can help fill the void.

“It will get it into the schools, which has enormous impact,” said Eduardo Machado, head of the graduate playwriting program at Columbia University. “So many people now in their 20s at least know I exist because they read my plays when they were in school.”

But published work can only go so far, said Terry Nemeth, vice president of publications for Theatre Communications Group, a nonprofit service organization that supports regional theaters. The organization has published two anthologies of works by Latino playwrights--one in 1987 and a new 10-work collection titled “Out of the Fringe.” It has also published stand-alone volumes of plays by Machado and Rivera.

The market for books of plays is small--selling 3,000 copies is considered a success. By comparison, a well-attended run at SCR’s 161-seat Second Stage, where most new works by emerging playwrights are presented, would be seen by about 6,000 theatergoers.

“The hope still has to be the [mainstream] professional theater,” Nemeth said.

Nicolas Kanellos, a professor of Hispanic theater at the University of Houston and director of its Latino-oriented Arte Publico Press, bemoans the slowness of major regionals to produce Latino plays.

“They’re turning away from the future and the demographics of where the population is going,” he said. “There’s a very good core of Hispanic theater material that could appeal to everyone, not just Hispanics, and they should be producing it.”

So far, those demographics have not taken root in theater seats.

At SCR, an informal written survey the theater passes out to audiences one week each year shows that Latinos, African Americans and Asian Americans combined make up less than 10% of the crowd--well-below their representation in the general population.

Kanellos thinks that arts-funding foundations are ahead of producers in emphasizing Latino works, and he foresees “innovative programs” in which grant administrators will push regional theaters to do more plays by Latinos--and presumably increase attendance by those who want to see those works.

The Cuban American Machado, who had a play presented in the first Hispanic Playwrights Project, is less sanguine.

The theater will not budge, he predicts, until other media show the way.

“What’s going to do it is for the film industry to start making lots of money from Latino movies. It is [happening] in music; if that trickles down, it will be film next, then television, then the theater.”

Solis, who will finally get his first New York production this summer--albeit at a small theater--takes comfort that progress is being made, even if a real breakthrough won’t come soon enough for the generation of playwrights represented in SCR’s new anthology.

“I feel a lot of us are just pioneers,” he said, “and down the line it will be easier for the next generation.”

Readings and other events as part of the 15th annual Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory will be held this week and next:

* “The End of It All” by Cusi Cram, workshop productions Saturday, Wednesday and June 23 and 25, all at 7:45 p.m.

* “Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams” by Nilo Cruz, staged reading, Saturday, 2:30 p.m.

* “Vieques” by Jorge Gonzalez, staged reading, Sunday, 2:30 p.m.

* Reception in honor of the publication of “Latino Plays From South Coast Repertory,” with playwrights reading excerpts from their anthologized work, Saturday afternoon (after the Cruz reading).

Admission is $8 for readings; $12 and $18 for workshop productions. (714) 708-5500. South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.