Garden Inspires Latino Tales

Nearly 20 years ago, the noted Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi planted one of his signature public gardens in the heart of Costa Mesa’s office and shopping district.

His “California Scenario,” 1.6 acres of granite, sandstone greenery and flowing water, was conceived as a metaphor for the state’s varied landscape of deserts and redwood forests, mountains and rivers, oceans and fields.

Now comes an ad hoc troupe of 14 Latino theater artists--five playwrights, eight actors and a director--to plant anew in the Noguchi Garden. They are creating “California Scenarios,” a suite of short plays that touch on more than 200 years of the state’s Latino history and heritage.

The program, commissioned and produced by South Coast Repertory, is the showpiece of the Costa Mesa theater’s 16th annual Hispanic Playwrights Project. The writers all are alumni of the play development program, which seeks to give Latino writers a forum for workshopping their plays and gaining exposure.

A year ago, South Coast and Broadway Play Publishing issued “Latino Plays From South Coast Repertory,” one of a handful of Latino play anthologies in print. Last month, one of the scripts in the collection, “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot,” won Los Angeles writer Jose Rivera an Obie Award for playwriting after its New York City premiere at the Public Theater. The play had been workshopped at the playwrights project in 1999 and later premiered at South Coast.

“California Scenarios” is an attempt to stretch the project’s boundaries--by at least the long city block between South Coast Repertory and the Noguchi Garden. Project director Juliette Carrillo got the idea from her evening strolls in the garden--a place she says has “a lot of mystery, a lot of poetry to it.”

What, she wondered, would that mystery and poetry elicit from a group of playwrights assigned to write about the California Latino experience--and to set their pieces against one of the garden’s symbolic landscapes?

Three of the five convened in March to soak up the atmosphere--learning of the garden’s history, walking the grounds, touching and climbing on its natural-looking rocks and polished granite surfaces.

“It’s always a gamble” to try to put together an evening of different works from different writers, Carrillo said. But knowing the sensibilities of the five--Luis Alfaro, Joann Farias, Anne Garcia-Romero, Jose Cruz Gonzalez and Octavio Solis--she figured it was a solid bet that they would come up with plays varied enough in tone yet sufficiently entwined in theme to produce a cohesive evening of theater.

Garcia-Romero, the only non-Latino of the bunch (her father emigrated from Madrid to New England in 1965), studied Southern California’s history when she got the assignment and became fascinated by such 19th century characters as Pio de Jesus Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, and Tiburcio Vasquez, who earned a reputation as a master criminal and a ladies’ man during a long career of banditry that ended with his hanging in 1875. At the sight of the Noguchi Garden’s desert-like mound of sand and cactus, she began formulating “Desert Longing (or Las Aventuras),” a light comedy about two nieces of Pico who wait--along with various other women smitten by Vasquez--for the bandit to rendezvous with them in the desert and sweep them away to a life of romance and adventure.

Alfaro, co-director of the Latino Theatre Initiative at the Mark Taper Forum, provides a concluding, humorous bookend with “The Gardens of Aztlan (An Acto Hecho a Mano).” For Alfaro, a meal at the El Torito Grill, a Mexican restaurant adjoining the Noguchi Garden, was the inspiration. He imagined one of the women who hand-produce tortillas in the restaurant’s dining room having an existential crisis, fleeing the restaurant’s artificial environment, and seeking in the sculpture garden the essence of what it means to be Mexican American.

It’s a slippery essence to grasp, Alfaro says. “It’s a crisis of the Chicano, ‘ni aqui ni alla’-- ‘neither here nor there.’ We’re not true Mexicanos because we don’t really [fit in] well in Mexico, but we don’t feel truly at home here. So what is our place in the world?”

Wedged between the laugh-seeking “Desert Longing” and “Gardens of Aztlan” are three sober pieces. Farias, a California native now living in Seattle, was struck by the stream snaking through the garden. She imagined it as the border Mexican workers cross out of economic necessity--and as the mythical river between the living and the dead. Her “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back” focuses poignantly on the dying moments of a migrant strawberry picker, a proud, dogged workhorse caught between love of his family and the material want that compels him to leave them in search of work.

Gonzalez didn’t revisit the Noguchi Garden while preparing his piece, “Odysseus Cruz.” He didn’t need to, having often taken breaks there during his long tenure as the founding director of the Hispanic Playwrights Project. For him, the garden evokes primal myths: “It has sort of a Greek feel to me, the whole design with the rocks and gigantic things rising into the sky.” Gonzalez revisits the chapter from Homer’s “The Odyssey” in which the hero journeys to Hades to meet his dead comrades; in Gonzalez’s play, Odysseus Cruz, a daring migrant worker, must confront the souls of less fortunate friends who believed his tales of riches and died trying to follow him across the border.

Audiences will get their own taste of the migrant experience: The use of three different settings in the garden requires playgoers to pick up their folding chairs and move at least once during the 90-minute performance.

The wild card of the sequence is “Encarnacion” by Solis. Shadow puppets, captured on videotape and projected on a huge concrete wall, will enact a sweeping, poetically elevated account of the Christianization of California during the 1700s; live actors will provide the puppets’ voices.

The piece was not inspired by the Noguchi Garden but is part of a larger historical work in progress called “Dreaming California.” Solis, author of South Coast’s annual Christmas play, “La Posada Magica,” is one of several writers collaborating with Larry Reed, a puppet-theater expert from San Francisco.

On show nights, ushers and security guards will try to guide non-ticket holders quietly around the periphery of the audience and playing area. But rehearsals for “California Scenarios” have been strictly a public affair; there is nothing to stop passersby from stopping to watch--or walking through the set.

For Carrillo, these unusual interactions with the general public have underscored theater’s lowly position in the mass-cultural pecking order.

“We’ve had kids come up to say, ‘Are you doing a film?’ ‘No, we’re doing this play.’ ‘Oh, when are you going to film it?’ They don’t get what it is.”

At first, Carrillo expected her experiment would be an ephemeral, “site-specific” event limited to six performances over two weekends. Now she is thinking of trying to get “California Scenarios” published, confident that what began as a dramatists’ potluck has the potential to be an appetizing full-course meal in any setting where audiences might gather to hear tales of the Latino experience.

“It’s a nice little package, a nice evening, and it absolutely could be done elsewhere.”

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* “California Scenarios,” at the Noguchi Garden, Anton Boulevard and Park Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Fridays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends July 1. Tonight’s performance is sold out. $10. (714) 708-5555 or https://www.scr.org.