American Dream Analyst

Joe Hortua entered the job market in 1997 with a master of fine arts degree in playwriting from New York University. That qualified him to earn his living as a restaurant barkeep.

Talk about good career moves. Now, at the young-for-a-playwright age of 30, Hortua is getting his first professional production--South Coast Repertory’s world premiere of “Making It,” which opens Jan. 25. The play grew out of the Chicago native’s four-year tenure watching, listening and learning at Lumi, a tony Italian eatery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

“I was still so green, and I learned so much about life,” the spiky-haired Hortua said during a recent interview at, fittingly, the oak-trimmed bar in South Coast’s lobby. Hortua found much about the restaurant microcosm unforgettable. He accumulated a boxful of notes on yellow legal pads that he filled with stories and observations inspired by his co-workers and customers.

What Hortua saw and heard from his perch behind the bar in New York has been distilled and transformed in “Making It,” a play whose theme he sums up as “deconstructing the myth of the American Dream.”

The play has three sets of characters.

The waiter has an acting degree and besieged hopes of doing something with it; his boss and nemesis, the restaurant owner, freely shares her caustic life lessons as an actress who gave up her dreams for something solid.

The diners consist of an engaged couple--he an aspiring young playwright who loves to pontificate; she a warmhearted and a good listener. Hortua regards the woman, Claire, as a touchstone for the audience, the one clear-seeing person in “Making It” who is not consumed with “making it.” Paolo, the playwright, erupts against his neglectful mentor, a distinguished gay author and social activist who becomes Paolo’s emblem for all baby boomer phoniness, self-righteousness and self-absorption. The generational rift between boomers and Gen-Xers, and the question of whether the younger generation is hopelessly lost in cynicism, emerge as themes.

Working in the kitchen are two immigrants of unspecified nationality. One is in love with America’s promise. The other thinks Americans are crazed malcontents. Hortua himself is the son of immigrants who arrived here as adults. His mother, Milagros, left Bilbao, Spain, for adventure. His father, Jose, came from Colombia, where his family’s poverty forced him to quit school at age 12. In America, the senior Hortua went from sweeping the floor at a Chicago auto parts company to heading its data processing department. He worked hard, got some breaks, became an apartment landlord on the side and put Joe and his younger brother, a civil engineer, through college.

When David Emmes, South Coast’s co-founder and producing artistic director, read “Making It” last summer, he decided that the virtually unknown Hortua deserved a shot on the theater’s Second Stage, and that he would direct the show himself.

Emmes was intrigued not only by Hortua’s themes, but also by his unorthodox writing style. As befits a fan of David Mamet and Ernest Hemingway, Hortua writes in short, undecorated sentences that are small kernels of meaning. Through repetition, accretion and subtle variation, he builds them into lengthy speeches. On the page, Hortua’s script looks like free verse. He says his style is largely inspired by Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian playwright who died in 1989 and, according to “The Cambridge Guide to Theater,” is known for “skillfully orchestrated cascades of words.”

Emmes says he is coaching the cast of “Making It” to treat Hortua’s prose cadences with a care usually accorded classical verse plays. “It’s very rhythmic and musical in the way great classic texts often are.”

This is heady stuff, given Hortua’s unpromising literary beginnings. He says his bad attitude and miserable study habits as a schoolboy in Morton Grove, Ill., earned him Ds and Cs and moved one high school English teacher to a book-flinging rage. But he liked reading newspapers and magazines, especially about politics, and he wrote for the school paper. Despite poor grades, he was accepted into the highly rated journalism program at the University of Missouri--he suspects because of his ethnicity.

Everything changed when Hortua came home for winter break during his freshman year. First he met Beth Wohlschlaeger, now his wife and the mother of their infant son, Pablo. Two weeks later, he nearly died from a burst appendix. During his recuperation he resolved to become serious about his studies. Soon, he was bingeing on Hemingway and political writers.

It wasn’t until the last semester of his senior year--now he was at the University of Iowa, home of the famed Writers’ Workshop--that Hortua even gave a thought to writing plays. To fill out his credits, he enrolled in a seminar taught by playwright Naomi Wallace--then an unknown graduate student, later the recipient of a 1999 MacArthur Foundation grant for her politicized plays.

Something clicked in Hortua, and Wallace saw it. She gave him special attention and remained a mentor after he graduated. Hortua can remember having read just one play--”A Raisin in the Sun”--before taking Wallace’s class. The only one he had seen that made any impression was “Hair,” and that was because of the nude scene. Now he got up early on Saturday mornings, encamped himself in a deserted college library and devoured the works of Mamet, Sam Shepard, Caryl Churchill and lesser-known European writers recommended by Wallace.

“Joe’s work excites me because it engages boldly in issues of power,” Wallace said via e-mail from London, where she lives. “Who has it, who doesn’t and why. He’s a very talented writer with a big scope. Even if his characters don’t leave the room, Joe brings all the intricacies and mess of the world inside that room for them to engage in.”

His sole aim at the start of penning “Making It” was “to write about a restaurant in its totality.” Only as characters and scenes emerged did he realize that his restaurant was a caldron in which bigger themes of generational conflict and the pitfalls of the American Dream were bubbling up.

Hortua hopes, ultimately, that “Making It” will challenge viewers who accept uncritically the truth and virtuousness of the American Dream. But neither does he wish to dismiss the dream. Hortua was tending bar as recently as last summer; his wife is on maternity leave from her job as a psychotherapist treating troubled teens in a group home. The family of three occupies a one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens, and Hortua wants more.

He has a commission from South Coast to write another script. But the next big step, he says, may be a move to Los Angeles to pursue opportunities in television, where writers typically earn far more than they can make from plays. He will go where he needs to go for the sake of making it because, well, being American means you get the chance to try.

“Most Americans live with this myth that makes them neurotic; they always feel like they’re not living up to it and they should be elsewhere,” Hortua says. “But [pursuit of the American Dream] is so like my dad: You figure out what you want and you just go ahead and do it. [The dream] is attached to certain myths, but on the other hand it’s very true for me--and very valuable.”

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“Making It,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 and 7:45 p.m. $19-$51. Ends Feb. 24. (714) 708-5555.