Importing Latino Theater

When Mario Ernesto was 15, in 1962, he left his native Cuba for the United States as part of Operation Pedro Pan, which was based on fears that Fidel Castro intended to ship male Cuban teenagers off to the Soviet Union.

The teen’s first home in his new country: Helena, Mont. There weren’t many Cubans in Helena. There was a lot of snow. “Talk about culture shock,” recalls Ernesto. “To me, it was like a Hollywood movie.”

He eventually found his way to warmer parts of the United States, graduating from college in Miami. Twenty years ago, he founded Teatro Avante in Miami, and in the mid-’80s he was part of the group that began the International Hispanic Theatre Festival, which Teatro Avante has administered annually since 1987.

It has attracted a wide variety of theatrical productions, mostly from foreign companies. Last year, for example, 16 shows from eight countries were performed in six Florida cities, and a sampler from the festival was performed in New York.

A branch of the festival will visit Hollywood this month and, later, Albuquerque. Local performances will take place at the Ford Amphitheatre in the Cahuenga Pass, Friday through June 20.

Not only will the festival bring a glimpse of international theater, it also has inspired the launch of the Ford’s Latino Audience Initiative, which was created with a $450,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation to the county-owned Ford’s private fund-raising arm, the Ford Theatre Foundation.

The project began last year when Laura Zucker, executive director of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, noticed a listing in the New Yorker of the Hispanic Theatre Festival events and asked the Ford staff to inquire about the possibility of bringing something from the festival to L.A.

The inquiry from L.A. was a blessing for the festival, because a planned 2002 repeat of its 2001 New York extension was canceled in the wake of fund-raising shortfalls after Sept. 11, Ernesto says. And he felt it would be a pity to bring foreign troupes to the U.S. without additional performances outside Florida.

Zucker and Martin Kagan, managing director of the Ford, at first decided simply to bring two events from the Miami festival for one year. But as they investigated funding sources, the program evolved into the three-year Latino Audience Initiative, supported by the Irvine grant.

The scope of the project impressed Ernesto. “I’m always concerned that we may be token Hispanics. But they’re very serious.”

Kagan said the Ford has booked some Latino-themed programming and attracted some Latino audiences in recent years, but not enough in a county with a population that’s more than 40% Latino. The initiative comes with a full-time program manager, Ralph Flores, and an advisory committee from local Latino arts groups.

The nationalities of the two international companies that will launch the Hispanic Theatre Festival at the Ford may initially look surprising, considering that the majority of L.A. County’s Latino population is Mexican American. The two companies are Pia Fraus Teatro from Brazil, which will perform Friday through Sunday in Portuguese with English supertitles, and Compania Marta Carrasco from Spain, which will perform in Spanish with English supertitles.

Flores says that it might be “a difficult task” to attract Mexican American audiences to Brazilian and Spanish work, “but that’s not to say that the only thing they want to see is mariachi. They’re a wide-ranging population. Some of them want to see cutting-edge work.”

Jerry Velasco, who hopes to turn Hollywood’s Doolittle Theatre into a Latino performing arts center for the Ricardo Montalban Nosotros Foundation, says that in coming years, he hopes to see more Mexican and Central American groups in the festival. Velasco is on the festival’s advisory committee, but he didn’t attend the group’s only meeting so far.

However, another committee member, Ruben Amavizca of Grupo Teatro de Sinergia, says no one at the meeting has complained about the nationalities of the groups. “It doesn’t bother me that they’re bringing someone from other parts of the world,” he says.

There are no Mexicans in the Miami festival this year, Ernesto says. A Mexican group he tried to import had scheduling conflicts.

Ernesto, Kagan and Flores all say that the choice of groups for L.A. was dictated by Ernesto’s judgment on which groups would fare best in the Ford, a 1,240-seat outdoor amphitheater. The Florida venues are smaller and presented indoors. The Ford needed something big and visually striking, Ernesto says. He says the Spanish and Brazilian shows meet that requirement.

And he doesn’t think a production in Portuguese might deter members of the Latino Initiative’s target audience. “Farsa Quixotesca” is based on the Don Quixote story, which many in the audience already know, he says. The Brazilian company’s other show, “Bichos do Brasil,” is a nonverbal family-oriented show. Furthermore, he says, more than 60,000 Brazilians live in the L.A. area.

Is there some particular characteristic that distinguishes “Hispanic theater”? Laughing, Ernesto replies, “We’re very passionate, we scream a lot, we talk with our hands.” But more seriously, he says his kind of theater is “visual, physical, metaphorical. It makes you think a little more than the realistic and text-based theater we’re used to in the United States.”

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Pia Fraus Teatro of Sao Paulo, Brazil: “Farsa Quixotesca,” Friday-Sunday, 8 p.m. $20; “Bichos do Brasil,” Saturday, 10 a.m., children free, adults, $4.

Compania Marta Carrasco of Barcelona, Spain: “Mira’m (Se Dicen Tantas Cosas),” June 19-20, 8 p.m. $20.

Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood. (323) 461-3673.