So Much Potential, So Few Offerings

theseDonde esta el teatro latino?

With Los Angeles’ enormous Latino population and the city’s thousand-plus stage productions each year, it’s logical that L.A. would be a Latino theater center.

But consider:

The city’s most venerable Spanish- and English-language company, Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, has retreated to its 99-seat theater in Lincoln Heights after several years of producing half of its plays at a larger venue in downtown’s Los Angeles Theatre Center. Its hopes of creating a mid-size home on Olvera Street are dormant.

A two-year attempt to turn Hollywood’s Doolittle Theatre into a Latino performance center has yielded only one production that lasted more than a couple of weeks, “Selena,” which lost more than $1 million in its April-June 2001 run.

The track record of Latino-oriented productions on the main stages of the county’s major nonprofit theaters is sporadic at best. Even the recent production of Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba,” at the Mark Taper Forum, used an Asian American director and a number of non-Latina actresses.

The 800-seat Teatro Los Pinos in South Gate, which is generally described as the most commercially successful Spanish-language theater in the county, imports its mostly frothy productions from other countries and is off the radar of the larger Los Angeles theatrical scene.

Officials of El Portal Center for the Arts, the organization that ran the mid-size El Portal Theatre, had pledged to include Latino-oriented programming at their North Hollywood venue but didn’t do much before the group collapsed earlier this year.

All is not bleak on the Latino theater front; there are a few signs of ferment. The Mark Taper Forum plans two productions that can be considered Latino-oriented for its main-stage season. The county-run John Anson Ford Amphitheatre sponsored a brief festival of imported Latin productions in June. The International Latino Theatre Festival, Nov. 1-10, will offer 14 performances by U.S. and foreign companies, including East L.A. Classic Theatre, in downtown L.A. and Echo Park. In the sub-100-seat arena, Grupo Teatro de Sinergia performs all-Latino work in Spanish and English, and About Productions’ plays are frequently Latino-themed.

And look who’s back--Jose Luis Valenzuela, whose Latino Theatre Company will open its first play in six years, “Dementia,” at Los Angeles Theatre Center’s largest theater Thursday.

Valenzuela’s group began as an in-house wing of the L.A. Theatre Center resident company in the mid-’80s, and it presented several productions on LATC stages. In 1991, Valenzuela moved to the Taper, where from 1993 to 1994 he headed the well-endowed Latino Theatre Initiative. The Taper presented three Latino productions on its main stage that were generated by the initiative when he was there. “Bandido,” though not critically successful, was the Taper’s highest-grossing show of the 1993-94 season. But Valenzuela left in 1994, citing the complexity of trying to secure main-stage projects at the Taper.

He then created his own Latino Theatre Company, which briefly operated out of Plaza de la Raza in Lincoln Heights but returned to LATC to do “Luminarias,” by his wife, Evelina Fernandez, in 1996.

Although the company originally planned to present regular subscription seasons, Valenzuela soon concluded that without the infrastructure of larger organizations, he would have to spend too much of his time producing instead of creating new work. The company then spent the next few years turning “Luminarias” into a feature film, which was released in 2000. Fernandez is also the author of “Dementia,” which addresses AIDS from a Latino perspective.

Just before a recent rehearsal of “Dementia,” Valenzuela discussed the state of his company and Latino theater in L.A. He sat at a table in the LATC lobby, the same place where he and his group mounted a short-lived squatters’ demonstration after the resident company closed, in which they emphasized the importance of keeping the space available for Latino work.

“I always loved LATC,” he said. “We cannot go too far east or too far west, but my audience has no problem coming to LATC.”

Valenzuela is adamant that his company is a part of the larger American theater. Only once did he produce a show in Spanish. He believes his primary audience consists mostly of assimilated Latinos, some of whom aren’t especially familiar with Spanish. “We would write about a Latino family in L.A. like another playwright would write about a Jewish family in New York,” he said. “But I don’t think the world saw us that way.”

That last comment reflects his frustration from working within mainstream theaters. “If we have to satisfy the dramaturges of those institutions,” he said, “we begin to shape plays to their taste. The voices of the playwrights diminish. Latino theater is suffering because the good writers have to write for the regular theaters.”

Valenzuela is scornful of many of those theaters’ Latino-themed efforts. He questioned the multicultural direction and casting of the Taper’s “Bernarda Alba.” “We really don’t have Latino directors who can fulfill the needs of a city like L.A.?” he asked. He enjoyed South Coast Repertory’s recent Latino-themed “California Scenarios” but called it “naive,” adding, “We did that [kind of work] in the ‘70s.” A South Coast spokesman declined to comment.

However, he looks forward to the Taper’s productions of “Chavez Ravine” by the Chicano trio Culture Clash and “Living Out,” Lisa Loomer’s play about Eastside nannies and their Westside employers, scheduled for next year, not only because they’re Latino plays but also because he has worked with Culture Clash and Loomer.

Luis Alfaro, who with Diane Rodriguez replaced Valenzuela as head of the Taper’s Latino wing and now also has the title of associate producer of new play development at the Taper, pointed out that the Taper’s subscription seasons weren’t totally devoid of Latino work after Valenzuela left, citing Oliver Mayer’s “Blade to the Heat” in 1996, which was accompanied by an attempt to reach younger and more suburban Latino audiences, he said.

Alfaro disagrees with Valenzuela’s go-it-alone approach. “In my vision,” he said, “we’re at the table with everybody else. I have to be immersed not only in my own issues but in everybody else’s.” He said Valenzuela’s attitude is indicative of “why we haven’t grown as Latino artists.”

Specifically regarding “Bernarda Alba,” Alfaro said he had heard from Latinos questioning the multicultural approach, and he understood their frustration--”of course there are many Latinas who could have done those roles. But it was a very strong directorial choice to address the plight of women on all levels.” Alfaro said he had learned a lot from “Alba” director Chay Yew.

Cross-cultural theater can be a difficult challenge, however. Carmen Zapata, producing director of Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, which specializes in Spanish-language classics including the just-opened “The Mayor of Zalamea,” said the group’s productions in Spanish outdraw its productions of the same plays in English, 3 to 1. “We need to share the beauty of our literature with as many people as we can,” she said, “but we don’t get the response from the non-Spanish audience that we’d like.”

Her company’s cutbacks, which include a drop in the annual budget from $1 million to $800,000 and a paring of the staff from 12 to seven, are due to corporate and foundation belt-tightening in the current economic crunch, she said. “We used to be very lucky to be smiled on by major corporations. They’re not smiling now.”

Jerry Velasco, president of the Ricardo Montalban Nosotros Foundation that runs the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood, believes in cross-cultural experiences. He said he doesn’t want his eventual audience or his theater’s bill of fare to be all Latino, even though its primary mission is to promote and present Latino arts.

But the Doolittle, with 1,000 seats and no guaranteed subscription audience, is a relatively expensive place to do a show, compared with the many smaller sites in town, he said. And the failure of “Selena” in 2001 intimidated some prospective producers, he added.

At this point, Velasco said, the Montalban Foundation is concentrating its efforts on restoring the facade of the theater to something approximating its original look, at a cost of at least $250,000, and the production schedule is on hold, preventing immediate bookings.

Velasco blamed the failure of “Selena” on its lack of marketing and publicity resources. Alfaro, however, said “Selena” wasn’t good enough. “I believed its politics. I didn’t believe its art,” he said. “There has to be a sense of virtuosity.”

That’s another reason why Latino artists sometimes turn to the resources and experience of larger, mainstream institutions, and why play development workshops, such as a just-completed program the Taper sponsored for young Latino playwrights at the Lee Strasberg Center, might help.

Regular theatergoing is more important in many foreign Latin cultures, where tickets are cheaper and companies often subsidized, than it is in Latino communities within the United States, Alfaro said. This may explain why Teatro Los Pinos in South Gate draws big crowds from the ranks of recent immigrants to its Spanish-language entertainments and light comedies.

Simon Lopez has operated Los Pinos for 17 years, almost totally unobserved by the non-Spanish-speaking world. His shows often feature the stars of Mexican telenovelas, such as Armando Araiza, Manuel Falco Ibanez and Pablo Cheng in “Las Apariencias Enganan,” through next Sunday.

Velasco and Valenzuela said they had attended shows at Los Pinos. But Velasco said the Los Pinos shows, with their suggestive innuendos and themes, probably wouldn’t work at the Doolittle--especially when it’s renamed after the group’s inspiration and benefactor, actor Ricardo Montalban.

Valenzuela drew an analogy with Latino music. He said the Spanish speakers who go to Los Pinos are much more interested in the Mexican star Luis Miguel than in the Mexican American, L.A.-based Los Lobos. But Valenzuela wants to create a theater that’s comparable to Los Lobos. “This city,” he said, “needs to give stature to the Latino culture that’s evolving here, every day.”

Don Shirley is a Times staff writer.