It’s still all work, no play

When the curtain finally went up this month on the Ricardo Montalban Theatre, the long-awaited debut spotlighted the hard-fought progress made by L.A.’s perennially struggling Latino theater. But at the same time, the clumsy unveiling ceremony also resurrected old doubts about its future.

The christening of the restored building, the former Doolittle Theatre near Hollywood and Vine, was billed as the culmination of a 34-year dream for Montalban, a lifelong advocate for greater opportunities for Latino actors. The arrival of the 83-year-old Mexican actor, lifting himself into a wheelchair, then flashing a handsome smile, drew cheers from a crowd that understood the perseverance it took to succeed.

For the first time in the U.S., Latinos own and operate a large, highly visible theater that provides the opportunity to stage major productions and showcase Latino talent, all under their own direction. For a community that represents half the city’s population but has little control over its cultural institutions, creating a home for pent-up artistic aspirations has galvanized the Latino theater community -- at least for the moment.

“We need it. We deserve it. And we have to be there [to support it],”says UCLA drama professor Jose Luis Valenzuela, who directs the Latino Theater Company based downtown at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

The question is: Will Latinos, and the rest of Los Angeles, for that matter, actually come out to support a full season of plays at the new theater? And more importantly, will the Ricardo Montalban Foundation, which owns the 1,100-seat theater, be able to raise the funds and recruit the talent needed to mount the first-class productions they envision? To succeed, the Montalban takes on the herculean task of reversing the recent retrenchment of Chicano-Latino theater, which burst on the national scene during the 1970s with great vigorand promise.

“If we play our cards right, we are going to be able to influence the future of the American theater,” says Jerry Velasco, head of the foundation and a prime mover in the acquisition of the building. “But at the same time, we have a big responsibility. If we want them to deal with us and respect us as a major theater, we’ve got to act and perform as a major theater.”

Growing pains

To some degree, organizers missed an opportunity to establish that respect on opening night May 8. As drama, the unveiling was resoundingly anticlimactic.

To begin with, budget constraints forced organizers to forego draping the front of the two-story, 1927 structure, depriving the moment of drama. The only part of the theater that was covered was the marquee, affixed to the building at the last moment by construction crews behind schedule by more than a week.

Velasco announced the grand opening from a narrow raised platform in the middle of the street, so crowded with standing celebrities and reporters that you couldn’t see the guest of honor in his wheelchair. On Velasco’s cue, workers lifted a red curtain from the marquee, but it had nothing written on it because the faceplate was missing, revealing just the fixture’s exposed fluorescent lights.

The awkward moment was symbolic because beyond the hoopla and the speeches, the Ricardo Montalban Theatre, like Latino theater in general, is still very much a work in progress.

When the theater became available four years ago, the Montalban Foundation raised from private donors the $2.3 million needed to buy it, and did it in less than a month. But that was the only phase that moved quickly. The facade unveiling marks only the start of a total renovation that will cost an additional $2.5 million for improvements to the stage, electrical system, seats and roof.

All that without staging a single, full-blown production. The theater has tentative plans to launch a regular season in fall 2005 but still has no operating budget or full-time staff. The foundation, which also hopes to acquire an adjacent property for a theater training academy, supplements donations through fundraisers and by renting the theater to outside productions, such as the WB’s “Steve Harvey’s Big Time.” Patrons paid up to $1,000 each for the unveiling, which also featured Chris Franco’s hilarious musical tribute to Montalban, best known for his role in the long-running TV series “Fantasy Island.”

The respected actor, recovering from back surgery, is a rare symbol of success for Latinos in Hollywood. After moving to the U.S. in 1939, he made his theatrical debut as a student at Fairfax High School and eventually appeared in more than 50 motion pictures. As a training ground for Latino talent, the new theater represents fulfillment of a long quest for Montalban, who was serenaded onstage by Robert Goulet’s in-person rendition of “The Impossible Dream.”

As part of the kickoff events, the Montalban is presenting a series of theatrical readings and workshops, dubbed “POV: A Festival of New Plays in Process,” which began Friday. Audiences will sit onstage as actors perform and develop four new plays over 10 nights.

The festival’s artistic director is Diane Rodriguez, a veteran of El Teatro Campesino, the influential farmworker theater group founded by playwright-director Luis Valdez. Rodriguez wrote the book for the festival’s opening work, a musical based on the life of Chicano songwriter Lalo Guerrero, whose music was used in “Zoot Suit,” Valdez’s landmark play about the persecution of Mexican American youths during the 1940s.

On opening night, Rodriguez took the stage to make an enthusiastic pitch for the festival, presented in collaboration with the Mark Taper Forum, where she runs the Latino Theater Initiative. The readings, she says, give the public -- and potential contributors -- a chance to imagine the kind of works that could be produced at the theater.

‘Another false start’

But even Rodriguez expresses doubts about getting a theatrical operation of this scale successfully off the ground. She has balked at accepting an offer to be the Montalban’s permanent artistic director, partly because there are still so many questions about adequate financing.

Rodriguez worries about making “another false start” at the Montalban. Three years ago, the theater hosted an outside production of “Selena,” about the slain singer that earned critical pans and lost more than $1 million.

“The reality is that a multimillion-dollar theater takes time to open right,” Rodriguez says in her office across from the Music Center. “I just don’t know if the board is going to be able to raise the kind of money to run a theater like this. If I do it, I don’t want to fail. I owe it to myself and the community out there not to fail.”

The notion that theater, ethnicity and community are inextricably tied has deep roots in the history of Latinos, especially in California. Valdez, the most famous Chicano playwright of the most successful Chicano play, had his start in the street theater that was El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworkers Theater), performing sketches on flatbed trucks for field workers being organized by the late union leader Cesar Chavez.

His emergence in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s coincided with the growth of the Chicano Movement. In the quarter-century since the movement faded, Latino political power evolved while the creation of Chicano cultural institutions lagged. Los Angeles, for example, has no Latino museum, no top-notch Latino art gallery, and only one major pop-music act, Los Lobos, who also emerged from the Chicano cultural movement.

“What happened with the Chicano Movement is that things were deconstructed, but no organizations were built up,” Rodriguez notes. “So today, consequently, 50 years later, we have no multimillion-dollar arts organization that supports work of color on a consistent basis. If we had, then our writers would be much further along.”

Valenzuela, the UCLA professor who formerly headed the Taper’s Latino Initiative, is also trying to create a Latino-run theater organization. With backing from Latino politicians, he has moved recently to take control of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, a downtown facility he hopes to expand.

‘We’re not that quiet anymore’

Meanwhile, the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre is providing technical and production support for a series of Latino play readings and workshops this summer. The series is part of a larger multiethnic arts program, backed by the county Arts Commission.

The timing of these efforts represents the maturing of the Latino theater community, buttressed by the growing power and wealth of the Latino middle and upper classes, the historic source of theater patronage.

“We’re becoming better at pushing for what we want. We’re not that quiet anymore,” Valenzuela says. “Somehow we have to get together and continue that trend, because if not, history is going to pass us by.”

The bookshelves in Rodriguez’s office are lined with scripts submitted to the Latino Theatre Initiative, part of the Taper’s program for new play development. But only a handful of Latino plays have made it to the Taper’s main stage, a continuing frustration that contributed to Valenzuela leaving the job after just one year.

In the theater as in the rest of the country, efforts to promote multiculturalism have fallen from favor. Regional theaters rarely stage Latino plays and corporate support for minority theater, such as L.A.’s Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, has dropped dramatically. Fewer opportunities mean fewer young people are entering the field as writers, Rodriguez says.

Valdez is also worried about the trend. “If you came down from outer space and saw the plays in the American theater today,” he says, “you’d think this was still an all-white country. We have to counter that with hope and with effort, but these are hard times. These are very hard times.”

Valdez, whose El Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista is one of the few survivors from among scores of Chicano community theaters that once dotted the Southwest, says the Montalban theater should become “a beacon for new playwrights.”

“What we need is more than little storefront theaters; I’ve been doing that for 40 years,” said Valdez, whose latest work, “Earthquake Sun,” a Mayan love story cast as futuristic science fiction, is being performed at the San Diego Repertory Theatre. “What we need is the opportunity to put our stories up on the proper pedestal, to frame them professionally. And that’s what the Ricardo Montalban Theatre represents.”

But first, Latino writers need to learn to tell stories in an entertaining, rather than a whining way, Valdez adds. “The biggest difficulty I find is breaking through this wall that conditions Latinos to act like victims,” Valdez says. “A lot of [Latino] plays are downbeat. They’re a drag. Nobody wants to pay top dollar to be depressed. People want to be uplifted. We’ve got to create heroes and superheroes in our storytelling.”

Rodriguez says the new theater also represents a chance for Latinos to cast off the minority mentality and start behaving like the majority they represent in the city and soon in the state. That means taking charge of their own productions but not excluding other groups.

In that spirit, Rodriguez notes that the fourth play in the festival, “Dhammashok,” about the life of an East Indian emperor, was written and directed by Ruben Polendo, artistic director of New York’s Theatre Mitu, a multiethnic ensemble whose work is based on ancient Eastern and Western theater traditions. Velasco says there has also been talk of collaboration with L.A.’s East West Players, a respected Asian American group.

Time will tell if Latino-run theaters can fulfill the elusive dream of fairly representing the region’s diverse communities, both on stage and in the audience. No other Latino play has come close to the cross-cultural success of 1978’s “Zoot Suit,” still the reference point for all Chicano theater. The secret is simple, Valdez says, turning a famous phrase about having faith in drawing fans to new venues: “Give them the material they want to see, and they will come.”

*

‘POV, a Festival of New Plays in Process’

Where: Ricardo Montalban Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood

When: Thursdays to Sundays, 8 p.m.

Ends: June 6

Price: $10-$15

Contact: (800) 595-4TIX, (800) 595-4849. See www.Ricardo montalbantheatre.org for full schedule.

Agustin Gurza can be reached at agustin.gurza@latimes.com.