Bringing a world view to L.A.

Watching the sleeping drunks and beggars on the steps of the antique church across the plaza, Aristides Vargas is reminded of a similar community, yet one much rougher and larger than the squalid sight outside his window. He’s remembering skid row in downtown Los Angeles.

That dismal, desperate place impressed itself deeply on Vargas’ consciousness last year, when he and other members of his theater troupe, Grupo Malayerba, presented Vargas’ play “Our Lady of the Clouds” on opening night of the second annual International Latino Theatre Festival of Los Angeles (FITLA). This month, Malayerba will again be one of the festival’s main attractions when it unveils Vargas’ six-character play “Of the Deaths and Resurrections of Lazarus, the Lazarillo,” about a destitute child’s struggle to find dignity in a violent and chaotic world.

Combining bleakly lyrical dialogue with gusts of cockeyed, absurdist humor -- a signature of Vargas’ writing -- “Lazarillo” will receive four performances at the Ford Amphitheatre from Thursday through next Sunday. Another of his works, “The House of Rigoberta Faces South,” will be presented at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, Tuesday through next Sunday, by the Nicaraguan company El Teatro Justo Rufino Garay, also as part of the festival in association with UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival and Highways Performance Space. All performances will be in Spanish with English supertitles.

Vargas, an internationally known actor and director as well as a playwright, says “Lazarillo” was inspired by “The Life of Lazarillo of Tormes,” an anonymous but influential picaresque novel written during Spain’s Golden Age. Back then, Vargas says, “lazarillo” referred to a person, often a youth, who would act as a guide to the blind. The play’s other reference is to Lazarus, the dead man restored to life by Jesus in the New Testament.

With its harshly comic view of Spanish society and the Roman Catholic religious establishment, the original 16th century novel ran afoul of the Inquisition, which banned it. A few years later the book reemerged in print, and its story continues to reverberate, Vargas and his colleagues believe, not only in Latin America but in those desolate parts of Los Angeles that shocked Malayerba last fall.

“We went to the United States, to the First World ... and our encounter with this city [Los Angeles] was this: mountains of people that lived in plastic under the bridges,” says longtime company member M. Del Rosario Frances. “There were crazy people, and it was a very strong vision, very lasting. And we thought that therefore, lamentably, this work, ‘Lazarillo,’ also would fit in the city of Los Angeles.”

Yet Malayerba took away another, far more positive image of L.A. “There are people there of different origins, of such diversity, such differences, that it is extraordinary,” Vargas says. “When this city learns to take on the differences and to live together, it is going to be a sensational place.”

With his flair for theatrical multitasking, the Argentina-born Vargas is a kind of modern-day version of the British actor-managers who dominated the London stage during the Victorian era. He also has a Dickensian knack for combining up-tempo entertainment with biting social commentary.

Vargas’ plays, which often deal with themes of exile, political oppression and the disruptions to the human psyche caused by violence and war, are widely produced throughout Central and South America. Juxtaposing poetic dialogue with unsettling, vaudeville-like slapstick choreography that recalls the works of the Italian satirical playwright Dario Fo, Vargas creates haunting, intricately layered plays that leave audiences alternately gasping with laughter and reflecting in troubled silence.

Other theater artists say Vargas’ works distill the essential qualities or historical realities of a particular time and place while capturing larger truths about Latin American society as a whole. That’s one reason why Luzero Millan, co-founding director of Teatro Justo Rufino Garay, says her company decided to collaborate with Vargas on two commissioned works, “Danzon Park” and “The House of Rigoberta Faces South,” which deals with a Nicaraguan family’s struggle to cope with the personal toll of a long civil war. “It’s very beautiful, the text,” Millan says. “The theme of the loss of dreams, the loss of love, it’s the reality of many Latin Americans.”

Malayerba (the name means “bad herb”) has spread its influence across the hemisphere’s Spanish-speaking half in other ways. Its home, a restored, three-story circa-1800 building near this Andean capital’s beautiful historic center, also serves as an acting laboratory that draws students from throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean. “Many of them aren’t going to be professional actors, but it’s an opportunity to encounter an ethic,” says Frances, who serves as the laboratory’s director. She, Vargas and Gerson Guerra, a third company member who graduated from the theater-training program, will perform “Lazarillo” in Los Angeles.

Since its inception, Malayerba has consisted of artists with roots from throughout the Latin world and beyond. Vargas left Argentina at 19 to escape his homeland’s political upheavals. Frances emigrated from Pamplona, Spain, 34 years ago, during the Franco dictatorship. Guerra’s mother is Brazilian. This diversity, company members believe, has enriched the group’s artistic perspective while allowing it to stay firmly grounded in Ecuador. “We know through our living that this world doesn’t end in Ecuador, that there is a universe much richer and much more complicated,” Frances says.

Like a number of top-flight Latin American arts companies, Malayerba survives on a bare-bones budget (about $30,000 annually) bolstered by Vargas’ playwriting royalties and occasional grants from foreign arts organizations, chiefly in Europe. Usually the company can afford to produce only one show a year in its 50-seat theater here. The Ecuadoran government gives no financial assistance to the company, despite having awarded Vargas its prestigious National Culture Prize in 1997.

Despite these constraints, Malayerba over the years has established close working relationships with theater companies and programs in Bolivia, Puerto Rico and other Latin countries. Stateside, Vargas’ works have been presented in Miami, Dallas and Los Angeles, but he says that in general Malayerba has had relatively little contact with U.S. theater companies and audiences. “I think there’s no interest, simply,” Frances says, referring to the prevailing U.S. attitude. “They believe that the interesting world is in the United States, and that in Latin America they aren’t going to find anything special, in Latin America there are Indians.”

For that reason, Vargas says, festivals like FITLA and UCLA Live’s are all the more crucial. “It can establish communication with another culture that is not North American,” he says. “In the long term ... it is going to convert into something more solid, but for now it is a process. Los Angeles is one surprise after another.”

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Two plays by Aristides Vargas

What: “The House of Rigoberta Faces South,” El Teatro Justo Rufino Garay

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Hilgard Avenue, Westwood

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 2 p.m. next Sunday

Ends: Next Sunday

Price: $28 and $40

Contact: (310) 825-2101

Also

What: “Of the Deaths and Resurrections of Lazarus, the Lazarillo,” Grupo Malayerba

Where: [Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 3 p.m. next Sunday

Price: $15

Contact: (323) 461-3673 www.fitla.org for festival schedule