Slim means, big dreams

THERE’S a simple rule one should always observe in Mexico’s vast, unforgiving northern wastelands, says Angel Norzagaray: Move too fast, and you’ll dry out and die.

So Norzagaray has developed what he calls a “desert aesthetic,” a list of artistic guidelines for making theater on the edge of nature’s blast furnace. First, do away with inessential action and extraneous dialogue. Second, pare sets and props to a minimum: a red clown’s nose, some strategically placed chairs, a long, narrow paper roll painted to look like a stretch of endless asphalt highway.

Third, and most important, never forget where you are -- or how you got there. The scorching terrain along the U.S. border can be a desolate, even deadly place.

Yet its spare beauty captivates. Its austerity imposes discipline. Its sheer openness leaves room to imagine and experiment, away from the rigid cultural orthodoxies of Mexico City, far to the south. Here in the desert, Norzagaray says, an artist can be truly free to invent a cultural scene from the ground up, then nurture and watch it grow.

And though Mexican theater still tends to be heavily concentrated in the country’s chaotic capital, Norzagaray and his collaborators are determined to put Mexicali on the nation’s, if not the world’s, cultural map, one play at a time. “It’s impossible to speak of theater in Mexico. You can’t. We’re an enormous country,” says Norzagaray, an actor, director, playwright, university administrator, newspaper columnist, husband and father of two (soon to be three) young boys. “And I am 3,500 kilometers, 2,000 miles, from the Federal District [Mexico City].”

Fortuitously, though, Norzagaray is only 4 1/2 hours by car southeast of Los Angeles, where he and his intrepid theater company, Mexicali a Secas, will be headed this week. On Thursday, they’ll open a 10-day run as a featured attraction of the fourth annual FITLA, the Spanish-language acronym for the International Latino Theatre Festival of Los Angeles.

The company will perform three plays at the Ford Theatre and downtown’s Los Angeles Theatre Center, plus a signature piece, “Cartas al pie de un arbol” (Letters at the Foot of a Tree), a haunting, lyrically autobiographical play by Norzagaray, on Oct. 26 at Garrison Theater at Scripps College in Claremont. As in previous years, the festival will present works by U.S. and foreign artists encompassing a wide variety of theatrical styles and genres, including four performances at REDCAT by the avant-garde Catalan theater-dance artist Marta Carrasco.

Mexicali a Secas -- a colloquialism that means “having to do specifically with Mexicali” and also puns on secas, the Spanish word for “dry” -- performs in repertory, allowing its members to showcase their formidable versatility. Its home, a 319-seat theater built by the federal government in the 1960s as part of a national culture initiative, regularly hosts performances by arts groups from throughout Mexico.

Theater is a lifelong calling but not a full-time occupation for the members of Mexicali a Secas, a loose collective of about 12 actors, directors and designers. Norzagaray carries a full load as an administrator at the Autonomous University of Baja California. He writes his plays late at night or on planes and says he plans to break away from the FITLA festival for a few hours so he can attend his son’s scheduled birth by caesarean section at a Mexicali hospital.

Other company members hold jobs ranging from plumber to director of communications for Mexicali. Felipe Tututi, a former student of Norzagaray’s who will perform with him at the Ford in Carles Pons’ existential clown show “Gracias, Querida” (Thank You, Darling), is a carpenter. Norzagaray’s actor brother Heriberto, who handles promotion for Mexicali a Secas, will perform in Los Angeles in Victor Castillo’s play “Recuerdos de la Ira” (a.k.a. “Villa y Zapata”), which posits a reunion in limbo between the heroes of the Mexican Revolution, Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Emiliano Zapata. “We all do everything,” says Angel Norzagaray.

The company’s nonhierarchical, let’s-put-on-a-show-in-a-barn mind-set suits Mexicali, an unpretentious, self-made city of more than a half-million that is barely a century old. Residents here are accustomed to low-key cultural exchanges: They take in a steady diet of U.S.-beamed television, celebrate both Halloween and Day of the Dead, and make frequent trips to Calexico, Calif., to shop, buy gas, work and, in some cases, live.

William Flores, FITLA’s executive director, says that Mexicali a Secas is but one example of the immense theatrical talent that lies just on the other side of the frontera -- but, sadly, off most Americans’ radar screens. “The United States is very U.S.-centered,” Flores says, “and what’s happening in other countries, even though it’s very important, if there is no interest on the media, we don’t get to know that.” To help remedy the situation, FITLA has launched a new initiative to bring some of its theater productions to four Baja California cities -- Tijuana, Tecate, Ensenada and Mexicali -- and to develop workshops where Mexican and L.A. artists can create new works together.

The imposing bulwark of mixed feelings that straddles the U.S.-Mexico border -- envy, fear, ignorance, indifference -- runs smack down the middle of two of the shows that Mexicali a Secas will bring to Los Angeles.

Between tragedy and comedy

IN “Cartas al pie de un arbol,” a determined woman named Mama Sorda from the drug war-ravaged Mexican state of Sinaloa goes searching for her son, who has fled to the United States to seek work. Skirting the line between tragedy and comedy, “Cartas,” which premiered in Mexicali in September 2001, plays like a classical Greek drama, complete with a fateful crossroads, a chorus of mariachi musicians and a ragged, Tiresias-like visionary who serves up Sophoclean reflections on the fate of those who risk their lives to reach el norte.

Norma Alicia Bustamante Martinez, the actor who plays Mama Sorda, says that although “Cartas” addresses a bleak Mexican reality, its theme reverberates globally. “While this polarization exists between the very rich and the miserables, we can’t avoid it,” she says.

Norzagaray, 44, says that “Cartas,” which he also directed, is his most personal play. Raised in a poor rural family of nine children in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, he spent much of his youth doing farm labor. “It was a very beautiful childhood,” he says, “very hard, but very beautiful.” Writing “Cartas” for him was a way to help “recover the memory of your story, of your infancy” and place it in a wider context. “I am very interested in the intersection of north and south, life and death, infancy and adulthood, the real and the mythic,” he says.

“Deseo” (Desire), by the Chihuahuan playwright Victor Hugo Rascon Banda, brings the U.S.-Latin culture clash down to a human scale. The intimate two-character drama explores the blossoming love affair and disastrous denouement of Susan (Lucia Marano), a control-freak academic from Los Angeles, and Victor (Javier Guardado R.), a blue-collar worker whom Susan meets at a conference in his native Colombia.

Suggesting a contemporary, bilingual knockoff of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” with dashes of Edward Albee and David Mamet, “Deseo” explores the dynamics of erotic power and psycho-cultural manipulation. Resourcefully staged by Norzagaray and assistant director Jesus “Chima” Castanos, “Deseo” will receive four performances, in Spanish with English subtitles, at the Ford Amphitheatre.

Marano, the Italian American actress who plays Susan, sees an offstage parallel to her work in “Deseo,” which has required her to shuttle between her Silver Lake home and rehearsals in Mexicali. “It’s pretty heavy [stuff] to be, like, a first-class citizen and then a block away is such poverty,” says the actress in her native Bronx accent.

Carving out an artistic niche separate from the rest of the border area is a particular challenge facing Mexicali artists, says director Castanos. He concedes that Tijuana, Mexicali’s sprawling western neighbor, tends to dominate Baja California culture. “The same show that in Tijuana would bring 5,000 people here will bring 500,” he says.

But Mexicali already has been able to develop its own distinctive punk-rock and electronic music scenes, different from the more celebrated ones in Tijuana, Castanos points out. Why shouldn’t it do the same with theater? “We’re trying to develop our own identity, not just watching Tijuana and every move they make,” says Castanos, whose L.A.-based Teatro Apolo company will perform the play “El Jardin de los Reyes” (The Garden of the Kings) Nov. 9 at LATC as part of the FITLA festival.

Of course, this do-it-yourself approach doesn’t come cheap, even for as cost-conscious a company as Mexicali a Secas. Money and manpower are perpetually in tight supply. The troupe gets government support, but not much.

Still, Norzagaray deplores what he calls the culture of “crying and wailing” when it comes to the arts. “To say, ‘I ought to be helped because I am poor, because I live far away, because I’m from a big family’ -- no, no! You ought to be helped because you make theater of quality. So it’s very disagreeable to hear this moaning with respect to the lack of help and ‘blah, blah, blah.’ ”

“We are going to make good theater,” he vows, “with or without help.” Make that one more point to add to Norzagaray’s “desert aesthetic.”

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On the bill at FITLA

Schedule of performances for the International Latino Theatre Festival of Los Angeles:

“Recuerdos de la Ira”

Mexicali a Secas (Mexico), in Spanish with English supertitles; [Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood; $15.

8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday,

3 p.m. Sunday

“Melancolia”

Latino Theater Company Laboratory (U.S.), in Spanish and English; Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles; $15.

9 p.m. Friday through Sunday

“Deseo”

Mexicali a Secas (Mexico), in Spanish with English supertitles; [Inside] the Ford; $15.8 p.m. Oct. 27 through 29,

3 p.m. Oct. 30

“Gracias, Querida”

Mexicali a Secas (Mexico), in Spanish; [Inside] the Ford; $15.

6 p.m. Oct. 30

“Bandolero y Malasangre”

Textoteatro (Venezuela), in Spanish; [Inside] the Ford; $15.

8 p.m. Nov. 3

“Galopando Una Burla”

TGE Progetto Zattera (Italy) in Spanish; [Inside] the Ford; $15

8 p.m. Nov. 4

“Compania”

Instituto Internacional de Arte Teatral de New York, in Spanish, with a synopsis in English; [Inside] the Ford; $15

8 p.m. Nov. 5

“Erase Una Vez el Cine Mudo”

Progetto Zattera (Italy); Nov. 5, [Inside] the Ford; $15.

3 p.m. Nov. 6

“Olin”

CLADA (U.S.), in Spanish; Los Angeles Theatre Center; $10 at the door.

8 p.m. Nov. 7

“El Hombre de las Suelas de Viento”

F. Itinerant Theatre and CLADA (U.S.), in Spanish; Los Angeles Theatre Center; $10.

8 p.m. Nov. 8.

“El Jardin de los Reyes”

Teatro Apolo (U.S.) in Spanish; Los Angeles Theatre Center; $10.

8 p.m. Nov. 9

“Aguardiente”

Marta Carrasco (Spain); REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, L.A; $16-$24.

8:30 p.m. Nov. 10 to 12, 3 p.m. Nov. 13

“UN POEMA: la batalla entre el miedo y el deseo”

Giovanni Luquini Performance Troupe (U.S.); Los Angeles Theatre Center;

$15, $12 at the door.

8 p.m. Nov. 12

“Performance Fiesta Clausura”

Leandro Soto (Cuba/U.S.); REDCAT; Free.

5 p.m. Nov. 13