John Leguizamo begins teaching his ‘Latin History for Dummies’

John Leguizamo is just about unstoppable. Also, at this moment anyway, just about unintelligible.

The perpetually kinetic performer-playwright is calling from New York with a request to push back a phone interview a few minutes. He’s still in a dentist’s chair (and has the slurred words of a gauze-packed jaw to prove it).

When he finally manages to regain control of his face, the man who made his first big noise with a show called “Mambo Mouth” sounds entirely ready to jaw about his latest piece, which hits La Jolla Playhouse in April.

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The new solo show is “John Leguizamo: Latin History for Dummies,” and it’s a mash-up of history, comedy and its creator’s singular strain of playful provocation.

The work represents a return to La Jolla for “Johnny Legs,” the Colombian-born, Queens-bred artist who was last at the playhouse in 2010 with “Diary of a Madman.” That confessional show, under the name “Ghetto Klown,” made it to Broadway and won Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards.

“Latin History for Dummies” already has had its ticket punched for off-Broadway’s Public Theater next year (with a stop at Berkeley Repertory this fall). But the La Jolla presentation will offer an early glimpse of the piece, and Leguizamo clued us in on what to expect.

Question: Did you find the audiences here helped you fine-tune the show that became “Ghetto Klown” the last time you were at the playhouse?

Answer: Absolutely. This process is very collaborative. Going to La Jolla last time was fantastic, man. I really felt safe. I think it’s important for an artist to feel safe so they can experiment and they can try and they can fail.

If you can’t experiment and fail, you’re not going to push yourself. You’re not going to try to reach beyond your grasp. And you have to, as an artist.

And so La Jolla (Playhouse) and the audiences were really nurturing — really forgiving. (He laughs.) And it gave me the confidence to keep on trying different things every day, every show, and see where that led me.

You’ve said you were inspired to work on this piece after getting a sense that your teenage son wasn’t learning about Latin history. Was that the main impulse behind it?

That’s one part of it, what my son was learning in school. But more of it was this article I read that said 45% of Latin kids drop out of high school. I said, “Wow, I understand that, man.” I never felt connected to what I was studying. I never read about one Latin hero, one Latin person who contributed to the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, World War I, World War II.

It was really dumbfounding. You couldn’t project yourself into those areas like all the other kids could. Obviously, the white kids could project themselves (onto) the Founding Fathers, the heroes in all these wars.

You’re like, “I guess I’m not made of that stuff.” That’s the math you end up doing: “I’m just not made for that. I’m not of that quality, I’m not of that ilk.”

I found all these incredible stories. I said, “My God, we’ve been in all those wars.” There were 10,000 Latin people who fought in the Civil War on both sides. You never even hear about that.

It’s a huge amount of people whose history and importance is just erased constantly.

Do you feel as though Americans, whether they’re of Latino heritage or not, have a lot to learn from this?

That’s how I feel about it. Obviously for Latin kids, it’s a huge gain for them. But I think it’s a gain for the whole country.

Are you taking on characters in the piece or are you acting as narrator? How is the show structured?

I start with a personal anecdote — I bookend it with my son being in school, and then with me being in school when I was in eighth grade. And then I start digging back into history as a narrator, and re-creating the battles of the Aztecs, the battles of the Incas. And certain characters from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

And I find analogous moments from my life that sort of parallel those battles or those lives or those situations.

I felt the audience needed that. I noticed that audiences needed my perspective on it, or my own personal experience.

How did you go about trying to make all that material funny as well as informative?

Humor is never easy work, man! Comedy is the hardest thing you’ll ever work on in your life. And yeah, it’s massive amounts of smithing and trial and error. But you know, I like to keep my JPMs, my jokes per minute, dense. Because I feel that audiences deserve that, and that it makes the history so much more palatable.

At the beginning, my idea was that the history was just so good that I should leave well enough alone. It was very dense with the history. And I lost the audiences completely. So I had to really rethink the piece.

It’s a lot of work. And I’m still workshopping it. I’m hoping I’ll reach that place where it’ll be the perfect piece that I dream it could be.

You’re known for being such a high-energy performer, and a solo show is a high-pressure undertaking. How do you sustain that connection with the material and the audience?

I did something interesting I had never done before: I performed in comedy clubs for the first time in my life.

People in the theater demand more of a lesson, they want to be elevated in some way. In comedy clubs, they don’t care about any of that [stuff]. But they want you to make them laugh.

It was really good, because the history was dense. And comedy clubs, they give you so much energy, man. As soon as I’m in there, the expectations are really high. It was an education for both of us. I had to re-educate them and go, “I’m going to give you a dense narrative that you’re not used to. But you’re also making me joke-smith a lot more.”

And that’s great. I want this history thing to be really palatable.

What kind of impact do you hope this piece ultimately might have?

“Ghetto Klown” inspired so many people not to quit chasing their dreams. I got a lot of letters and social-media love about how it kept people pursuing their dreams, which was kind of my goal with that.

And with this one, I’m hoping people will go, “Wow, I had no idea. I’m going to start researching history.” Maybe public schools will start changing their textbooks.

I’m hoping that it’ll have that kind of revolutionary effect.

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