THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 16, Number 3 Fall 2004

Editor: David Savran Guest Editors: Caridad Svich and Maria Delgado Managing Editor: Ken Nielsen Editorial Assistant: Amy E. Hughes Circulation Manager: Elisa Legon Circulation Assistant: Juan R. Recondo

Professor Daniel Gerould, Executive Director Professor Edwin Wilson, Chairman, Advisory Board Frank Hentschker, Director of Special Projects

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Editorial Board
Philip Auslander Una Chaudhuri William Demastes Harry Elam Jorge Huerta Stacy Wolf
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. Our aim is to promote research on theatre of the Americas and to encourage historical and theoretical approaches to plays, playwrights, performances, and popular theatre traditions. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes (rather than endnotes). Hard copies should be submitted in duplicate. We request that articles be submitted on disk as well (3.5" floppy), using WordPerfect for Windows or Microsoft Word format. Submissions will not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Please allow three to four months for a decision. Our distinguished Editorial Board will constitute the jury of selection. Address editorial inquiries and manuscript submissions to the Editors, JADT/Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309. Our e-mail address is mestc@gc.cuny.edu.
Please visit our web site at web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc Martin E. Segal Theatre Center publications are supported by generous grants from the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Copyright 2004

Shannon Jackson Jonathan Kalb Jill Lane Thomas Postlewait Robert Vorlicky

The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1044-937X) is a member of CELJ and is published three times a year, in the Winter, Spring, and Fall. Subscriptions are $12.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an additional $6 .00 for postage. Inquire of Circulation Manager/Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309.
All journals are available from ProQuest Information and Learning as abstracts online via ProQuest information service and the International Index to the Performing Arts. All journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 16, Number 1

Fall 2004

Contents
CARlOAD SVICH AND M ARIA M. DELGADO

E/merging Territories: Latina/o Theatre and Performance

CARlOAD SVICH

Shaping the Future of the American Voice

STEPHEN B OTTOMS

19

Sympathy for the Devil? Maria Irene Fornes and the Conduct of Life
ASHLEY LUCAS

35

The Stigmatized Body on Stage: Evelina Fernandez's Dementia in relation to the AIDS Crisis
JENNIFER FLORES STERNAD

52

The Politics of Ephemerality: Harry Gamboa Jr. in Conversation

GUILLERMO G6MEZ-PENA

63

Brownout 2 with and introduction by Elaine Katzenberger

CARlOAD SVICH

97

Re-Shaping the Future : Afterthoughts on a Community Conversation

CONTRIBUTORS

110

Dedicated to Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez

Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004)

E/MERGING TERRITORIES: VIEWS ON lATINA/0 THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE (ARIDAD SVICH AND MARIA M. DELGADO

"Latino" is a necessary makeshift shelter that we're keeping over us in the storm.t he dreams that he dreams silence and then hunger he dreams that he dreams hunger and then he dreams that he dreams hunger and then silence he dreams what he dreams2 The history of Latin(o) American writing for theatre and performance is as duty bound to themes of honor, conflicting passions, and class struggle as to themes of independence, free will, homelessness, cultural formation, identity politics, and border crossing. Irrevocably tied to a history of colonialism and syncretism, Latina/a theatre has risen as much out of Mayan ritual tradition as Greek, and Iberian classicism as Bahian carne-val. In the U.S., Latina/a dramatists have been forging a unique, hybrid blend of drama for close to fifty years without garnering much in the way of attention, save for a few notable exceptions. Nicholas Dante's Pulitzer Prize for A Chorus Line in 1976 rarely figures in regard to contributions made by Latino dramatists and librettists in mainstream and academic presses' discussion of U.S. theatre history.3 Nilo Cruz's 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Anna in the Tropics, whilst certainly acknowledged by the media, was met with skepticism and thinly disguised disregard by critics when the play reached the Broadway stage. In the "middle" history, between Dante and Cruz, for example, there has been an extraordinary amount of rich, distinguished writing for theatre and performance which reflects the seemingly in-exhaustive range of imagination and stories
1 Jose Esteban Munoz, "Towards Translocalism: Latino Theatre in the New United States," in Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries, ed. Caridad Svich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 66-70, at 69.

2 From Michael John Garces, "Caught" (unpublished script, 2003).

3 Alberto Sandoval's exemplary work in Jose, Can You See? Latinos on and off Broadway (University of Wisconsin Press: Madison and London, 1999) is, of course, a prominent and groundbreaking exception.

SVICH AND DELGADO

u.s.

in the Latina/a writing community based in the U.S. These, however, have been pushed to the fringes of writing about U.S. drama, which has focused rather predictably on a rather conventional cohort of largely white, male dramatists who simply do not reflect or acknowledge the changing geographical and cultural landscape of the

Exceptions have always existed. Master dramatist Maria Irene Fornes's exemplary body of work cannot be diminished despite changing trends. As both writer and, crucially, director, she has forged a career that has been shaped by and in turn helped shape off-off Broadway and the avant-garde theatre movements of the 1960s. Her Spanish and Cuban heritage have proved palpable referents in her work, but they are referents that have defied easy stereotyping or pigeonholing. Indeed her impact on a generation of dramatists and storytellers, which include not only Nilo Cruz, but Eduardo Machado, Migdalia Cruz, Cherrfe Moraga, John Leguizamo, and Carmelita Tropicana (to name a few) has been significant enough to set the course of Latina/a dramatic writing for the past thirty years, as well as its present and future. Fornes's position somewhere between the languages of theatre, visual arts, and performance has also served as a prototype for other artists from the Americas whose theatrical journeys similarly negotiate the vocabularies of biculturalism, live art, dramaturgy, and languages refracted and reworked through the prisms of translation. Crucially it is an engagement with the roles that performative interventions occupy in our time that marks all their works, and these interventions and strategies take varied and challenging forms. It may be that Carmelita Tropicana, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo G6mez-Pena have been championed by performance studies academics but the landscape of American theatre today is impacted as much by the force of Jose Rivera's writing for theatre as by that of Guillermo G6mez-Pena's writing for performance and cyberspace. Interrogating the mythologies and iconographies that have shaped the myriad cultural identities that make up the Americas is at the core of the work. And yet, even while young writers like Alejandro Morales, Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya, Quiara Alegria Hudes, and Jorge Ignacio Cortinas are continuing the evolution of what is possible on our stages, the territory in which Latina/a drama exists is barely sign-posted on the U.S. theatre map. Beyond the U.S. to the U.K., the Latina/a voice remains very firmly on the outer fringe : occasional performances in "alternative" venues with cultural programmers citing "difference" and "otherness" as a means of justifying their decisions to program more visibly identifiable African-American dramaturgy rather than the Latina/a. Indeed Latina/a drama is constantly emerging, rather than arrived, and whilst this may seem problematic to many practitioners

EMERGING T ERRITORIES

and scholars in the field, we posit that the day Latinoja drama arrives will most likely be its end. In a state of emergence, anything is possible. Indeed, the impossibility of what is possible is often at the heart of the work by our most gifted dramatists and performance artists. Chafing at the Canon, digging away at national and trans-cultural myths, Latinajo theatre practitioners claim several spaces of play at one and the same in their work. Theatrical space is political, sexual, high- and low-brow. Explorations of club culture rub up against decoy texts on the Web, ancient Indian and Asian myths, graffiti, the dramas and genres written by Iberian icons, and cinematic referents. Stories of migration occupy permanent rather than nomadic space in the body politic of the Latina/o drama. Migration appears as a mode of being, a way of life, a bridge from the multiple worlds that we simultaneously inhabit. Jean Genet and Reinaldo Arenas share psychic space in the voices of queer writers creating un-coded texts for the stage. The socio-political histories of Cuba, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Central America are inextricably entwined with those of the United States. The specter of Spain remains a powerful if problematic reference point. America is both the dreamed-of "North" of the border crosser, and North, Central, and South America: Las Americas. To understand contemporary U.S. dramatic writing, one must understand contemporary Latinajo theatre. The American voice is made up not only of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Paula Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Mac Wellman, and John Guare, but Luis Valdez, Culture Clash, Mildred Ruiz, Ricardo Bracho, and Michael John Garces. The list is long, impressive, and healthily diverse, and if in our classrooms, and in publications, this is not always the case, time will optimistically reward both the student and historian with the clear shining evidence of the wide stylistic, emotional, and geographic range of the theatrical voices of the Americas. In this issue we gather scholars and practitioners engaged in the lively negotiation between performance, practice, and theory focused on the Latina/o performative voice. Opening with an edited transcript of a roundtable on the state of Latina/o playwriting held at INTAR in New York in November 2003, which reflects and comments on the diverse constituency of the Latina/o arts community, we move on to hear from U.K.-based scholar Stephen J. Bottoms's polemical take on the work of Maria Irene Fornes. Which voices are heard, which voices are allowed to be heard by the media, and which voices refuse to be silenced are themes running through both pieces. In mapping out the resonance of Fornes's The Conduct of Life in a post-9/11 America beset by the phantoms and realities of imperialism, Bottoms argues for a reading of the play that positions its concerns within the

SV!CH AND DELGADD

text of social immediacy that has always shaped the reception of the canon. Young scholar Ashley Lucas examines the work of Evelina Fernandez within the specific context of Chicano theatre and politics against the "broader" context of American theatre, and whether indeed one context need be placed necessarily against the other. Performance artist Harry Gamboa, Jr., sits down to an interview with Jennifer Flores Sternad to talk about anti-canonical, subversive structures of performance and the power of both invisibility and trace(s). Guillermo G6mez-Pena in his performance essay Blackout 2 claims territory for the stateless voice as well as the maligned and disregarded voice of illness. In the afterword, we hear again from some of the practitioners from the historic 2003 INTAR panel, who, in a documented cyber transcript present their positions in response to pointed questions about nostalgia, commerce, globalization, trade, and education. In a post-post-modernist landscape of skepticism and nihilism, their vocabularies engage vibrantly and vociferously with the borders, enigmas, and politics, both real and imagined, of our age. The bodyits contents and dis-contents, its status as a locus for myths based on fear and foreboding and a site for enacted punishment-becomes a central concern for the practitioners and scholars assembled in this issue. Transgression is not a conscious mode of working, but rather an attitude to theatrical endeavor that intersects with the social, economic, and political realities of life in the Americas. Time and again, however, what remains a constant in Latina/a performative work is the beauty of the possible: the "what is to come" for our form, and how it is responding to the demands of the age. Embracing play, pose, and experiment, the artists herein take a neo-Modernist delight in language and the heightened possibilities of human speech (voice as drum, speech as action, image as force) counter to the plastic tendencies of our debilitating Age of Reproduction, and its alternately realistic and pornographic artistic imagination. Latina/a writing for the stage, in even its short history in the U.S., stakes a different claim. Its territory is local and global, mono and multi-lingual, male and female, straight and queer. The very open-ended-ness and ambiguity of Latina/a theatre ensures that it is a territory that will never be defined by strict borders imposed with covert political agendas. There is not one map here, but many maps. They speak with an eloquent, passionate, and mestizo tongue of lands broken, remade, and unbroken spiritually. They speak of old dreams and new dreams. Of what is possible and necessary. Of the ephemerality of performative moments that cannot be controlled or interpreted to particular agendas. And always, somehow, the privileged moment of ecstasy in art when the impossible is made concrete, appearing, if only for an instant, before it disappears into memory.

Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004)

SHAPING THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN VOICE: A ROUNDTABLE ON POTENTIALI1Y, DIFFERENCE AND (OMMUNI1Y IN THE NEW GLOBAL ORDER (A LATINO/A PLAYWRIGHTS' PERSPECTIVE)l

Organized and moderated by

(ARIDAD SVICH

with: Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya, Ricardo Bracho, Jorge Ignacio Cortinas, Migdalia Cruz, Michael John Garces, Amparo Garcia-Crow, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Eduardo Machado, Oliver Mayer, Alejandro Morales, Carmen Rivera, Elaine Romero, Luis Santeiro, Alberto Sandoval Sanchez, Nilaja Sun, Candido Tirado, Karen Zacarias, and (via e-mail) Octavia Solis The following is an edited transcript of a public roundtable on Latina/a theatre and playwriting held on November 10, 2003 at INTAR Theatre in New York City. For over thirty years, INTAR and its founding artistic director Max Ferra have nurtured and supported many of the U.S's finest writers, actors, and directors, most significantly during Maria Irene Fornes's Playwrights Lab (1978-1991). Hailing from Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New York, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Texas, and Washington D.C., the established and emerging playwrights who came together for this encounter represent the broad geographic and artistic diversity of the Latina/a writing community. In this document, the colloquial and sometimes fragmented nature of the roundtable is preserved in order to re-capture the experience of the event for the reader; it also serves as an indicator of the multivalent articulations of experience within this writing community caught at a crucial moment in its history.
INTRODUCTION BY (ARIDAD SVICH

In 2005 Don Quixote will be 400 years old . Cervantes has taught us, and continues to teach us, that uncertainty is indeed all we can count on in this world. We live somewhere in La Mancha with
1 The roundtable was made possible with support from the TCG/PEW National Theatre Artist Residency Program. Special thanks to Lorenzo Mans, literary manager of INTAR, for practical support, Jennifer Flores Sternad for audio transcription, and to Michelle Memran and Alejandra Parra for video transcription.

SVICH

names borrowed and invented, and impossible dreams of just, classless driven societies on our brains. We move about with an equal measure of confidence and trepidation on the ever-changing map that James Joyce so insightfully remarked upon in Ulysses as being "Trieste-Zurich-Paris." Our future is bound up in our present. The memories we hold dear are handed down from our parents, grandparents, diaries, letters, stories, movies, and novels. Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Venezuela, Columbia, Argentina, Brasil, Peru, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Chile, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Canada, Portugal, and Iberia (and other countries of the Americas) all live in our dreams and imaginations as ports of call and ports of fictional entry into worlds full of mystery, romance, violence, and possibility. These countries that make up the map of the Americas seem like undiscovered countries, partly because in the U.S., in this segment of the Americas, north and south have been distanced by economic inequalities, class warfare, border rage, and educational misrepresentation. Behind the seductive come-on, the open-lipped beckoning of the southern island sirena, painted so effectively and permanently by colonial culture and its post-colonial tendency to accept and identify (but not necessarily recognize) the exotic Other by simply re-dubbing existing tropes in a quasi-revisionist mode, lies the painful truth of complicity between the Americas. The sirena, the coqueta, the billboard image of the loose-hipped South and Caribbean, was created in a tacit agreement between the Americas so that the dollar economy could invest in native riches for the betterment ultimately of non-native conglomerates. But what was not agreed upon or expected in this economic and political exchange was the mestizaje that Cervantes predicted and placed on the literary map so many years ago. The sons and daughters of the original sirenas, coquetas, pistoleros and mercaderos, enchanted by stories and myths of their past, have been breaking ground over the last forty years or so to unearth and re-conceive literary history. Uncovering the veiled stories of these "undiscovered" countries, and of buried grandfathers, greatgrandmothers, ancient warriors, and barrio-teros, the Latina/a writers of the Americas have been re-configuring the map, even as it keeps changing, evolving and refusing to settle on La Mancha, Trieste, Zurich or Paris, but rather acknowledging that they all exist at one and the same time in their respective individual and idiosyncratic modes as well as existing as one fragmented, mixed-up yet continuous stream of history. In a mix of genres, languages, and voices that are necessarily hybrid and representative of the uncertainty of the modern condition, Latino and Latina writers have been making work that refuses easy

S HAPING THE f UTURE

labeling or branding. We know all too well what being a coqueta is like. The game of barter and trade has been played for hundreds of years. The bill of goods sold need not be us anymore, or them, but rather no bills, please. Instead, Latina/a dramatists in particular have been asking their audiences provocative questions about how it is that human beings, and therefore societies, witness and participate in acts of joy, suffering, and cruelty, and how they can embrace potentiality. In the 1980s and 1990s the identification of self and community was a common thread in the works of our dramatists. Exploring aspects of cultural nostalgia and the psychic toll of diaspora on the human condition were signifiers of our work. Finding a language between A and zeta in order to express who we were and needed to be became a goal (and still is). We stole a page from Cervantes's book, and started to make our own Quixote of the New World . Miguel Pinero and Luis Valdez wrote a couple of chapters and then Maria Irene Fornes re-invented the book. Eduardo Machado, Cherrie Moraga, John Jesurun, Migdalia Cruz, Nilo Cruz, and many others followed swift on their heels with urgency, ambition, and humility. And now we find ourselves facing yet another chapter, another page in the great reconstruction of the writing body of the Americas, and at this vulnerable time we are forced to ask again What language(s) are we speaking to and with each other and our world, and why? What impossible dreams do we have for the right here and the right now? And how can we truly transform societies broken by centuries of plunder, trade, willful and un-willful violence, tyranny and genocide with a few words, and some paper or a computer screen? A little wish: Tilt at windmills, forge ahead, be disillusioned and rise up again. The constancy of our task will exceed our singular endeavors, if not to change history, then to simply leave a mark on the path of time. One print, one scribble, one rude scrawl across a neglected wall will be read by a child who cannot imagine or understand the future, but who will take up perhaps ( quizas, quizas, quizas, as the old bolero goes) a pen, a spray paint can, marker, or invisible ink and write the next and next line on the wall of endless human desire. As we write in the 21st century, and have been writing in the previous one, what stories will be found on the map across north and south?

SVICH

A STATEMENT

FROM 0CTAVIO SOLIS

To articulate the events and trends of the future is more difficult than it's ever been, because we are more aware now of the random nature of our world . Still, it doesn't mean we abdicate our responsibility to shape meaning into these random aspects. We find structure that lets us assume more power over what happens next. There's a kind of freedom in being able to predict things that may never come to pass, since who in this life is truly prescient anymore? But sometimes we hit the mark and for the sake of that schwang at the bullseye, I'll muse a bit on the future. My first comment is that Mr. Nilo Cruz has blazed a trail for all of us. In achieving the Pulitzer recognition he deserves, he has cast us all graciously into his limelight and we will reap the benefits of that sooner than later. By consistently writing in a voice true to his roots and depicting a stunning world from which he came, he has made our culture more resonant with what some think of as the American Life. We are the American Life. My second comment is that we have been doing that to some degree already, and with sparklingly diverse results. It's become impossible to define what best typifies a Latino play; and Latino playwrights are even tougher to nail down. Some don't even prefer the tag "Latino." But each of them embraces his/her own idea of the world, and by that token, that world embraces us. It's not all that rosy, though. I still don't see us getting produced with the frequency we should be. I'm sure economics and demographics have a lot to do with it; I'm sure personal taste and schedule conflicts have something to do with it too. But, whereas a few years ago, we were part of the agenda, now we're only a memo. What I am feeling, though, is a subtle sense of belonging to a larger class all of a sudden. That same slightly darker class of American that the Patriot Act is casting sidelong glances at. El Otro, The Other. The Foreigner, The Alien. The one who should be a little more grateful but still has something jammed in his craw. The one whose allegiances we wonder about. I don't like it, and yet, I like it. Because this underhanded process of cultural disenfranchisement is the meat on my plate. What does this mean for our work? A little more political heat. A little more coraje (as if there wasn't enough anger already). A little more eloquence on the vagaries of living American . But also a greater awareness of the world outside our borders. A greater fearlessness about stepping outside our play structures to forage into new ones. A reevaluation of what our Latino identity means in a world where LatinAmericans don't think of Latino identity, per se, because they are the

SHAPING THE F UTURE

general population. They don't need the Decade of the Hispanic. Soon in California, there will be more Latinos than Anglos. But only the Anglos will get really hung up on it. Recently in Mexico City, I had a play done, one I considered was a quintessentially American work. They loved it because it spoke to them about what being Mexican was. I got very confused. Spy Kids (2002) is stealing all our thunder. Because filmmaker Robert Rodriguez is doing it all on his own terms. Because he is insisting on showcasing Latinos. Because all the kids watching it don't even consider the subversive aspects of seeing so many brown people on screen. They're having too much fun. I think we're all to some extent getting tired of the expectations some directors and producers have about us. We want to write about love, and sometimes with people who don't have Hispanic surnames. We want our chance to try on some of the Greeks, to do our own Medea or Orestes. We want to explore gender issues that go beyond our cultural heritage. Sometimes a Latino is in the picture because one of every five persons in this land is a Latino. That's all. We're stretching the notions of what Latino work is, and that's to all our benefits. And sometimes we want to write about the old vatos in the neighborhood, and that's cool, too. My hat's off to the directors who have never wavered in their faith in us. Those who will continue to call us up when it's not "our" turn. They'll pay for it, like they always do, but our work will get better, their theatres will get bette~ and their audiences will get better. Those subscribers that won't will die. Teaching is our real future. We have to teach, we have to craft what we have learned into a doorway for the next tier of writers. There is great humility in understanding that THEY are the future trailblazers, because it's sorta admitting that not all the walls are going to tumble for us in this generation. Luis Valdez and Maria Irene Fornes blew down some of the first, and Cherrie Moraga and Eduardo Machado blew down some more, and we are doing some hella damage on some structures right now. But it won't make a bit of difference unless we show the way to the coming crew. College theatre. That's the future too. Yeah, Yale, NYU, blah blah blah. But I mean real college theatre that most Latinos can afford. I meet many actors today who tell me they got their start doing my play in some college production in the middle of nowhere (like my home town, El Paso) . There's the breeding ground for our future directors and actors, and I won't turn my nose up at it. 'Cause ya never know. These are a few of my rambling reactions to the future I perceive. They're all mine, and chances are, they'll boomerang right back into my big yap. It doesn't matter because all of this was predicated on opportunity anyway. Which is suddenly more palpably

10

SvrcH

real. How fortunate we are to have Edward Albee, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Nilo Cruz mentioned in the same minty breath.

CS: In the process of putting this panel together, I asked the writers

a series of questions that have been on my mind quite ardently for the last couple of months. The questions were as follows: a) As the global map reconfigures itself, where do you see Latina/a dramatic writing heading? What is its concrete future? b) The first generation or so or Latina/a writing for the theatre focused primarily on cultural nostalgia. What happens after nostalgia for lands remembered, longed for, or imagined? c) What dreams do you have for the theatre's present? d) How do you identify your community? And how does this affect what or how you write for the stage? e) Transnational trade and market economy dominate much of what is seen and/or documented of work made for the public eye (i.e. dramas). Where do you stand in either embracing, critiqueing, bypassing, or challenging capital pressures? f) In what ways can theatre transform and/or heal a culture? Riffing on what Octavia Solis has brought to the table, let's begin with: what dreams do we have for future generations, and how they relate to the dreams that we currently have as writers?

Luis Santeiro: When I write children for children's television (Sesame Street), it has nothing to do with being Latino; I am just a writer. But something is missing. I do some of my best work writing for children's television, but a part of me is forced out of the equation because the fact that I am Latino is not part of what I am writing. So I write plays, and screen plays, and yes, "I do the Latin thing" but it still feels very fragmented to me. When I write for TV, I am a writer; when I write for theatre and film, I am Latino. I hope that in the future writers don't have that split in their lives. Ricardo Bracho: My dream for North American English-dominant theatre is a year without Shakespeare. Still the best produced playwright in this country and this fact I think speaks most to the fact of the U.S.'s persistent sense of itself as an Anglo Colonial settler society than anything else. In his stead I advocate for the staging of new work by local playwrights in all those parks, stages and school auditoriums. By local I mean someone can walk, take public transportation or drive on less than a whole tank of gas to rehearsal and the proposed production site. And this is unlikely given that the that the NEA just funded Shakespeare's expansion to remote parts of

S HAPING THE FUlURE

11

Alaska, military bases and more rural spaces, but completely possible given how many actors, technicians, designers, and writers that would be creatively nurtured and temporarily liberated from iterations of a terrible thing.

Nilaja Sun: I am a solo performer and an actor (and currently a 2003 Princess Grace fellow at INTAR). I think that Mainstream America, whatever that means-is seeing us more as a growing population, which means it's more comfortable for us to really speak about the kind of stuff that's going on in our own communities, and the prejudice that exists. We're finally able to present stories where what we show is not so pretty, because, truthfully, it's only when we can bring up the stuff that's not so pretty that we can show that our work is as full and human as Shakespeare's. Amparo Garcia Crow: For me, the dream of the future would be to be able to lessen the burden of representation . Because when you have been part of the earlier generations, there still is the burden of representation that weighs upon the writer. You have this obligation to your community or at least to address : "Well, this is a Chicano and this is a Cubano." That's all fine and good. I'm an educator as well so I'm used to having to contextualize information. However, now and then I want to jump out of that stream of representation . My dream is that producers look at the true art of a piece and be able to see it, and let it speak for itself, regardless of where it's from . Karen Zacarias: I work in D.C.; I work in the public schools teaching playwriting as a form of conflict resolution and arts empowerment, and it's wonderful to see kids of all colors and flavors finding dialogue, and finding a way to write and communicate to be with other people. And then some days I'll get someone from a school to call me, from a private school and they'll say, "We're having Hispanic Heritage Month and we'd like for you to come and speak to the kids." I don't know whether to feel honored or strange about that. My dream is to have the theatre call me up and say, " Not because you're a woman, not because you're Latina, but because you're human and we respect your vision, we would love to have you write a play." Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya: For the last ten years I have been working in Puerto Rico and Minneapolis, Minnesota. And I think part of what I do has been labeled experimental theatre. It's really trying to find a place that is paradoxical and contested . When I first got a note about this event the first thing that sprang in my mind was that Latino theatre had a future because we were going to have a panel on that future. And maybe in my questioning way what I would ask you

12

SVICH

to imagine now is no future for Latino theatre. Go to a place where you can think about that void, and what shapes would that void take. Would it be, for example, total control of the visibility of art by market hegemonies? Someone else writes your stories? Would it be no story? Would it be no page? Would it be finally being swallowed up by the industry of musica Latina? Would it be non-political theatre? And is the void of non-political theatre a possible void? Would it be a theatre of screen stages, of stages inside the body? A place in which language is the end, not the medium? Is this, what we're doing today, this performance/panel going to be the true play of the future? What I would ask you to do is to think about those voids in your mind, and think about the ones to which you want to say: "No, ahara es, this can not happen." And the ones to which you might want to say: "Yes, ahara es, this can happen."

Michael John Garces: My dream for Latino theatre would be to work with theatres and artists who question what it means to be themselves every year. As Latinos in this country, we're redefining what it means to be Latino every day. Because it didn't mean the same thing to me last year as it does now. The reason that we write plays is to question, to keep trying to redefine who we are. If we want our audiences to question themselves because of the plays we write and the structures we examine, then I think we have to do that with ourselves. Quiara Alegria Hudes: I'm very scared of theatre falling into habits. One of those habits is succumbing to the subscriber base for season programming . Fear begins to control decision-making. Theatres should always be challenging their subscribers intellectually and emotionally. They should let themselves be scared for what they're putting out there on the stage. Theatre should-and I think this is one way that we have an advantage in many of us being bilingual-always be a bilingual process in which there are some things that can never be translated. That kind of dynamic space that no one can quite define in words has to be alive in the work. And also, in a very numerical sense, I hope that theatres just reach out much more to Latino audiences because I just see in every city I've worked in they they're just completely ignored or thought of as a " Latino Day" or "Audience Day" or something, and that's wrong. Carmen Rivera: I think the important thing for the future is to find producers who really want to produce theatre, who want to take chances. And we in the Latino arts community have producers, but I don't think we have enough. We also need to have-and this is probably an impossible dream-but universal-thinking critics who would accept a world that they might not be familiar with. Many times

SHAPING THE FUTURE

13

critics use their own filter in critiquing a play. We don't have that many Latino critics, and until that happens, what do we do? There need to be bridges built. Maybe we're impatient or maybe the 1960s made us really think that we can have a better world, but I think we can.

Eduardo Machado: What should we do? That writers write about the political hell that we're in right now. That writers begin to question the ruling class again. That we stop this fake "over-interested in style, completely lacking in substance," 1990s avant-garde . That we stop writing about magic realists and start writing about the harsh reality. That we do theatre anywhere we can and not wait for the big pie in the sky; and when we get offered the big pie in the sky we go for it. And make a difference. And then be willing to go back and do it on the street. That we don't fall for showbiz, that is a biz that we have to deal with, but we don't have to believe what it preaches. Candido Tirado: My dream actually takes me back, rather than forward. In 1988 I had a play done called First Class. At the time theatre was open: white people would go to see Latino plays, Latinos would go see Black plays, Asians ... etc. Theatres got smart. They wanted to get subscribers so they said, "Well, we do White plays over here. We do Latino plays over there" and theatre became very segmented. And that's where we are today. Most of the problems we have are due to this segmentation. What we need to do in some ways is to go back to when everybody went to every play. And you heard there was a good play, it didn't matter if it was Latino, Asian, African-American, people would go. It's like at a restaurant. There could be a restaurant in the North Bronx somewhere that has good food and you all would go, right? It doesn't happen the same way in theatre anymore. The same thing with critics. They wait until the last possible moment to see our plays. That's a big thing, because the audience won't come until they hear about the play. There are also advertising budgets. Theatres, especially the Latino theatres don't put much into advertising, so people don't know about our plays. You cannot do theatre in a vacuum. You cannot do theatre without an audience. Oliver Mayer: I've been thinking all day about something Alfonso Arau said. He's Mexican; he directed Like Water for Chocolate; he said that when he's in this country he feels that everything is one hundred per cent about money. When he goes to Mexico, where he's from, he thinks that things are about ninety-two per cent about money. And so my dream is that all of us are residing somewhere in that eight per cent. But obviously, to have chosen the theatre is to make my mother very unhappy. To pick a really lousy business, I mean one of the very

14

SVICH

worst, honestly. We have a problem. We have a problem because the thing we love is the thing that will not pay us. It is the thing that is extraordinarily elitist, and makes us always feel as if we're the other. What we need to do, and I believe we have done, is try to remember there is something more going on in our souls than money, than trying to take from. We're trying to give-while we're taking, because we still have to take, but we're trying to give back. I think the Latino playwright is really, for once, really stage cente~ in this particular battle. We have a real responsibility to be writing in that eight per cent, to be dealing with soul, which is something we've got a lot of. We don't have much money, but we've got a lot of soul. We don't have a monopoly on it, but we've got some good stuff. This thing that we're up to is a valuable thing . I feel that at certain points we've been connected as artists in this community, and we're not so connected right now. We have to get connected, we have to really remember people like Miguel Pinero. I don't want him to have died in vain.

Jorge Ignacio Cortinas: I want us to nurture the art of speaking out of both sides of our mouths. I agree with everything that everyone has said, even the people that disagree WITH EACH OTHER. Invariably there's something about THE category LATINO that is as much a straightjacket as it is an enabling factor. And I want us to work both ends of that equation at the same time . To get really excited about the platform and what it enables and at the same time, to dovetail with that Michael John Garces was saying, to always be unraveling the straightjacket at the same time. And to always be asking questions. And you know I love Shakespeare, I love Lorca. I want to see those plays all the time, except when I don't. That's the weird contradiction. I want all of that mess, all of those contradictions to be welcomed into the big, warm house of Latino all the time. Migdalia Cruz: I don't have a dream. Not about the theatre. I don't think about theatre. I feel like I'm a craftsman, like a carpenter, and I build these houses. And the dream for me is that these houses keep getting filled, and not just by me, but by the people who feel like they're not entitled to their own voice, or their own poetry, or their own beauty, and despite it all continue to tell their own stories. That is really the only thing that counts. Build a house; fill it with the truth. For me, that is art--architecture with a life force moving through it. Alberto Sandoval Sanchez: People don't read plays, and I'm in academia . People don't want to teach plays. They want to see the productions. Teaching, as I do, in the Ivy League at Mount Holyoke College, is a problem because most of the student body is Caucasian, White, and what they want to do most of the time is a staged reading.

SHAPING THE f UTURE

15

You get a staged reading but you never get to see a production. And I'm always pushing for the production but it never happens in a way. I remember at Dartmouth College, which we all know is a well-to-do college, about ten years ago, the Latina/Latina students asked for a Latino play and they decided to stage West Side Story. And they invited me for the debate and it was a mess, and I didn't know I was going to be in the middle of a political mess. So, it's really hard to see our plays. I'm always crossing over and we're so privileged that we can go to Broadway, Off-Broadway. I 've been to San Antonio, San Francisco, to Miami; I travel to Puerto Rico and I get to see plays everywhere because I love theatre and that's what I enjoy, but one of the problems I see is: how can we get our work out there. Not only through anthologies, you know. Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/a Theatre and Performance co-edited by Caridad Svich and Maria Teresa Marrero is an excellent anthology and I see it everywhere. I have an anthology out with Nancy Sternbach, Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology, but there's no distribution at all. I go to the drama bookshop and I look for my book. I have told them three times, "Why don't you order my books?" But when I talk to young people, they're dying to read our work, they're dying to hear about it, they're dying to read about the criticism . We're all so different; we all come from different backgrounds. And, as a Puerto Rican, people think I only work with Puerto Rican theatre and Nuyorican theatre, but I also work with Chicana/Chicana theatre and also with Cuban-American theatre. My first article about Latina theatre was about Dolores Frida. My doctoral degree is in seventeenth century theatre. Cervantes never got his plays produced. And when he published them, he wrote these plays were nunca representados. We're all political in a way, we have to be in order to be center-stage and speak about where we come from, and what our dreams are. I read Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics and I couldn't stop reading it. Anytime I read a Latino play like Jorge Ignacio Cortinas's Maleta Mulata or Migdalia Cruz's Miriam's Flowers or Eduardo Machado plays or Caridad Svich's plays, I realize how poetic and important the work is. I came to New York in 1983. In April of that year Tennessee Williams died. I told my partner, "John, I have to go to the funeral," because Tennessee Williams was the greatest ever for me. And being a gay boy, I knew what The Glass Menagerie was all about. And I got there and I said, "Where are the lines? I must be at the wrong funeral home." So I walked in and the guard was there, and he said, "Can I help you?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm here to see Mr. Williams," and he said, "Upstairs. Take the elevator to the second floor." And I walked into the room and there were only about six people in the corner and the coffin was open. And I just stood there and I couldn't believe it.

16

SVICH

He was right in front of me and nobody was there. Maybe that was one of the most important things that happened to me in my life. We have our dreams but we don't know what's going to happen in the future. It goes to show that theatre isn't valued in this country the way that it should be.
CS: I've always thought that this strange battle that we always fight in terms of identification and labeling would have been erased by now. In the late 1980s the theatrical climate did feel more open and things now have gotten narrower. Theatre-going in this country (only twenty per cent of the population actually goes to the theatre and really cares about it, and that's why it doesn't have any public sort of impact or the discourse doesn't happen publicly for that matter, unless you're in a city, of course, where it seems to matter) should be like going into a record store: there's the alternative rock CD, and hip-hop and pop and classical. And it's all music, and it all exists and it lives and breathes in the same space. And there's access to all of it. This goes for genres as well. I think that one of the things producers haven't caught on, or perhaps writers haven't caught on to, is the notion that we can work in many different genres. We could write a sci-fi play one day and an action play the next. Everything co-exists at once. It's important to talk about transformation and healing in our culture. I feel that there's a lot of anger and frustration, and justifiably so in terms of opportunity and the way moreover that our work is marketed and sold, among us and within our community; I want to talk about ways of turning those feelings into a positive. What strategies do you have as artists for making transformation happen, and for also, dealing with cultural nostalgia (if at all)?

Eduardo Machado: I don't think the first generation of writers in Latina/a theatre focused on nostalgia. When you write a play about being away from your country and longing for it, that has a certain nostalgic element to it. But when you write a play that takes place in your given country, that is not nostalgia. It is just a dramatic story that is not being told in the United States. Thinking about writing about a specific ethnic group leads to nostalgia and is only giving into the superpowers' idea that the only relevant thing is what happens in this country now. That's just propaganda . There is nothing more that the United States would like than to rid us of our past, and our culture and our literature. Then we could truly be labeled "Third-World" and be more easily exploited. All great plays have an element of nostalgia in them. Where would Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and The Three Sisters be without nostalgic references and recollection? And that's the sort of thing that, if I could say anything, is that we're the only minority that

S HAPING THE F UTURE

17

gets labeled "Hispanic play." And we're just writing plays. They don't say "British plays." And Tom Stoppard isn't considered a minority in this country. He's just considered a great playwright. And he is a minority, and he's not really English. He's Czech! And I think that as long as we try to become ethnic, we will never... rise above things. I wrote this play called Stevie Wants to Play the Blues that was not about Hispanics. The only Hispanics that went to see it were mad at me because I didn't write a play about Hispanics and they were using Spanish money for the play. And I thought it was enough that I had written this play. For me, it was the greatest experience of my writing life, because no one asked me, "You came to the United States when you were nine? What was that like?" With this play, they just asked me about being a playwright and in the end... we're just playwrights. When Morgan Jenness, former literary manager at The Public Theatre in NYC, asked me to teach a Hispanic writing lab there I said, " No! Bring everybody in there. Not just a Hispanic lab." And we had everybody in there. And it was exciting and we argued. And we argued about theatre and art, which is tough to do anywhere, no matter who you are. And I think what we got to get past is the label, and just be. Because the label makes you an ethnic group.

Quiara Alegria Hudes: I write words just to be a record of my spirit and of the people whose spirits I've known . I hope that I can write history, though a lot of it is fiction. And I don't-I hope that actually our nostalgia goes beyond even just mami and papi and abuelo and abuela and goes really ancient and goes way back to the roots and continues to do that. Because this country moves really fast, but there are civilizations in the world that are 7,000 years old, so we still have lot of history to uncover. We haven't had that long to let it all simmer. In this country the market whitewashes people. We should reach back in time past mami and papi, beyond los abuelos, to a time when blood soaked the earth, when yucca grew from that wet soil, to Spanish strangers arriving on indigenous shores, to far before. I hope our nostalgia grows to be ancient. And that doesn't mean I don't like contemporary plays. Characters live in the now, their situations are current. And of course theatre is modern now, and cell phones go off in the middle of theatres- it's a modern happening. Our plays must have relevance right now, but also be in the context of the future and the past. Especially because this country is whitewashed. It's a kind of entropy. Things grow bland. The marketplace makes everything procurable for 9.99 or 99.99 . Bertelsmann owns every major book and magazine publisher. And huge conglomerates own the TV stations, and record labels, and news sources and stories get lost. And I think that nostalgia is actually a form of self-protection

18

SVICH

against that. It is armor against that in saying: No, the marketplace can't have identity theft on me. It can't replace my memory and my self. And that nostalgia doesn't just mean romanticizing the past or looking at the green hills through rose-colored glasses. But it also means imagining brutality and questioning textbooks and kind of yearning to unlock the different horrors of history as well. That's all part of nostalgia.

Alejandro Morales: Cultural moments are getting shorter and shorter. We have all this access to information, and there's oversaturation of allowed information. As this saturation of information continues, how we are going to be able to look at cultural moments and look at history? It's so instantaneous now that questioning history is extremely important. Look at the way the war in Iraq is presented to us: it's all packaged; it's all delivered to us in a shiny little box. I think that constantly questioning history and what happened is going to be more and more important. The more stuff we have to sift through, the more stuff we have to throw onto the stage and examine. Karen Zacarias: For me, images of transformation, language, and culture, even the words that we write are fluid in their meaning and permanent in their existence. There's something to be said just for doing. We have the power as individuals here just to go in and do. So let me give you three photographs of things I have witnessed: a play: Cinderella: Rice and Beans, Cinderella does not speak one word of English. Instead of going to a ball she goes to a basketball game against her evil stepsister. The crowd: Black, White, Latino; everybody cheering for Cinderella. They don't understand a word she says, but they cheer for her when she makes a basket and they pull her shoe off and throw it off the thing. And I was amazed at that. Kids understood her. They understood what was going on there. Second image: a play that I wrote, The Sins of Sor Juana, done at a theatre in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a town that's very White, and here is this play set in the seventeenth century about a Mexican nun, and yet, they understood it. These people in Ann Arbor were now more connected to my ancestors and to my grandparents and to who I was than people were in my own hometown. Third image: every year I raise three hundred thousand dollars to send five hundred kids to go the theatre. I produce plays written by kids so they can see what the work has done. And when you go to Bell Multicultural High School, a school that doesn't have any arts because they think the arts are the cherry on top instead of the flour and the milk, and you produce the play by a writer who just got out of a gang, and wrote the funniest comedy about that. And he gets a standing ovation by his classmates, that's what art is. Theatre is about community.

Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004)

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: MARIA IRENE FORNES AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE STEPHEN

J.

BOTIOMS

It's the devil's way now There is no way out You can scream and you can shout It is too late now, because You have not been paying attention. -Radiohead, Hail to the Thief (2003)

These words, from the opening song of an album named in honor of George W. Bush's questionable presidential election victory of 2000, are ringing in my ears as I sit down to write this essay. It's May of 2004, and the newspapers and television bulletins are full of "shocking revelations" about the physical, sexual, and psychological abuses that have been being meted out on Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison-former stronghold of Saddam Hussein's regime of terror and torture. The occupying forces, it seems, have resorted to tactics very similar to those of the despot they ostensibly came to liberate Iraq from. Yet the only response that the Bush administration has come up with is to insist that this is not what Americans do; that all the world knows this is not what Americans do; that these are freakish, isolated incidents perpetrated by "bad people." I am reminded irresistibly of Moises Kaufman's 1999 documentary play, The Laramie Project, in which the townspeople of Laramie, Wyoming, insist that the two young men who brutally beat gay college student Matthew Shepard, and left him crucified on a wire fence to die in the prairie wind, are in no way representative of the town: "Laramie is live and let live," is the insistent refrain from many of those interviewed for, and represented in, the play.l Yet it also becomes clear that gay and lesbian residents of Laramie have tended to live in fear because, as one interviewee bluntly points out, "live and let live" too easily boils down to "If I don't tell you I'm a fag, you won't beat the crap out of me" (59).
1 Moises Kaufman et al., The Laramie Project (New York: Vintage, 2001), 17. Subsequent citations are indicated parenthetically in the text.

20

BOTTOMS

The Laramie Project demonstrates with unsettling directness the logical consequences of teaching an entire culture that those whose sexuality is different from the approved standard are-in all good conscience-to be shunned, judged, even condemned to hell. "The seed of violence," notes Father Roger Schmit, the Catholic priest interviewed in the piece, is in language rather than in action: "every time that you are called a fag, or you are called a you know, a lez or whatever. ... Do you realize that is violence?" (66) The conviction of Moises Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project was that, by listening closely to the words of Laramie's townspeople-liberal and conservative, gay and straight, Catholic, Baptist, and even Muslim-a kind of cultural tectonics might be laid bare in the aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder. "There are moments in history when a particular event brings the various ideologies and beliefs prevailing in a culture into sharp focus," Kaufman writes. "By paying careful attention in moments like this to people's words, one is able to hear the way these prevailing ideas affect not only individual lives but also the culture at large.''2 Attention, quite clearly, needs to be paid to the Abu Ghraib atrocities-and not just in the legal, forensic sense. Perhaps, now, someone will create a documentary play about why Americans might become torturers; about the logical consequences of teaching an entire culture that the people they are fighting against are a dark, dangerous "other"-uncivilized, underdeveloped, driven by irrational religiosity, collectively guilty for 9/11. "A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq," observes Colleen Kesner, a resident of Fort Ashby-the small, West Virginian town that is home to Lynndie England, one of the key culprits in the Abu Ghraib abuses: "To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different race, you're sub-human .... Tormenting Iraqis, to her, would be no different from shooting a turkey.''3 The elision here between "country boys" and England's status as a "her" (to which I will return later) is precisely the kind of telling verbal slip that a Moises Kaufman or an Anna Deavere Smith might pick up on in staging such reflections. Yet this case also points up the limitations of the journalistic, interview-based approach to play-making. Any dramatic exploration of the abuses carried out by members of the 372nd Military Police Company-an army reservist unit based in Cresaptown, in the remote panhandle of Maryland, right on the West Virginian border-would find it difficult to avoid reinscribing
2 Kaufman's introduction to The Laramie Project, v.

3 Colleen Kesner qtd. in Wikipedia online encyclopedia entry on Private Lynndie England <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynndie_England>.

S YMPATHY FOR THE D EVIL

21

familiar, media-derived stereotypes of the "dumb rural redneck" in the minds of urban theatregoers. The perpetrators of the atrocities would thus remain distanced, alien-all too easily looked down on and dismissed. The Laramie Project has, in fact, been criticised by some on very similar grounds, and certainly it is the case that-even as that play apprehends the roots of homophobic violence-it is never quite able to explain how Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson could have treated Matthew Shepard with such inhuman brutality. They remain monsters-an incomprehensible blind spot in the play. Perhaps it is in trying to approach the incomprehensible that more traditional, fictionbased dramatic writing comes into its own. In this essay, I propose to argue that Maria Irene Fornes's play The Conduct of Life may be constructively re-read as offering valuable insights into recent events. First performed in 1985, at a time when the Reagan-Bush administration was actively propping up right-wing dictatorships in several Latin American countries, the play features a torturer for one such military regime-one who, far from being merely monstrous, proves all too humanly plausible. Like Moises Kaufman, who is Venezuelan, the Cuban-born Fornes is a first-generation immigrant to the United States, whose necessary adaptation to an English-speaking culture seems to have given her a particular sensitivity to the specifics of language and its cultural valences. Fornes moved to the U.S. with her mother in 1945, at age fifteen, and had to teach herself to speak English by "paying attention" to those around her-a process which has left an indelible mark on her approach to writing. Throughout her long career, she has positioned herself as a kind of attentive onlooker (as opposed to, say, an allusive autobiographer), using playwriting as a means to apprehend, and make comprehensible, voices and perspectives other than her own. Indeed, she has spoken of writing plays "almost as if you are watching the characters through a window."4 This attitude places her in marked contrast to those American playwrights popularly considered "canonical," whose plays tend to be centered (sometimes obsessively so) on experiences drawn from the particular social milieu they themselves know best. The plays of Edward Albee, for example, tend to focus on upper-middle-class, East Coast characters of the kind he grew up with, while those of Sam Shepard habitually depict more transient figures from the American West. By contrast, the "rooms"
4 Maria Irene Fornes, interview by Maria M. Delgado, in Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes (Lyme, NH; Smith and Kraus, 1999), ed. Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich, 272.

22

BOTTOMS

that Fornes has "looked in on" in her plays span the full spectrum of social and class circumstances, from the abject poverty of Mud (1981) or What of the Night? (1989), to the comfort and privilege depicted in Fefu and Her Friends (1977) or Abingdon Square (1987). The diversity of Fornes's plays, which makes them almost impossible to collectively "brand" by theme or milieu, is perhaps one reason why her work-though certainly fit to stand alongside that of Albee, Shepard, and others-has often been overlooked or underappreciated by critics. Another is simply the continuing, continuing, prejudicial tendency to assume that Fornes's own, multiply-othered status as a woman, a lesbian, and a Latina must . somehow render her a playwright with "minority" appeal. Yet it is precisely her ability to adopt an "outsider" perspective in her writing that can help her audiences, in turn, to view the world with fresh clarity, and from unexpected angles. Fornes has developed an arsenal of writing exercises designed to help train the conscious mind of the writer to "follow" intuitively the behavior of imagined characters, in imagined rooms, rather than leading them in particular directions; to allow them to emerge, with their own integrity, from the subconscious. "If I think I know what I want to write about," she says, "I soon find out that I can't write at all. But if I start writing and am patient enough, I sooner or later find something which is in the lower layers of my being, and that is the thing I should be writing about."S In effect, Fornes's approach helps her to focus attention on that which she knows on some intuitive level-from her observation of, and experience of, the world at largebut which she has not yet consciously registered. "The play writes itself. The first draft writes itself anyway. Then I look at it and I find out what's in it. ... Then I rewrite. And of course in the rewrite there is a great deal of thought and sober analysis."6 This, then, is playwriting as a form of self-education, a process that is often mirrored within Fornes's plays by a leading character's desire for further learning and understanding. This mix of intuitive insight and "sober analysis" also enables spectators and readers of Fornes's plays to view her characters from a perspective that is at once thoughtfully compassionate and critically dispassionate: their needs and desires tend to be presented with clarity and sympathy, even though one character's concerns may be utterly at odds with another's.

s
1985, 15.

Maria Irene Fornes, "Creative Danger," American Theatre, September

6 Maria Irene Fornes, "I Write These Messages That Come," The Drama Review 21, no. 4 (December 1977): 27.

SYMPATHY FOR THE D EVIL

23

Take, for example, Abingdon Square-which locates its concerns with gender and power in the genteel Greenwich Village of the 1910s. We can quite understand why the fifteen-year-old Marion, following the death of her parents, might agree to marry a much older man, Juster, for protection and companionship. We can also see why, as she grows older, the vision of romantic love that she encounters in books might take root in her imagination, and why she might eventually feel compelled to seek the actuality of such love with an attractive, younger man-even while remaining innocently devoted to her husband. Equally, though, we can see why a traditional, patriarchal figure like Juster-fundamentally decent though he clearly is-might find her affair intolerable, once he discovers it. His expulsion of her from their home, and his refusal to allow her access to their child, provide the play's dramatic pivot, and eventually drive her close to insanity. Yet on some basic level, Juster is less "to blame" for all this personally than are the cultural assumptions into which he has been conditioned, and which he cannot see his way beyond . Abingdon Square, like most of Fornes's works, centers primarily on the concerns of "the other" (the dispossessed or poor, the foreign, the feminine-in this case, Marion), and, equally typically, tends to "other" the perspective of the traditionally privileged (the wealthy or powerful, the masculine). Yet if Juster is viewed, attentively, from a distance, it is with an eye that is as generously understanding as it is coolly critical. "I don't think I would enjoy writing if I had to demean a character," Fornes notes, in a piece of astute self-criticism. "I will deal with a character's darkest side, but I think I will always feel interest or a degree of tenderness or compassion." Intriguingly, though, she cites one exception to this rule: "I feel no compassion [for] the character of Orlando (the military torturer in The Conduct of Life) . ... The best feelings I've had for him were when I felt he was too stupid to know better."? Fornes's summary judgement on Orlando is harsh, and deservingly so, but it also belies the complexity of her treatment of the character. As noted previously, it is all too easy to dismiss as stupid or ignorant the actions of those who appal us, and Fornes's comments here perhaps suggest a certain, continuing unease on her part with The Conduct of Life itself-precisely because of the in(-)sights it offers into the worst kinds of human behavior. This is, she has noted, a play with "a strange soui."B Yet it is also a central text in Fornes's oeuvre,
7

Fornes, interview, in Delgado and Svich, 260.

8 Maria Irene Fornes, interview by David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group,

1988), 67.

24

BOTTOMS

not least because it crosses and recrosses the lines of social class that tend to demarcate her other works, located as it is in the unstable territory between relative privilege and relative poverty. The central character, Leticia, is a well-to-do, educated woman in the context of the unnamed Latin American country in which the play is set. Yet she is also acutely aware of the poverty that she sees all around her on the streets, and wants to better educate herself in order to understand what might be done to change things. The irony is that, like Juster, she cannot see beyond certain ingrained assumptions-tending, for example, to treat her housekeeper, Olimpia, as both an irritant and an idiot, while taking her daily labors for granted. In one scene, Olimpia delivers an extended monologue recounting her mundane morning routine in excruciating detail, but Leticia pays no attention-responding to the entire tirade with a dismissive "So?"9 Literally overlooking Olimpia, Leticia sees "the poor" as an abstract concept, in need of her aid, but remains blind to any links between public and domestic responsibility. During the play, Leticia becomes aware of her husband's increasing involvement in a regime of torture, but even here she blinds herself to the personal implications. She insists on seeing Orlando as the innocent dupe of his superiors: "He's not wise. He's trusting. They are changing him. He tortures people," she tells her (invisible) friend Mona on the telephone, as if to convince herself of his lack of agency in these developments (85). This, in turn, seems to absolve her of any personal responsibility to confront or question him about his work, or to attempt to exert any alternative influence over him. Perhaps she thinks she carries no such influence, but the bitter irony here is that Orlando's actions seem, in part, to be a consequence of his sense of social inferiority to Leticia. While there are indications that this was once a mutual, loving marriage, it also appears inherently unequal in terms of class status. It is clear to Olimpia, for example, that it is Leticia who holds the power in this household (it is she who pays the bills, who hires and fires), and so Olimpia feels no compunction in treating Orlando with contempt when "the boss" is not around: "You drive me crazy. You're a bastard. One day I'm going to kill you when you're asleep" (80). Orlando's lowly status in his own house is mirrored by his low rank in the military: as he notes in the frustrated monologue that opens the play, he is "thirty three and . . . still a lieutenant" (68). Determined to win promotion "within two years," he resolves to steel himself against all weakness and "feminine" feeling-to develop the kind of cold, hard, masculine authority that he
9 Maria Irene Fornes, The Conduct of Life, in Maria Irene Fornes: Plays (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 71. Subsequent references are to th is edition, and are indicated parenthetically.

SYMPATHY FOR THE D EVIL

25

believes will help him climb the ranks. Leticia immediately feels the consequences of this resolve, as Orlando attempts to exert patriarchal control over her: "he told me that he sees me as a person who runs the house," she tells their friend Alejo, in the play's second scene (69). Her response to this personal belittlement, however, is defiance. Orlando's attempts, in the same scene, to convince her and Alejo of the masculine virtues inherent in hunting wild animals-"Hunting is a sport! A skill!" (69)-prompt derisory responses from her on behalf of the voiceless victims. Leticia is more articulate than he, able to argue her case more passionately, and now threatens to become yet more articulate, by acquiring further education for herself. Unable to compete with her, Orlando resorts to two strategies, equally ineffective. The first is to stomp in and out of the room, pretending to ignore her appeals to Alejo, while feebly shouting dismissals: "You're foolish!-You're foolish! You're a foolish woman! (Orlando exits. He speaks from offstage.) Foolish .... Foolish . . . ." (69) The other is to threaten to cut her out of his will-a weak strategy at best, since it presupposes his own premature death, and one which again highlights his own fear of emasculation and disempowerment: "I said she would not inherit a penny from me because I didn't want to be humiliated" (69). Fornes's depiction of a social microcosm within this single household invites us to see the recent Abu Ghraib atrocities from another perspective. While the perpetrators of these crimes may indeed have been undereducated "country boys," their humiliation of Iraqi prisoners can be read not simply as a sign of "stupidity," but as an expression of their own relative powerlessness. These were soldiers thousands of miles from home, in a country they did not understand, placed in charge of far more prisoners than even the most experienced prison officers could be expected to handle, without any kind of training for the task. Left to sink or swim in the wake of a supposed victory, these soldiers must have experienced a particularly acute version of a syndrome mapped out by Susan Faludi in her 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man. American culture, Faludi observes, promises much to its young men, through the valorization of masculine endeavor and the myth of success, but for the less socially privileged, those promises are rarely borne out by experience. It is all too easy for the resulting sense of frustration or inadequacy to find expression in the assertion of power over somebody, anybody, who appears weaker. "American violence," Sam Shepard once memorably remarked, "has to do with humiliation . .. . This sense of failure runs very deep."lO
10 Sam Shepard, interview by Michiko Kakutani, " Myths, Dreams, Realities-Sam Shepard's America," New York Times, 29 January 1984, 2:26.

26

BoTTOMS

It does not help, of course, that masculine aggression itself is so often prized and admired in American culture, as it is in many others. Macho bravado thus becomes an excuse for violence. In Conduct, when Alejo first confronts Orlando about his work as a torturer, he attempts to laugh it off as if he is engaged in mere playground fisticuffs: "Boys play that way" (75). Alejo, he implies, is less than a man for objecting. Similarly, when photographs of the Abu Ghraib abuses were first made public, some right-wing commentators attempted to dismiss the images as depicting mere frat-boy hazing antics. In reality, though, it is only the soldiers who have undergone "hazing." If U.S. military recruits today come overwhelmingly from underprivileged social backgrounds, it is in large part because the army appears to offer a way out, and the opportunity to better oneself by climbing the ranks. In order to have any chance of doing so, however, one must accept the further humiliation of following orders without question-surrendering both one's personal autonomy and one's sense of moral judgment. It is this "de-humanization" of the soldier which, according to former U.S. marine platoon sergeant Jimmy Massey, makes abuses such as those at Abu Ghraib almost an inevitability: "American soldiers, and especially marines, are dehumanized. They're dehumanized from day one, when they enter boot camp . . . so that they'll have the self-confidence to pull the trigger, even if it's a civilian [in their sights]."ll Considered in this light, Orlando's reference to "boys' play" can perhaps be read as an attempt to stifle his own misgivings: by invoking an imagined group standard of masculine behavior, he seeks to render inhuman actions "normal" (if other people are doing it, it can't be all that bad). Certainly, Orlando does have misgivings about what is happening to him. "Since they moved him to the new department he's different," Leticia tells Mona: "He's distracted. I don't know where he goes in his mind .... He worries" (74). He worries, and yet he does not resist. One of the central, brutal ironies of The Conduct of Life is that Orlando's determination to master his own destiny, by climbing through the ranks to a position of greater consequence, renders him an essentially passive ['feminine"?) instrument of the regime he believes himself to be manfully serving. Numbing his conscience and denying his own agency in his treatment of prisoners, he becomes curiously dissociated from his own actions. Thus, in what is perhaps the play's most horrifying speech, he discusses the consequences of torture as if he were merely a fly-on-the-wall observer of medical experiments, rather the perpetrator of atrocities:
11 Jimmy Massey interview on the Today program, BBC Radio 4, 24 May 2004. Transcribed from an online recording at: www.bbc.co.ukjradio4/today/listenagain/monday.shtml [cited 26 May 2004].

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

27

Some people get a cut in the finger and die. Because their veins are right next to their skin. There are people who, if you punch them in the stomach the skin around the stomach bursts and the bowels fall out. Other people, you cut them open and you don't see any veins. You can't find their intestines. There are people who don't even bleed. There are people who bleed like pigs . . .. You hit them and they bust an organ. (79-80)

It is as if Orlando has convinced himself that the victims' bodies are themselves to blame for their inability to withstand applied pressure. Fornes paints the deadening psychological impact of torture on the torturer with disturbing plausibility, while also making explicable Orlando's utter surprise when accused of impropriety by his superiors, over the death of a prisoner in custody: "What kind of way is this to treat me? After all I've done for them?" The death, he maintains, was an accident, none of his doing: "He came in screaming and he wouldn't stop . .. . I had to put the poker to his neck just to see if he would stop. Just to see if he would shut up" (79). In much the same way, the accused in the Abu Ghraib atrocities vehemently protested their innocence when brought to account. According to The New Yorker, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick insists that he vigorously questioned some of the "psy-op" techniques that (he claims) they were expected to apply to prisoners-"such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell-and the answer I got was, 'This is how M.I. wants it done.' "12 The defendants all claim that they were merely doing what they were told, that military intelligence wanted prisoners "softened up" for interrogation. And while the defense of merely carrying out orders is, both morally and legally speaking, no defense at all for acts of cruelty and abuse, Fornes's depiction of Orlando makes all too clear that the erosion of individual responsibility that comes with being subjected to a chain of command can generate a terrifying moral vacuum when one's superiors do not themselves set a clear example to follow. As one Washington Post editorial has argued, "The foundations for the crimes at Abu Ghraib were laid more than two ears ago, when Mr. Rumsfeld instituted a system of holding detainees from Afghanistan not only incommunicado, without charge, and without legal process, but
12 Qtd. in Seymour M. Hersh, "Torture at Abu Ghraib," The New Yorker, 10 May 2004. Accessed online at: www.newyorker.com/ printable/?fact/040510fa_fact.

28

BoTTOMS

without any meaningful oversight mechanism at all."13 That was, one might add, a very meaningful oversight indeed. In emphasising the ways in which military regimentation both capitalizes on and corrupts the urge of recruits to "become men," I have until now overlooked one striking factor in the Abu Ghraib casenamely, that three of the seven soldiers initially charged with the abuses were women. Yet this does not, I would suggest, invalidate the argument. Indeed, it is clear that female recruits feel the pressure to "act like a man" just as intensely as their male counterparts: they, more than any, must demonstrate that they belong among men-that they can do "a man's job," that they can engage in "boys' play''-even if that means running the danger of being attacked as "un-feminine." "Who can forget the iconic image of Lynndie England, the ugly sheman," remarks one website commentary on the photographs from Abu Ghraib, "grinning and pointing at an Iraqi prisoner of war's cock."t4 As if seeking, retroactively, to reclaim a more "feminine" role for herself, Private England has insisted that she was ordered to pose this way, for the camera, by her superiors (one of whom, Specialist Charles Graner, was also her lover). England's friends and family-rather like Leticia protesting Orlando's innocence-have likewise insisted that "she's not the person that the photographs point her out to be."1S The pictures, they imply, do not show authentic enjoyment of another's pain: in this "psy-op" psycho-drama, England is simply "acting," like an obedient ingenue, for her unseen director. The now-unfathomable question of who initiated what, and under pressure from whom, is made still murkier by reports that other, unreleased photographs-viewed only by United States senatorsfeature England "having sex with numerous . . . military guards, sometimes in front of detainees."16 This appears to have been just one aspect of the grotesquely sexualized abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, which also involved male detainees being threatened with rape, forced to commit oral sex acts on each other, and sodomized with flashlights. Given all this, Fornes's depiction in The Conduct of Life of Orlando's turn to sexual violence as well as torture seems disturbingly prescient. His kidnap, imprisonment, and repeated rape of
13 "A System of Abuse," Washington Post, 5 May 2004. Accessed online at <www. washingtonpost.comjac2/wp-dyn/ A2372-2004May4 ?language>.

14 <http://badgas.co.ukjlynndie>.
15 Destiny Gloin, friend of Private England, qtd. in BBC News Online, <http:/fnewsvote.bbc.co.ukjmpappsjpagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/america s/3691753.stm>.

16 <http://breaking.examiner.ie/2004/05/13/story147437. html>.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

29

a young homeless girl, Nena, has no possible justification in terms of "following orders," yet it is clearly bound up with the process of dehumanization into which he has allowed himself to be drawn. The Conduct of Life, according to Fornes, developed from an image-derived from a visualization exercise-which suggested a far more consensual sexual encounter than the ones eventually depicted: "I saw a girl-a mulatto girl-wearing a pink slip, and a soldier who was wearing an undershirt, military breeches and boots. They were in a hotel room, and she was being sweet to him ... . It was just a little scene but it had a strong impact on me."r7 Somewhere between starting and finishing the play, the room mutated into a basement cell, and the girl into the helpless Nena, yet the sensuality of the original scene still informs the final scenario at root level. Orlando knows he is drawn to the erotic, the romantic, yet he is torn between these impulses and the ingrained masculine compulsion to "get ahead" in his career. "My sexual drive," he concludes in the play's opening monologue, "is detrimental to my ideals. I must no longer be overwhelmed by sexual passion or I will be degraded beyond hope of recovery" (68). The word "degraded"-with its connotations of stripped rank as well as personal decadence-indicates Orlando's basic fear of becoming subject to his passions, rather than lord over them. It never occurs to him that the forced repression of his sexuality might result in degradation of a far more disturbing kind. Orlando's fear of sexual vulnerability is underlined later on when, in a speech apparently outlining his witnessing of a stud stallion "performing," he meditates on how, after the insemination, the stallion collapsed on top of the mare: "She wanted him off but he collapsed on top of her and stayed there on top of her. Like gum. He looked more like a whale than a horse. A seal. His muscles were soft. What does it feel like to be without shape like that? Without pride. She was indifferent" (74). It does not take a psychologist to see that the "mare" who thus threatens Orlando with her "indifference" is his wife, Leticia, from whom he appears to withdraw sexual contact, rather than let her see him again in a flaccid, powerless state. What is equally striking about this passage, however, is that Orlando's description of the stud scene sounds, at first, more like an act of torture than of sex. Indeed, the abrupt, unexplained way in which the speech is introduced generates real uncertainty over the passage's referents, when heard in performance. "He made loud sounds not high-pitched like a horse,"

17 Fornes's introduction to The Conduct of Life, in On New Ground: Contemporary Hispanic-American Plays, ed. M. Elizabeth Osborn (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987), 48.

30

BOTTOMS

Orlando notes, as if discussing one of his torture victims: "He sounded like a whale, a wounded whale. He was pouring liquid from everywhere, his mouth, his nose, his eyes" (74). For Orlando, it seems, the act of sexual penetration has itself become one of physical cruelty. Little wonder, then, that as cruelty becomes his metier, he seeks a vulnerable sexual partner on whom he can vent himself without losing status. Orlando's confinement of Nena in the cellar of the house-an image emphasized onstage through the simultaneous use of different stage levels representing different floors of the house-has obvious connotations of psychic repression. Seeking to eradicate any softness or sensuality from his public persona, Orlando forces his sexual drives, quite literally, underground. Though he may rapidly be losing control over both his career and his home life, the cellar allows him a private stage on which to perform his fantasies of total, unquestioned authority. Indeed, he seems to expect Nena to substitute for Leticia by taking on the role of a more passive, obedient love interest: "Be a nice girl," he tells the terrified child, "Hold your lips soft" (76) . Again intent on denying to himself the true horror of his actions, Orlando casts himself in the role of sadistic lover and Nena as the masochistic receiver of his attentions. "What I do to you is out of love," he tells her, as if hoping the utterance will performatively render the concept real for them both : "It is my most private self. And this I give to you .... I need love. I wish you would not feel hurt and recoil from me" (82). The irony here is that Orlando is again "de-manned" by becoming oddly dependent on the approval of another-one whose approval he will never gain. As has often been observed, the truly powerful partner in a sadomasochistic relationship is the masochist, who invites and permits the sadist's theatricalized cruelty, while proving a willing, submissive audience. Nena, however, is submissive to the point of silent, near-catatonic abjection, and wants nothing other than to absent herself from the performance entirely. At one point, she hides herself successfully enough that Orlando believes briefly she has escaped: "he becomes still and downcasr' (73), the stage directions tell us. Despite his best efforts, he has become the jilted lover, the flaccid stallion-once again the victim of fate rather than the master of it; the object of indifference rather than the hero of the psychodrama. There is, perhaps, a similarly pathetic dynamic to be detected in the Abu Ghraib scenario. Did England and her partner(s), for example, believe that the performance of sex acts in front of detainees would constitute some pornographic theatre of cruelty? (Even though the detainees, to avoid the spectacle, could simply close their eyes.) Similarly, the reported glee of the abusers when they succeeded in coaxing erections out of prisoners suggests a need to perceive that the

S YMPATHY FOR THE D EVIL

31

victims were actively responding to this drama of domination. Yet the victims, at least to judge from the photographs, appear to have submitted to their degradation with an abjection similar to Nena's: their own, "voiceless" surrender-their inability, one presumes, to protest, whimper or beg for mercy in English-must have seemed peculiarly unfulfilling to the abusers; like an "I love you" proffered but not reciprocated. Hence, perhaps, the need to stage their domination for the camera, as if to re-orient the performance toward some external audience. Viewed in this light, all the grinning and thumbsupping at the lens seem like feeble masks for the abusers' desperate lack of real purchase on the situation. In Conduct, Fornes is utterly unsparing in her exposure of Orlando's ultimate inability to secure mastery over anyone or anything. When his private abuse of Nena proves unsatisfying, he attempts to up the ante by using his control over her as a way of reasserting dominion over his home-by making Nena's presence, and what he does to her, ever more unavoidably apparent to Leticia. This, too, is a kind of torture, applied now to his own wife: "Why do you make her scream?" Leticia asks him in horror, at the sounds she overhears (82). (''I can't help it," he retorts-still denying the effects of his own actions.) Yet this, too, fails to produce the results he desires. In making known Nena's presence in the house, Orlando provides his captive with an unexpected ally and friend : Olimpia, the housekeeper, plays games with her, involves her in her work, and generally helps Nena re-acquire a voice-and with it, some degree of human dignity. Olimpia, moreover, undermines Orlando's terrorizing control over Nena by treating him-in her presence-with dismissive contempt. Like a bully scolded by his teacher, Orlando can only respond by yelling impotently back at her, in a further-degraded echo of his earlier scene with Leticia : "I can't stand you! .. . I can't stand you!" (81). Humiliated on all sides, Orlando finally resorts to the previously unthinkable in order to exert his authority. In the play's concluding scene, he erases the last boundary between his professional and private lives by subjecting Leticia herself to an invasive interrogation-and in full view of Olimpia and Nena, as if to teach them who is really "boss." The pretext for Leticia's humiliation is the suggestion that she has taken a lover, and though nothing else in the play confirms the veracity of the charge, she eventually concedes the point, under pressure. "They'll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth" notes former U.S. intelligence agent Willie Rowell, on the counter-productivity of torture : "You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say. You don't get righteous information."lB The question of whether or not Leticia really has taken
18 Qtd. in Hersh, "Torture."

32

BOTTOMS

a lover remains unanswerable, but it is also largely immaterial: Orlando's performative exertion of authority, and her performative submission, renders her subject to him, as he intends. Yet it also renders him a cuckold, and the fact that Orlando wants her to confirm this suggests that he has, finally, become so addicted to his own humiliation as to crave it. His next, and last, move represents his ultimate blurring of the boundary between brutality and sensuality. Demanding further details of her liaison with "Aibertico," Orlando slides his hand inside Leticia's blouse with the words "Was he tender? Was he tender to you!" (88) He has degraded himself to the point of acting out his wife's imagined infidelity, as if in some masturbatory fantasy: onstage, his touch reads both as an act of torture, and as a perverse gesture of tenderness toward his abject wife. The invasive caress, however, finally proves too much for Leticia. Screaming, she breaks from her chair, seizes a revolver from a desk drawer, and shoots him dead. "Whenever I hear the word 'tender,' " Peggy Phelan has written, "I always think of tender's sister, 'render.' "19 Leticia seems to have heard something similar: refusing to (sur)render, to be rent asunder, by his touch, she responds by appropriating a deadly, phallic authority of her own. If there is a certain, grim justice in the way that Fornes shows Orlando being undermined and humiliated at every turn (even as he struggles ever more frantically and violently for a firm grip on his own fate), there is none in the play's final image. Leticia, having finally been confronted, unavoidably, with the brutality that Orlando embodies, responds with reflexive violence, but then proves unable to take responsibility for what she has done. She hands the gun to the hapless Nena, "hoping''-the stage directions tell us-"she will take the blame."20 She has found a scapegoat who (like so many scapegoats) has neither the voice nor the power to resist this transference of guilt. Indeed, most tragically of all, Nena has already been inscribed with guilt so forcefully by her orphanage upbringing that she seems to see suffering as a burden she must bear without question: "if someone should treat me unkindly," she tells Olimpia, as if reciting catechism, "I should see them and receive them, since maybe they are in worse pain than me" (85).

19 Peggy Phelan, "Tenderness" (paper presented at the Goat Island Summer School, Chicago, July 1999).

20 See Osborn, 72. This direction was added to the version of the text printed in this 1987 edition, apparently as clarification. It does not appear in the previously published text in Maria Irene Fornes: Plays (see note 9 above).

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

33

Nena's learned helplessness finds its less innocent flip-side in the despair of Alejo, in the face of Orlando's slide into sanctioned barbarity: "I didn't know anyone could behave the way you did. It frightened me. It changed me. I became hopeless" (75). As if surrendering any claim on the phallocentric power to which Orlando aspires, Alejo notes that "I am sexually impotent. I have no feelings . . . . How can one live in a world that festers the way ours does and take any pleasure in life?" (75-76). His self-emasculating resignation, however, suggests a degree of narcissistic self-pity that seems almost as reprehensible as Orlando's. The onus, Fornes seems to suggest, is on all of us to take whatever action we can to stop the world from "festering"-rather than simply taking refuge in distracting personal preoccupations (dramatic criticism, for example). Her location of the play in the domestic sphere functions as a persistent reminder that those wielding and abusing power are not merely faceless, implacable killers, but human beings with homes and families-whose resolve and self-confidence, like Orlando's, may in fact be far less rigid than we imagine. Leticia fails to see, until the very last, that her own position in the household is, in many ways, more powerful than his; that she is responsible for his behavior as well as subject to it. She has not, it seems, been paying attention. The atrocities at Abu Ghraib are, above all else, a wake-up call to Americans to set their own house in order; to take responsibility rather than seeking scapegoats. "Congress must finally begin to exercise its authority to oversee and regulate the administration's handling of foreign detainees," wrote the Washington Post on May 5: "That several of its senior Republican members were proclaiming themselves shocked yesterday to learn of the abuses-as if none had been previously reported-was itself shameful .''21 It looks depressingly likely, of course, that momentary shock and shame will give way to the usual evasions, denials and amnesia, and that America will once again slide into anaesthetized slumber until the next wake-up call, and the next, provoke further convulsions of "lost innocence" in the face of ordinary Americans' propensity for violence (as if My Lai, Oklahoma, Columbine, and the rest had never happened). Mere theatre can do little, perhaps, to challenge the grand illusions of American righteousness. Yet the exemplary importance of artists like Maria Irene Fornes, and indeed Moises Kaufman, through his documentary theatre, lies in their quiet, persistent underlining of the need to pay careful attention both to the world around us, and our own responses to it. Like Leticia, perhaps, our desire for oversight too

21 "A System of Abuse."

34

BOTTOMS

often causes us to overlook that which is staring us in the face. Yet the task, Fornes's work reminds us, is not to seek "righteous information" with which to judge and confront (and bomb) the wicked, but to critique constantly our ways of seeing, in order that we see not just our own assumptions reflected back at us, but some small glimpse of the terrifying complexity of human fear and desire. Only then will political action be rendered meaningfully responsive (rendered tender?), rather than merely reflexive. "We're blind," Leticia says in Conduct, in what is perhaps her most astute moment of selfrecognition: We can't see beyond an arm's reach ... . We take care of our pocket, but not of our country.... We think we don't have a future. We think we don't have a country. Ask anybody, "Do you have a country?" They'll say, "Yes." Ask them, "What is your country?" They'll say, "My bed, my dinner plate." But things can change. They can . (75)

Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004)

THE STIGMATIZED BODY ON STAGE: EVELINA FERNANDEZ'S DEMENTIA AS A RESPONSE TO THE AIDS CRISIS ASHLEY LUCAS

dementia (di men'sh?) n. 1 insanity; madness 2 Psychiatry a disorder of the mind affecting perception, memory, and judgment, characterized by reduced ability to remember, control muscular movement, recognize familiar objects and sounds, etc.l
Both of the dictionary definitions of dementia suggest a departure from a socially accepted reality and an inability to function within the traditional constraints of mainstream logic and behaviors. In titling her most recent play Dementia, Chicana playwright Evelina Fernandez evokes a metaphor of the main character's displacement from the "real" in the sense of mainstream or traditional values and culture. The title also suggests the Chicana/o community's dementia, in the sense of a "disorder. . . of judgment," about the queer community and AIDS. The play's protagonist fades in and out of dementia, in the psychiatric sense, as he dies of AIDS. Having departed from societal norms long before his illness began, this queer Chicano, who at one point in the play dresses in drag, forces the audience to question notions of the real, the natural, the sane, and the traditional. His moments of dementia often provide greater clarity and comfort to both the character and the audience than does his "sane" reality. This distortion of the real and the perceived pushes notions of identity, the body, and performance to the forefront of Dementia's commentary on the massive impact of AIDS in the Chicana/o community. In 1999, the Center for Disease Control released data showing that Latina/as in the United States died of AIDS at four times the rate of non-Hispanic whites.2 Though they represented only 13%
1 Webster's New World College Dictionary, 4th ed. (2001), 383.

2 Miguelina Maldonado, "HIV and AIDS Among Latinos: Implications for Prevention and Care" (paper presented at the Ninth Statewide HIV/AIDS Policy Conference, hosted by the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute and the New York City Department of Health, 25 May 2000).

36

LuCAS

of the U.S. population at the time, Latina/as reported 19% of new AIDS cases in the year 2000.3 Despite its powerful presence in Chicana/o communities for the past twenty years, the AIDS epidemic seldom surfaces as a major theme in Chicana/o performances and popular culture. Furthermore, as Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez notes, the theatrical scripts written by Chicana;os that deal with AIDS gain few productions and are not often published.4 Cherrfe Moraga's Heroes and Saints and Culture Clash's Magic Mission Mystery Tour are among a small group of published Latina/a plays which deal with AIDS without making it the central theme of the play. David Roman asserts that the pervasive "heterosexism" of members of the broad Chicana/a community, particularly that of activists and cultural theorists, constructs topics like homosexuality and AIDS as lasting taboos.s This prevalent discourse within Latina/a communities keeps the subject of AIDS from receiving sufficient attention in popular culture and U.S. Latina/a media. In 2002, the world premiere production of Fernandez's play Dementia,G directed by Jose Luis Valenzuela and performed by the Latino Theatre Company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC), situated one man's battle against AIDS in a Chicana/o community in East Los Angeles. Winner of the 2003 GLAAD Award for Outstanding Los Angeles Theatre/ the play fearlessly addresses the cultural taboos of not only AIDS and homosexuality but also teen pregnancy,

3 Joint report by the National Association of People with AIDS, the Center for Disease Control, USMBHA-AFMES, the National Minority AIDS Council, the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, and the Center for Community-Based Health Strategies, p. 7 <http://cdcnpin.org/topic/latino.htm>.
4 Alberto Sandoval Sanchez, "So Far From National Stages, So Close to Home: An Inventory of Latino Theatre on AIDS," 0/fantay II, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 1994): 68.

s David Roman, "Teatro Viva! Latino Performance and the Politics of AIDS in Los Angeles," in i.Entiendes?: Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings (Duke University Press, 1995), 351.
6 The production went into previews on 24 September 24 2002, opened on 3 October, and closed on 3 November (Geoff Rivas, e-mail to author, 14 May 2003).
7 On 26 April 2003, the Latino Theatre Company won the award for Outstanding Los Angeles Theatre for Dementia at the Fourteenth Annual GLAAD Media Awards. GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) proclaims itself to be "in the business of changing people's hearts and minds through what they see in the media"; see the GLAAD website <http:/jwww.glaad.org>.

DEMENTIA

37

bisexuality, infidelity, infertility, illegal drug usage, and cross-dressing. Contrary to the tone set by some of the darker themes in the aforementioned list, Dementia explores the process of dying of AIDS with humor, compassion, music, and a celebration of life. Fernandez constructs an environment in which a supportive and loving Chicana/o community rallies around the dying protagonist Moises (Moe). Conflicts in the play arise in response to the disease and the situation in which it places Moe and his loved ones, but the playwright does not treat AIDS as an evil that must be kept hidden and cloaked in shame. Instead, she presents it as a terrible illness that demands acknowledgement, honesty, and an active response from the Chicana/o community. In order for the Chicana/o community to respond constructively to the AIDS crisis, it must claim a form of chicanidad 8 that incorporates the queer community and AIDS patients. This requires a significant shift from the exclusivist principles of Chicano nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Having been active participants in the Chicano Theatre Movement, the members of the Latino Theatre Company and their productions reflect various conceptions of Chicana/o identity at different points in time. The founder and director of the Latino Theatre Company, Jose Luis Valenzuela, immigrated to California from Mexico in 1973 and soon became involved with Teatro de Ia Gente and later Teatro de Ia Esperanza.9 Evelina Fernandez, who would later marry Valenzuela, got her start in professional acting playing the role of Della in the original production of Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum .lO Fernandez joined Teatro de Ia Esperanza in Santa Barbara, California, during the time that Valenzuela was part of the company.u The two left the Teatro and moved to Los Angeles in 1984 to start a theatre company. Bill Bushnell and Diane White at the Los Angeles Theatre Center hired Valenzuela to start the Latino Theatre Lab, and he in turn was able to
8 Chicanidad refers to the identity of being a Chicana or a Chicano. Mexican Americans began referring to themselves as Chicanajos during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s, and the label suggests a social consciousness of the movement's political struggles around issues such as unfair labor practices, bilingual education, and police brutality.
9 Jorge Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81.

to Evelina Fernandez, interview by author, Downey, Calif., 12 April 2003.

11

Huerta, Chicano Drama, 82.

38

LUCAS

hire the founding members of the Lab : Enrique Castillo, Fernandez, Sal Lopez, Angela Moya, and Lupe Ontiveros.1z The Latino Lab later renamed itself the Latino Theatre Company. Since many of the founding members of the group had worked in teatros and in the original production of Zoot Suit, they created theatre with an acute consciousness of Chicano Movement politics and a commitment to performing for Chicana/o audiences. Fernandez believes that the Chicano Movement never really ended: Well, I've never left it. . . it never stopped being for me, for us. We're... more involved right now.. . because of our anti-war [referring to the war on Iraq] activities, but. .. when I see my friends ... that I met in the Movement, everybody's still moving forward.D Much like Chicana/o identity, the Movement, at least in Fernandez's perception, continues to evolve and address the politics and issues of the present moment, and for Fernandez, as for her characters, activism plays a huge role in the constitution of a movement and a cultural identity. Fernandez loosely based the lead character in Dementia on Chicano actor/director Jose Guadalupe Saucedo, one of the founding members of Teatro de Ia Esperanza, who died of complications of an AIDS-related illness in 1996. In the program notes to Dementia, Jorge Huerta refers to an interview he conducted with Saucedo shortly before his passing: "Before the taping I [Huerta] asked Jose if he wanted me to ask him about his battle with AIDS and he said, 'Yes. As a Chicano, I want to put a face on AIDS. Unfortunately that face happens to be mine.' "14 As a close friend of Saucedo's for decades, Fernandez very consciously chooses to portray a character similar to Saucedo in an effort to memorialize his life and comment on the ways in which his friends and family dealt with his passing.1s Fernandez creates a character that matches a brown body and face to the disease as a means to visually depict the stigmatization of the Chicana/o AIDS patient. The social stigmas and judgment inherent in

12 Huerta, Chicano Drama, 83. 13 Fernandez, interview.

14 Jorge Huerta, "The Roots of the Latino Theatre Company: The Road Back Home to Dementia," program for a production of Dementia by Latino Theatre Company, 2002.
15 Fernandez, interview.

DEMENTIA

39

society's perception of Moe's body label him as sexually deviant, morally depraved, politically offensive, and irrevocably diseased. Fernandez strategically combats the stigmas by articulating a notion of chicanidad that can include this body. She fills Moe's speech with specific references to Chicana/o culture and history, integrating AIDS into a narrative of Chicana/o subjectivity. Dementia presents its audience with a complex and nuanced set of characters, each of whom extends beyond the boundaries of stereotypical representations of Chicana/os. The play opens with a dark stage and spotlight on Lupe, a Chicana drag queen in a gorgeous evening gown.16 The end of the song is greeted by generous applause from, "Moe, a skeleton of a man . .. As the lights come up, he is a Ghandiesque vision to behold."17 Center stage in his hospital bed, Moe talks to Lupe about her talent as a singer and her beauty in her glamorous drag. Moe's long career as a Chicano director in the theatre explains the heightened performativity of his drag queen alter-ego. Throughout the play, no character but Moe can see or converse with Lupe. Fernandez says she created Lupe to serve a similar function to the one that El Pachuco serves in Zoot Suit, an alter-ego who comments on the action of the play.1s Like the angels in both Tony Kushner's Angels in America and Jose Rivera's Marisol, Lupe serves as a fantastical and beautiful being who pushes the main character towards his destiny. Whether Lupe is a personification of death or merely a hidden facet of Moe's personality, she serves as Moe's guide through the end of life and into the next world, all the while feeling perfectly at ease in her drag queen identity. Moe aspires to that level of peace and relies on Lupe to let him know when his time to die has arrived. This play seldom emphasizes Moe's suffering, focusing instead on his will to live and find joy in the life he has left, but some of the most disturbing moments in the play show the audience Moe's weakness and inability to care for himself. These moments remind us of the full force of the disease. Susan Sontag explains in her essay "AIDS and Its Metaphors," "The most terrifying illnesses are those perceived not just as lethal but dehumanizing . .."19 Moe's severe 16 Evelina Fernadez, Dementia (unpublished manuscript, 2002).
17 Ibid. 18 Fernandez, interview. 19 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 126.

40

LUCAS

physical deterioration stares the audience in the face throughout the play. His gaunt body, laid out in a hospital bed and wearing a diaper, provides an inescapable visual reminder that AIDS strips people of individual choice and agency. No matter how humorous or lighthearted the play's dialogue can be, the audience and the other characters must deal with the visual image of Moe as a marked, dying, brown body. Sontag discusses society's perception of the diseased body: "Underlying some of the moral judgments attached to disease are aesthetic judgments about the beautiful and the ugly, the clean and the unclean, the familiar and the alien or uncanny..."20 The aesthetic medium of theatre allows a literal progression of the disease's effects on the body to play out as the patient journeys toward death. The supporting characters in Dementia each have to deal with the ways in which they judge Moe and the aesthetic of death that surrounds him. Because they love him so much that they do not wish to outwardly judge him, they turn on one another as a response to what Sontag calls "the ugly," "the unclean," and "the uncanny" aspects of Moe's condition. Moe's friends gradually arrive at his home and dress him in drag for his party. While all his friends call him Moe, Lupe addresses him as Moises, appealing to a different, more personal part of his identity. The use of his name in Spanish allows Lupe to set up a level of intimacy, an alter-reality, and a preparation for Moises's journey towards death, as the private Moises can reveal himself fully to Lupe, while the struggling Moe still argues with his compadres21 about the best way to die. Raquel (sometimes called Rachel), Moe's ex-wife, also calls him Moises, but rather than establishing a comfort level for him, Raquel's presence unsettles Moe because of the breach in intimacy between them. The thought of Raquel seeing him in drag terrifies him. When he hears that she is coming to see him, Moe demands that his friends immediately take off his dress and make-up so that he can perform the male identity of a heteronormative exhusband. Raquel brings back not only Moe's past but also the 1960s ideologies that enforced strict codes of heterosexuality and masculinity. The idea of seeing her upsets him so much that he wanders back into dementia where Lupe sings to him in Spanish and initiates the sensual dance number that closes Act One.

20 Ibid., 129.
21 The word compadre has no direct translation in English but refers to a friend so close that s/he is like a family member. Often compadres serve as godparents to one another's children.

DEMENTIA

41

At first the dance appears to be a private one between Lupe and Moe, but as it continues, the rest of the cast join in a big, campy musical number, accented by the hilarity of the hugely pregnant Tamara moving as freely as any of the other characters. Because they dance in Moe's imagination, all of their bodies are free of stigma and constraint. The dance functions as a Brechtian alienation device, pulling the audience out of the immediate story of Moe's everapproaching death and making them laugh at the sight of bodies dancing in ways that they physically could not if the play abided by strict naturalism. In act two, Lupe guides Moe to the end of his journey, coaxing him with songs in Spanish to depart from this world. When he is ready to go, Moe signals to Tamara that the time has come. She clears his friends out of the room, saying that she needs to change his diaper, and she removes his IV and turns off the oxygen tank. Moe dies in her arms to the sound of Lupe singing, "Please, let me live! This is my life! This is my life! This is my life!''22 The lights blackout, and then for just a moment a bright spotlight appears on Moe, standing alone, naked and exultant, looking more whole and alive than he has at any other point in the play. In death, he has fully accepted himself at last. Despite the ways in which his own community stigmatizes him for his homosexuality and his illness, Moe actively participates in and deeply loves East Los Angeles Chicana/o culture. As his body deteriorates, Moe tells Lupe of his dreams of health and happiness, of returning to the neighborhood of his youth and "going cruising": "Where the rucas (chicks)23 wear their poor boys and their hip-hugger bell bottoms, brown suede boots, eyelashes and eyeliner. Lips and eyes perfect because no Chicana went out without her make up on.''24 Moe's nostalgic portrayal of the late 1960s in East L.A. evokes a historical moment when Chicanajos actively joined together in solidarity and a collective political consciousness. 22 Ibid., 77. 23 Rosaura Sanchez, Chicano Discourse: Socio-Historic Perspectives (Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers, Inc., 1983), 132; Ilan Stavans, Spang/ish: The Making of a New American Language (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003), 214. Sanchez defines ruca as mujer, but in common usage ruca refers to a more specific identity than the more general definition of mujer as woman. Stavans defines ruca as "attractive woman,'' highlighting the word's connotations of youth and beauty. For this reason, I choose to t ranslate ruca as chick rather than woman, even though it has no direct translation. 24 Fernandez, Dementia.

42

LU CAS

Moe's description of the style and beauty of Chicana fashion in the sixties and seventies situates women in the era of the Chicano Movement without defining them in opposition to men. Such a depiction displays a markedly different perspective than the dominant voices of the Chicano Movement. This alternative view of the Movement aligns Fernandez and her play with what Sonia SaldfvarHull calls" ... feminism on the border... [which] springs from these preliminary [1970s] articulations of early Chicano nationalism and the dissatisfaction that so many activist mujeres (women) began to feel in the face of the masculinist notions of that political movement.''2s In Moe, Fernandez defies the heterosexism of the Movement without criticizing the Movement itself or its leaders. Moe simply offers another perspective, that of a queer Chicano activist and artist.26 His detailed, visually oriented account of the Chicanas who go cruising describes an aesthetic memory of women in East L.A. during the Movement. His social positioning as a gay Chicano in East L.A. in this era reveals a great deal about the ideologies this character represents in the play. Dementia's Moe embodies several different political perspectives at once: Chicano, queer, drag queen, AIDS patient. The ideologies attached to each of these stigmatized identities intersect in the character of Moe, and the contact and conflicts caused by this complex perspective demand a certain level of interpretation and critical thinking from the audience member who watches Moe's journey through the play. Fernandez writes Moe as a sympathetic character, and if the audience does indeed sympathize with him, then it must also engage in at least a peripheral and temporary willingness to accept each of his taboo identities. Through the creation of counter-hegemonic characters and narratives in an artistic genre, Fernandez makes a deliberate and powerful intervention not only in Chicana/o discourse but also in the documentation of U.S. cultural history. Moe's imagined cruise becomes more overtly political as he continues:

25 Sonia Saldfvar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 12.

26 The playwright's subjectivity as a heterosexual Chicana adds another dimension to this dynamic.

DEMENTIA

43

I wanna cruise the boulevard before the bars went up. Before 1970 and the Silver Dollar tragedy. Before the pigs put the fear of the law into us by clubbing our na'ive heads. Before they sent our sons and brothers to fight a senseless war and leave East LA for the first and last time .. . .27 Almost counter-intuitively, in this cruising monologue, Moe remembers an idealized version of his youth by listing the tragic events of the Chicano Movement rather than the triumphs. He does this by recalling the times before the events that violently broke up peaceful protests in Los Angeles. He speaks of the height of the Chicano Movement, after the start of the Great Delano Grape Strike in 1965 but before the "Silver Dollar tragedy": the shooting of Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar at the Silver Dollar Bar on August 29, 1970. Salazar's murder occurred after he and his television crew spent the day recording the national Chicano Moratorium where upwards of thirty thousand people gathered in L.A. to demonstrate against the Vietnam War.28 By invoking the historical moment between 1965 and 1970, Moe captures a sense of Chicana/o solidarity, peaceful activism, and progressive politics. Moe wants to return to a romanticized version of a non-violent and unified East L.A. Moe hearkens back to the time before Salazar's murder, as he deals with his own gradual obliteration by disease. He furthers the metaphor of illness as the destruction of his political body and consciousness through his references to East Los Angeles before acts of police brutality against the Chicana/os who attended the Moratorium and before the Vietnam War. Moe clings to a vision of East L.A. in the late 1960s as a safe haven, a familiar place where Chicana/os could easily live their whole lives without leaving. It takes a disruption of the enormity of the Vietnam War or AIDS to break the protective circle of Moe's community. As Sontag notes, the effects of AIDS, like those of war, are irreversible.29 Only in his dementia can Moe now live in a world before AIDS. Now that the epidemic has arrived, the community must deal with the ramifications of the disease and move forward. Though Moe seems incapable of letting go of the past, the next generation,
27

Fernandez, Dementia.

28 Jorge Huerta, interview by author, San Diego, Calif., 15 October 2002. 29 Sontag, 108.

44

LUCAS

exemplified by his niece Tamara, has no choice but to deal with the realities of the present. Tamara, sixteen, pregnant, and unwed, serves as Moe's primary caretaker and watches her uncle deteriorate every day. Though he has no children of his own, Moe passes on his sense of Chicano Movement solidarity and politics to Tamara. As she tends to him in his infirmity, Moe emphasizes the importance of giving her child a meaningful name: MOE: ... And if it's a boy you're gonna name him ? TAMARA: I don't know. He smacks her on the head. MOE: Moises ... TAMARA: Oh, yeah. MOE: And if it's a girl? TAMARA: What's that name you like? MOE: Paloma ... TAMARA: Paloma. Dove, right? MARTIN: Like the soap? MOE: No, like the bird of peace, pendejo [asshole].30 Moe wants to take an active role in the naming of this child for several reasons. He acts as a father figure to Tamara, whose own parents do not appear in the play. He also lives with the memory of his own marriage to Raquel, whom he forced to have an abortion. Later he says that not having the child is his only regret in life. With Tamara's baby come not only the promise of new life and a continuation of Moe's family line, but also hope and, possibly, redemption. By envisioning a promising future for this child, Moe is in some way trying to replace the child he chose not to have. Beyond having a patriarchal sense of pride in his own name, Moe's choice of the name Moises for Tamara's baby alludes to the Biblical Moises (Moses in English) who delivers his people from suffering. Moe searches for his own deliverance from the pain of his medical condition and often refers to the Chicano Movement political strategies of solidarity and resistance, which coincide with the Biblical Moises's political actions. Paloma, Moe's other choice in names, complements these sentiments by symbolizing peace. Both names reflect Moe's desire to live through the next generation of his family; a nephew would bear his own name, while a niece would bear the name he and Raquel would have given to their own daughter.

30 Fernandez, Dementia.

D EMENTIA

45

Further guiding Tamara's approach to parenting, Moe lays out a moral and political value system for the child: MOE: Go on, Mija .. . And you're gonna teach her? . . . All the good things about life and love and she'll be a leader of the Chicano movement and she'll fight against the oppression of our people.31 Moe envisions a life for Tamara's child in which she espouses the political beliefs of the Chicano Movement or at least promotes its ideals. Once again, Moe dreams of the non-violent aspects of the Chicano Movement, wanting the child to know "all the good things" rather than the hard masculinist edge of militancy and nationalism also associated with the Movement. By strategically omitting the factors that excluded minority groups within the Movement, such as women and gays, Moe idealizes the past in order to offer Tamara and her child a framework in which to construct an evolving, more inclusive, and updated version of Chicana/o politics. In doing so, he places a huge burden on this sixteen-year-old girl. Not only must she raise this child by herself, but she must have the strength, foresight, and understanding to single-handedly raise the next leader of the Chicano Movement. Moe thoughtlessly corners Tamara by asking her to live the life he wanted for himself rather than helping her to find her own path. He ironically never owns up to his primary act of sexism: forcing Raquel to have an abortion. Moe's idealization of the Movement and his own past helps him to deal with his impending death but does not serve Tamara's best interests. Though she never negates her uncle nor attacks his visions of the past or future, Tamara has a much broader understanding of all of the events of the play than any of the other characters. She commits herself completely to taking care of Moe and lets the other, less immediate dramas play out around her. At pivotal moments in the play, she acts as a wake-up call to those who are too absorbed in their own pain and traumas to notice what is happening to others. In one such moment, she responds to Alice and Raquel's complaints about the things they have suffered in life: You know, I used to think that older people were . . . I don't know. . . smart. I always thought that when I got older I would be able to make sense out of

31 Ibid.

46

LUCAS

everything, you know, and make wise decisions and do good things. Now, I'm really scared because I realize you don't get smarter you just get older. I thought my generation was bad, but you guys. You're really fucked up.32 Tamara critiques the ways in which the other characters in the play use their own problems as a way to avoid dealing with Moe's death. She alone has the will-power and presence of mind to stay focused on her uncle, and as a result, Moe entrusts her with the two things about which he worries most: his death and the future of Chicana/o activism. Moe's fixation with teaching the child how to be a Chicana/o activist reflects the concept that individuals perform political and ethnic identities rather than having some sense of a predetermined character from birth. In order for Tamara's child to lead a Chicana/o movement s/he must perform the identity of a Chicana/o activist. Jose Esteban Munoz theorizes that the performance of an ethnic identity in the U.S. relies on a normative conception of whiteness as performed so minimally that it claims neutrality. The assumption of white normativity not only sets non-whites apart through physical indicators but also positions the cultural practices of non-whites as additive or defective in relation to the foundational standard of "neutral" whiteness. In order to escape this debilitating and often unconscious notion of ethnicity, Munoz asks his readers to : . . . move beyond notions of ethnicity as fixed (something that people are) and instead understand it as performative (what people do), providing a reinvigorated and nuanced understanding of ethnicity. Performance functions as socially symbolic acts that serve as powerful theoretical lenses through which to view the social sphere.33 In the context of Chicana/o theatre, Munoz's concept of ethnicity asks the question, "What practices (performative acts) maintain Chicana/o identity?" Fernandez suggests that the cultural productions of Chicanas/os in the 1960s and 70s helped define the 32 Ibid. 33 Jose Esteban Munoz, "Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs)," Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (March 2000): 70.

D EMENTIA

47

politics of the Movement and its participants: ". . I do think that Chicano theatre played a really really important part [in the Chicano Movement]. I think it would've been a very different kind of movement. Not only due to Chicano theatre, but Chicano art in generaJ."34 Fernandez perpetuates the tradition of the performance of Chicana/o identity through her plays. She creates characters who also engage in the metatheatrical production of identity because Moe and his friends are theatre professionals as well. All of the characters in the play have an acute awareness of their performance of identities both in the plays they used to produce together and in their personal lives in the play. Moe's performed self derives as much from his sexual orientation as from his politics. The intimate links between his sexuality and his politics assert the presence of homosexual men in the Chicano Movement, even if their voices were not heard during the Movement itself. In several of the memories Moe recounts to Tamara, he makes the Movement sound as though it embraced all Chicana/os, when it actually enforced strict patriarchal power dynamics and gender roles. His nostalgic memory elides the sexism and homophobia for which many contemporary scholars now critique the Movement. In a chapter entitled "Ching6n Politics Die Hard," Elizabeth Martinez attacks the persistent masculinist discourse that has long dominated Chicana/o political rhetoric and connects this form of sexism to racism: For years progressive Chicanos have talked about fighting the "colonized mentality" that makes Raza identify with the oppressor and denigrate ourselves . . . Our history as a people of Mexican origin began with a hemispheric rape, and we carry in us, consciously or not, the idea that to be conquered is to be chingado ("screwed"); that to become unconquered requires dominating-even screwingothers. We have thought too little about how racism and sexism are interrelated, reinforcing structures in a system that identifies domination with castration, that quite literally casts politics in sexual metaphor.3s

34 Fernandez, interview.
35 Elizabeth Martinez, De Co/ores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998), 176.

48

L uCAS

In the context of David Roman's aforementioned theory of heterosexism, Martinez's argument includes an imbedded critique of homophobia along with its accusations of sexism. Martinez reminds us of the crucial link among all types of discrimination. The sexual metaphors of power and dominance that often define both colonization and masculinity illustrate how a masculinist response to racism recreates oppression in the forms of sexism and homophobia. In the context of Dementia, Moe's willingness to overlook the negative aspects of the Chicano Movement stems from a deep-seated connection to his chicanidad, which he defines largely in terms of his idealization of the Movement. Horacia N. Roque Ramirez posits that gay Latina/as commit firstly to a Latina/a identity before adopting a gay identity: "Because we are socialized into racial ethnic communities in the foundational years of our lives, it's tricky/challenging simply 'to do away' with such affiliations for the sake of 'queer citizenship.' ''36 This primary socialization can lead to a greater loyalty to the Latina/a community than to the gay community when the two come in conflict. The ways in which the Chicano Movement privileged a heterosexual, ultra-masculine identity directly conflict with Moe's queer identity. When Moe chooses to omit the oppressive aspects of the Movement from the memories he shares with Tamara, he displays his loyalty to his 1960s concepts of chicanidacf37 and manages to evade the need to critique or analyze Movement politics. Though he may not outwardly criticize the heterosexism of the Movement, Moe does describe how that discourse cast him in roles he did not want to fulfill. A conversation between Moe and his gay hairdresser friend Martin details their experiences with the performance of straight identities before they came out:

36

Horacio N. Roque Ramirez, e-mail to the author, 9 May 2003.

37 I make the distinction that he clings to a 1960s version of chicanidad, as opposed to a more contemporary version, because alternative readings of chicanidad, notably those of Chicana feminists, in the years since the Movement have worked to combat the macho discourse and make the concept of Chicana/o identity more inclusive.

38 Fernandez, Dementia.

DEMENTIA

49

MOE: Remember when you lived with Roxie? MARTIN: And you lived with Raquel. MOE: What were we thinking? MARTIN: That we were straight. MOE: Ugh! They alllaugh.38 The homophobia of the Chicana/o community boxed these men into a culturally defined notion of masculinity that precluded a gay identity. Despite the fact that they found no joy in the performance of straightness, they adopted a heterosexual mentality to go along with their performances. In retrospect, they see the confinement of that lifestyle and reject it with humor. Their laughter issues out of a current state of greater comfort and empowerment that both men experience out of the closet. Despite Moe's ability to laugh at the more ridiculous aspects of his performance of heterosexuality, he does not tell his friends about the pain of being identified as different by the Chicana/o community. He saves that discussion for Lupe and the safe haven of his dementia because he cannot seem to publicly articulate his anxiety over failing to be the heteronormative husband that Raquel wanted. Moe's dementia serves as a dramatic construct in the play which allows him to manipulate the concepts of memory and identity in order to situate himself in a performance of queer identity that does not conflict with his notions of chicanidad, largely because his performances of queer identity parody those of heterosexual identity. Judith Butler theorizes that homosexual performances that parody heteronormativity denaturalize prevalent beliefs that heterosexuality is the only gender norm. She specifically notes the ways in which drag parodies heterosexual femininity and questions the link between gender and biology.39 When Moe dresses in drag, the Chicana/o audience witnesses the feminization of the Chicano body and must reevaluate conceptions of chicanidad in order to reconcile queer identity with prior notions of Chicana/o identity. Despite his commitment to Movement ideologies, Moe no longer performs an unwanted heterosexual identity. This break from the performance of heterosexuality occurred long before he contracted AIDS and began experiencing dementia, but since the audience never sees Moe in a state of good health, the playwright
38 Fernandez, Dementia. 39 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 137-38.

50

LUCAS

employs his dementia as a theatrical device in order to meld Moe's past and present. He recreates his health and innocence through his performed memories of cruising and addresses the negative aspects of his past only when pushed to deal with his identity. In the realm of his dementia when the fabulous Lupe confronts him about taking off his party dress before Raquel's arrival, Moe again addresses the act of feigning heterosexuality. Moe explains the homophobia of the late 1960s Chicana/o community in East Los Angeles and offers up his confusion about his identity: "I come from a generation when being called a 'Puto' was an insult not a compliment. I come from when being gay meant ... I don't know. Not being a real man."4D Moe feels caught between standards of "manhood" and his sexual orientation. Here, in the privacy of his dementia, he can finally critique the Chicana/o community's exclusion of gays. In Spanish puto means faggot and is directly related to the feminine puta, meaning whore. Both puto and puta label people as "the fucked," those who are dominated and used. Here Moe implies that in the present Chicana/o context the term puto takes on a new, positive connotation. When they reclaim the term for their own use, Chicano homosexual men engage in the practice of semantic inversion, the reversal of a word's meaning or connotation,41 much in the way that contemporary African Americans appropriate the word black and homosexuals redefine the label queer for their own use in contrast to their formerly dominant, pejorative connotations. In the present moment of the world of the play, Moe finds a comfort zone where his community of friends readily accepts and supports many of his choices about identity. Moe's openly acknowledged battle against AIDS brings him the inner peace to face his death with courage. The portrayal of his struggle on stage invites audiences to accept the realities of AIDS and homosexuality in Chicana/ o communities. By identifying various levels of oppression within the broad Chicana/o community, Dementia works toward community acceptance and the deconstruction of harmful stereotypes and social practices. It asks Chicana/os to awaken from their state of dementia (disorder of judgment) in regards to the queer and AIDS-afflicted members of their community.
40 Ibid., 44-45.

41 Geneva Smitherman, Ta lkin That Talk: Language, Culture, and Education in African American (London: Routledge, 2000), 21.

DEMENTIA

51

The program to the play emphasizes that this production was presented in association with the Wall-Las Memorias Project, an organization committed to community awareness through the construction of a memorial in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood in L.A.42 Dementia functions as a public memorial much like the Wall. It bears visual and performed testimony about what AIDS does to a group of Chicana/o characters on stage, representing the struggles of AIDS patients whose dramas played out in real life and often in the absence of community awareness. On one level, the performance commemorates the life of Jose Guadalupe Saucedo, but at the same time it asks us as an audience and a community not only to acknowledge the presence of AIDS but to take active roles in AIDS prevention, raising awareness, and providing a supportive environment for victims of this epidemic.

42 The Wall-Las Memorias Project Website: <http: I/www. geocities. com/WestHollywood/Village/6543 >.

Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004)

HARRY GAMBOA, JR.: EPHEMERALITY IN AN URBAN DESERT - AN INTERVIEW

JENNIFER FLORES STERNAD

For over thirty years, Harry Gamboa, Jr., has been creating art that traverses and hybridizes media: conceptual video, photography, performance, installation, fotonovelas, radio drama, poetry, fiction and essays. Gamboa, whose work is at once formally experimental and cuttingly political, is a critical figure in the avant-garde art in the United States. Gamboa was a co-founder of the conceptual performance group Asco (1972-1987).1 Asco, which was based in East L.A., fused activism and art performance. Its members used guerrilla tactics to expose and resist the exclusions that undergirded the urban experience in Los Angeles. Gamboa's art career developed alongside his involvement with the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. From his observations of the media's biased reporting, Gamboa learned of the media's power to project a version of reality. C. Ondine Chavoya, Ph.D., has remarked how this understanding deeply influenced the members of Asco, whose mail art, media hoaxes and "No-movies" manipulated the mechanisms of representation-the same mechanisms by which young Chicano/as had been put under surveillance, stereotyped or erased from the public view.2 With their "No-Movies" the artists used the city as the set in which they staged conceptual performances designed for Gamboa's still camera . They then distributed single images of the performances as if they were stills from actual films. By mimicking the representational codes of cinema, the artists of Asco created the affect of film without creating the film itself.3 Gamboa writes, "We realized that martyrs, miracles

1 Gronk, Willie Herron III, Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandoval were the other original members of Asco. Many other artists were affiliated with the group during its lifetime.

2 C. Ondine Chavoya, "Social Unwest: An Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr.," Wide Angle 20.3 (1998): 54-78. This interview also can be found at <http://www.harrygamboajr.com> (cited 2 October 2004).

3 See C. Ondine Chavoya, "Psedographic Cinema: Asco's No-Movies," Performance Research 3.1 (1998): 1-14. For a discussion of No-Movies also see David E. James, "Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of 'Avant-Garde' Film in Los Angeles," October 90 (Fall 1999): 3-24.

HARRY GAMBOA, ]R.

53

and massacres could be created with images, icons, little money and very few resources."4 This conversation took place on October 27, 2003 in Los Angeles. It is part of an ongoing research project on Chicano/a art and avant-gardism. Gamboa's has been a critical voice in the history of Chicano/a art. As Chon Noriega, Ph.D., has noted, Gamboa's work documents Chicano experience while challenging ethnographic romanticism, the stereotypes of mass media and the essentialism of Chicano identity politics.s In this interview, Gamboa discusses how the calculated ephemerality of his work mimics personal memory and toys with the academic penchant for obsessional documentation. He explains how the publication and dissemination of works has changed his relationship to writing and how it has changed the works themselves. Gamboa describes how first-hand experience with violence has affected his work, and developed his conception of language as a potential weapon. He considers the increasing levels of surveillance within the United States, and how it will affect artists' willingness to wield this weapon . As he describes in the interview, Gamboa is influenced by the theatricality of the everyday. For him, the urban theater of Los Angeles is marked by extreme and random violence, which becomes absurdist and sometimes surreal in Gamboa's stylizations. Although often disorienting and humorous, Gamboa's work also provides nuanced readings of those stories, people, and even postures of aggression and vulnerability that most often go unnoticed. In conversation, he discusses how this skill relates to his own experiences living in L.A. Gamboa was the editor of Regeneraci6n and co-founder of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. His work has been shown in celebrated international fora, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and the Smithsonian Institution. Among his works are more than thirty videos and numerous conceptual dramas for radio and theater. Gamboa's video project L.A. Familia II is currently in production and is sponsored in part by a 2004 Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship. Gamboa is featured in the newly completed documentary Los Angeles Now, directed by Phillip Rodriguez. Many of his performance texts, photography, fiction, essays and poetry are collected in Urban Exile and his more recent work, including fotonovelas, videos, and exhibition announcements can be found on his website: http:/jwww.harrygamboajr.com . Gamboa lives in L.A. and teaches at California State University, Northridge.

54

STERNAD

Thanks to the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University and UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center for institutional support. - Jennifer Flores Sternad

*
Jennifer Flores Sternad: In Urban Exile many of your performance texts are published alongside your fiction and essays. They are so compelling as written works that it's easy to forget that they may have been written to be performed, not necessarily read in a book. A performance cannot be reproduced or circulated as a text can, and the ephemeral nature of performance affects the way its meaning is created. Could you talk about the difference between your work that was written to be seen by an intimate audience and/or performed once, and work that is published? Harry Gamboa Jr.: I think one of the things about works that are designed to be presented only once, performed and possibly never read, is that all the mechanisms of spoken language and action take precedence over the work. Also, short-term memory plays a role in the audience. So the mechanics of persuasion and many things that one can do with a live audience are not the same on the page as in performance. With an audience I can leave them the script, as it were, to retrace and realize the techniques with which I have attempted to hypnotize people. Since I've begun my website, many of the works that I have created since the publication of the book have just immediately ended up online. So, it has gone from being an ephemeral kind of work to a quasi-ephemeral kind of work on the internet. But you can print it, so it can become tangible. But if you don't bother to print it, it can be removed or erased just as easily, which I've done, over and over again. For instance, the website I have right now with all the work I've put into it could just as easily disappear tomorrow if I decide to do it. Oftentimes I'll put something up, people look at it and really want to refer to it, and then it's gone and there is no way to access it. That, for me, is also part of my approach to myth-building: to introduce things into the universe, into the lexicon, and then remove them and see if there is any ripple effect. Some things, for example, can be referred to in print, and yet the source material is now gone. So, it's playing a little bit with memory, but also with the whole mechanism of academia, which is so inclined to document and footnote. But what happens when it is only the footnote that exists? I've known Chon Noriega since 1991. Over time I have given him copies of works I've written just because I thought he'd like them.

HARRY GAMBOA, J R.

55

I wasn't thinking about permanence. I went through a period where I pretty much destroyed all my materials. I tore papers up, threw negatives away, erased videotapes .... I really wanted to streamline what I was going to leave behind, and wanted to basically erase my trail. In the meantime it seemed like Chon had become more interested in the work. I went to his house and he had assembled my book. He had located things I hadn't seen in twenty years, things I didn't want to see, things that were never designed to be shared, materials I had destroyed and had hoped would never be seen. But all throughout this period I had developed a trust in his judgment, because I respect his approach. I said, "Chon I really don't want to even see it until the day before it's going to go to print. Then we'll cross the Ts, because if I see it now I'm going to tear up half the pages." So, I read Urban Exile from beginning to end and then I stopped writing for about two years. Many of the pieces that are in the book were really designed for publication with a circulation of fifty or an audience of ten. And here and there in the book are pieces that were never meant to be heard two times in a row. So, some of the lines that I have are repeated over and over again because I thought these were lines that I wouldn't share initially with other people. Then to go through the book and see so much repetition in my work made me reconsider my approach to writing in the sense that I suddenly was in a situation where if I did write something there was the possibility that it could be juxtaposed with another piece I could write in the future . So I have to think of the work in the context of future works that don't exist.

JS: The language of your work is dense, and the printed work invites re-reading. It therefore lives in a very specific temporality. How different is that from the temporality of the performed work?

HG : The effect is like here in L.A. when you're driving through traffic. Do you ever drive with your windows down a little bit? It's like when you're driving through traffic and you're at a red light and you get hit with this blast of rap music and then it drives away. Yet you were somehow or other affected by that, and the next thing you know you'll say something absolutely outrageous that you got from the rap song and you don't even know how it got there.
JS : With avant-gardist or political work there is the risk that in its circulation it may be defanged. Because it can be bought and sold like any other commodity or because, within academia perhaps, it can be re-circulated as a discursive commodity. Is the way you embrace ephemerality a way of resisting that?

56

STERNAD

HG: It's a commentary on the way that I look at the whole system. I might as well play along and play with it at the same time. I'm both resisting and playing the game. When I was young here in Los Angeles, I would rent cars sometimes and get on the freeway and step on the gas and step on the brake at the same time to see what would happen. I think that's really how I approach life, because it tends to generate unexpected responses, chaos, and it has a tendency and a possibility to break the machine. One of the things I have always been interested in is establishing decoy art and decoy ideas that are designed to send people off on a wild goose chase. On some level that's also kind of performative. I can then incorporate the reader, the viewer, into performing an act that otherwise would not have taken place but is sort of bouncing off of an element in a script that affects their lives.

Cruel Profit, 1973. Conceptual Performance. Pictured: Willie F. Herron. Copyright by Harry Gamboa Jr. 1973.

HARRY G AMBOA, JR.

57

JS: Can you give me an example of a decoy?

HG: You can go all the way back to the word ' No-movie,' or even the name 'Asco' where it's a joke and not really meant to be taken seriously and before you know it, it's art history. Depending on the kind of feedback you get from the other artists in the group, they might be laughing still at this whole notion that people took it seriously.

JS: In interviews and in your own writing you often address how violence has been a part of your life, including how it has affected your aesthetic sensibilities. Could you talk about that element of your work?
HG: I guess my understanding of violence has just changed slightly. For instance, I don't think art in any way could really comment on the current state of violence in this world . The amount of official extrajudicial torture, extrajudicial disappearances, the massacres that have taken place, the genocide taking place around the world, the suicide bombing, the militarism, the fascism that's around this planetfor artists to really make a comment on violence is a luxury. My understanding of violence has been from first hand experience here in an urban setting. I believe I have the same level of awareness of violence as someone who has been in a war because, to a great extent, in L.A. County there are numerous ongoing wars of different types. One is gang war; there are class wars, environmental wars, social wars, psychological wars. The way that I travel around this city I have actually witnessed numerous fatalities. I have witnessed people going from being alive to being dead. I've seen the process of people going from sane to insane; the process of people being fairly well-off to being destitute; people knowing exactly their place to being completely lost. On one level that has tended to fuel my work. But a lot of my work tries to retrace the missteps of these victims and tries to offer a map by which to avoid these multivariate landmines. And if you are totally tuned in to an urban landscape, as we are, you might actually be able to make it to as old as I am . If not, there's a good chance you might get hit one day. Or step on the wrong twig that's going to send you someplace else.

JS: Do you think the formal qualities of your work effect a certain type of violence in themselves? I don't know if 'violent' is the right word, but your work, especially your use of language, can be very jarring or disorienting.
HG : Language can be used as a weapon. There are a lot of different types of weapons. With some you just want to stun them and some you want to kill them and some you want to just destroy. I have always

58

STERNAD

thought of language this way: as a means to defend and offend others. It's something I've always used it for, and using language as a means to persuade. If I weren't the one speaking out I'm not sure I would exist. Seriously. Physically or artistically or socially. Definitely socially! wouldn't exist or persist in the realm that I do without my occasionally doing something that involves language. For instance, there was a three to five year period when I spoke at all the major museums in Los Angeles. The museums were having some kind of survey show about Los Angeles in one way or another in which they totally excluded Chicanos in the work that was being exhibited. And as an afterthought decided to incorporate a Chicano in the dialogue about the process of creating art, in which I was called at the last minute. But each and every single time I was basically the only Chicano present in the situation, and I then had a major confrontation with five hundred people at a time. Several times I was chased in the parking lot and verbally assaulted 'til I was out of their reach. People screaming out, "Gamboa you'll never have a work purchased in L.A.!" "Gamboa you're not like such and such artist, he would never say such a thing!" It was me basically inserting a certain idea and certain terms that confronted where they were coming from. It was for me great fun because I think I'm capable of fighting with five thousand people at a time. But after going through that experience I am firmly convinced that I will never ever do that again. I will never speak in front of a museum again. JF: What bothers you particularly about museums? HG: Museums are basically display cases for the wealthy and for a particular audience. The museums here in L.A. are particularly antiChicano and so are their audiences. And I'm not about to waste another breath on them. The way that capitalism causes cultural amnesia it will be amazing if anyone remembers that our ancestors were from Mexico to begin with! There are mainstream films out there, for example, with blatant anti-Mexican sentiment, and the majority of people supporting these movies with their dollars are Mexicans or Latinos. Everyone refers to the "Hispanic market," because there is political savvy at work that understands that there is a big wallet out there. Everyone is just interested in pick-pocketing that wallet without giving anything in return . I could view the Latino population in the U.S. as a victim, but I don't, because to be a victim you have to be an active participant in your own victimization . I can only do what I can do. As an individual artist, I can only produce my work when I'm ready and put it out there, and that is all my contribution can really be. Because I don't have that much energy and I have even less money and, as it turns out, I have

H ARRY G AMBOA, JR.

59

even less time, and whenever I do work it is usually designed to affect an audience, and you have asked me who my audience is and sometimes I don't even know who they are. For me it's just the fact that I know it's going to be out there.

JS : Many artists I 've spoken to have talked about being excluded from 'mainstream' institutions. The idea of the mainstream implies access to certain audiences and of course, access to certain markets. But with subversive or political art, there can be a conflict between sociopolitical or cultural effectiveness and the rewards that can come with success in the 'mainstream.' What would you say about that conflict and the risks that artists will take?

Underpass, 1997. Conceptual performance. Pictured: Linda Gamboa. Copyright Harry Gamboa, Jr. 1997.

60

STERNAD

HG: Well, there are actually artists who have made a career out of calling themselves 'terrorist artists.' There are some artists who have really gone out of their way to be considered angry artists, and they are some of our most successful artists. But again, some artists suffered the consequences of calling themselves that. Some who were really on the forefront maybe fifteen years ago had to absolutely retreat and remain silent because they were actually able to address the people they wanted to address. Others just wanted to do their work, and were called " un-radical." I tend to not say what I am . Let the work say it. ... But I sure have heard what other people think I am.
JS: Like 'avant-garde.'

HG: I don't really know. There are a lot of different people out there doing things, they get called certain things, and it's specifically geared to who their agent is.
JS: Do you think that the idea of an avant-garde is still tenable? Is it possible for art to be effectively subversive?
HG: In this period that we live in-I think we're very quickly approaching a very solidified fascist state, technologically superior and thoroughly supported by brilliant think-tanks on the right-wing-it will be very difficult for artists to step out of line. Because they will be attacked on multiple fronts, and be completely excluded not only from art, but possibly be put in jail, not allowed to work. They're already establishing different categories of travel and credibility. I think it's similar to what happened in Argentina in the seventies. The first people that were lined up were the students and the creative people. And they just killed them. Here I don't know if it will be that blatant but they can make it very difficult for you to support yourself, and make sure that you are just a minor participant. In the long term there will be artists who will be forced out of doing their work because there will be little chance of getting anything done.

JS: I've read your comments about the theatricality of the everyday.6
How does that factor into how you understand identity?

6 See Chavoya, "Social Unwest: An Interview with Harry Gamboa, Jr."

HARRY GAMBOA, J R.

61

HG: The majority of people that live in L.A are trying to neutralize and blend and be non-specific on many levels. The only people here that really stand out are the Japanese nationals that are students here. In the majority of L.A. you can't tell males from females. All the clothes are the same, the hair color is the same, the sunglasses are the same, even the language is the same. There's no difference. These are people that want to be taken off the stage, as it were. They are a critical subject of my work because I am interested in people who try to remain invisible. What happens when you remove all the elements that could serve as visual cues and clues? Other things come into play and become almost magnified: certain behavior quirks, phrases, position of stance, various activities that they are engaged in. I've been invested in looking at people in that way lately. The way they approach, the way they walk, eye movement, and even tonality of voice. It's all subjective, from me as someone perceiving this because I don't go around and ask people, "Did you really mean this? Did you really mean that? Why did you do that?" to correlate with what my findings are. That's not my role. I can only go by what I perceive and feel, and I also operate quite a bit on instinct. I have a way of categorizing people, and I can sense danger. I can sense a lot of things. A lot of it is actually learned from years and years of experience, just having seen so many activities repeated, by total strangers. On some level there is predictability, but every so often I am proven wrong and I find myself in situations where I should have known better but I didn't. And every once in a while I'm completely on target and I'm able to benefit from things that other people can't see.
JS: That expression, "wanting to be taken off the stage" is so true.

HG: I think it has to do with where you are, in Southern California. You can drive forty miles to the desert and you can walk through the desert and go, "Wow there's nothing here." But if you're able to actually see what's there, there are a lot of living creatures there. Except they all blend in; they all camouflage; they remain motionless; they do not want to be noticed. And people are like that here. It's kind of an urban desert. What you find is that the people who are really flashy are the people who are either putting up a totally artificial threat, or the people who are totally threatening. Sometimes you really can't tell. If you stand out, the people who are going to notice you are the gangs or the cops, and if you want to avoid that entirely then you have to be totally unnoticed. For instance, there are people who are out there who are totally covered with tattoos. Very decorative but it actually has a lot of meaning. For some people it has a very jarring effect. A lot of people wear it on the outside. On some level it's like the way a cactus has spines. If you can get past the spines, the cactus is very succulent

62

STERNAD

and very tender and very vulnerable. Often the things you've got to watch out for are the things that look pretty normal. It's that little smooth rock that's going to cut your hand off. It's that thing that doesn't have a glow, but when you touch it, it's going to poison you. So, in reality the most dangerous people are the ones that look like they won't bother you at all. Usually when I walk into a building I scan everybody and if I feel danger then I won't go in. And I won't go in a place that doesn't have a backdoor and a window because those are two ways out. That's only because in my lifetime I have gone through a window because I broke the window because I had to get out. That also serves as a metaphor for a lot of situations that I've been in: if there are not two or three ways out, then I'll not engage.

Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004)

BROWNOUT 2
(PERFORMANCE S CRIPT,

2000-2003)

GUILLERMO G6MEZ-PENA

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

From 1992 to 1999 collaboration became the spinal cord of my performance work and my main political praxis. During those years my "solo voice" was relegated to my radio commentaries on NPR, my writings and performative lectures. I collaborated across gender, race and generational lines as an act of citizen diplomacy AND as a way to build ephemeral communities of like-minded rebel artists. By 1998 many colleagues, producers, and audience members had told me that in my attempt to include other voices I was "disappearing" too much and they wished "to hear my voice again," alone, unmediated, uncompromised by the ongoing negotiations inherent to the collaborative process. Around the same time, my closest collaborators, Chicano performance artist Roberto Sifuentes and choreographer Sara Shelton Mann, needed to do some soul-searching themselves and asked La Pocha Nostra for a "sabbatical" to recapture their own sense of self, and work on their own material for a while. Thus, in 1999, I decided to return (temporarily) to my solo work. I chose two aesthetic strategies: recycling (a quintessential border strategy) and the palimpsest. I began assembling the first draft of Brownout 1 by reviewing my digital archives. I excerpted texts coming from myriad sources: past duets with Roberto, radio commentaries for "All Things Considered," film scripts and notes from my performance diaries. I began to layer them, juxtapose them, and re-write some of them under a different light. By mid 1999 I went on the road for two years with the new material. As I was touring Brownout 1, I obsessively revised the text in between sites. I would either take one "unit" or excerpt out, and bring a new piece in progress, or I would incorporate unscripted topical pieces I came up with on the spot. Depending on the cultural and political characteristics of the venue, I choose this or that text. Some "units" were quite interactive and demanded the active participation of a bilingual audience for them to work. The staging of the piece also changed from site to site depending on many factors: budget, amount of technical help, time available to set up, etc. A few times and under the ideal conditions, I incorporated live musicians, say a cellist, an opera singer or a DJ. (I love to juxtapose classical European music to rap, rock en espafiol or drum & bass). My strategy of recycling images and texts is

64

G6MEZ-PENA

an intrinsic part of my aesthetic praxis which means that eventually Brownout 1 became a series of radio pieces, video poems, guerrilla interventions during town meetings or political marches, and cyberplacazos for the net. Brownout 2 was written to be presented in the diverse contexts of performance, poetry, theater, theoretical conferences (as a keynote address), and direct politics. Excerpts of the script have also been broadcast in various NPR radio programs (mainly All Things Considered and Latino USA) and have also been shot in video. A DVD containing a selection of these videos can be obtained directly through La Pocha Nostra's officepochnostra@aol.com. Fragments of Brownout 2 were published in Performance Research (UK) in the winter of 2003 . The complete script will appear early next year in my upcoming book Ethno-Techno (ROUTLEDGE, 2005). Guillermo G6mez-Pena, Mexico City

*
INTRODUCTION BY ELAINE KATZENBERGER

In the summer of 2000, Guillermo G6mez-Pena had suffered a health crisis that landed him in the hospital in Mexico City for a month. The journey from Brazil, where he first became ill while on tour, to San Francisco and through the labyrinth of the U.S. healthcare industry, and finally, in serious crisis, on to Mexico City, is a story in itself. Suffice to say that upon arriving in Mexico, Guillermo was, as far as he and those who loved him could tell, close to death. He was incapacitated for weeks, hooked up to various machines, poked and prodded each day, semi-delirious and semi-conscious, tethered to life by the determined refusal of his family and friends to let him go, but most of all by the unlimited and implacable love of his companera, Carolina. He was spared, only to face what the doctors pronounced would be a severely altered future: one without touring, one without performance. Luckily for all of us, that's not how it turned out. Although it took time and was initially only a frail hope, he was ultimately able to fully reclaim his health and has since returned to his usual Herculean level of activity and production - Brownout 2 is only one of myriad projects he has developed since that crisis. But it is unique, the only one that draws its content from that tenuous period of grave illness and slow recovery, and as we sat together revising the texts a year after it all had happened, I was struck by the fact that the piece could be developed and staged as a sort of hospital-bed soliloquy, a meditation from the edge of death on the meaning of life and the possibilities of art. He was completely taken with the idea, and we set

BROWNOUT

65

to work in our usual fashion, throwing ideas back and forth and trying things out for each other; by the end of the night we had the first draft. Many of the first-person texts that ultimately came together in the script for Brownout 2 were written in the hospital and in the months afterward, a time when G6mez-Pena was slowly and painfully regaining his strength, faced with the possibility of having to adjust permanently to what seemed like a puritanically disciplined and bland existence. It was a period of difficult questions, about the past, about the future. What, after all, does a performance artist who has spent over 20 years as a peripatetic provocateur do if he can't travel or perform? How had he arrived at this crossroads? If his years of efforts and experiments were now being framed as a "lifestyle" that his body would no longer tolerate, what were the possibilities for any kind of compelling or rewarding work? And how does one calibrate the effects and the effectiveness of a life lived through art? Were the issues and events that fueled the work really the right ones after all, and had the work actually had enough impact? The texts were like semi-delirious journal entries, a solitary, unmapped journey through the upside-down landscape of a life interrupted. Performance is, by definition, a body-based art, so what happens when a performer is faced with the loss of this medium as a means for expression? What might be the inner dialogue that ensues? In this way, Brownout 2 is about a crisis of the body - the artist's body, the body politic, a body of knowledge, a way of knowing and exploring and challenging. Brownout is an existential howl, a musing on the meaning of an artist's life, the place of art in society, the body's role in consciousness, the effects of years of cultural transpositioning, on family love, on relationships, on the nature of self. It is a polyphonic, multilingual rant, a loquito's cry in the wilderness of facing the future, facing the past, facing death and bracing for life. It is the summation of Gomez-Pena's 20-plus years of being a cross-border ombudsman, an intellectual provocateur, a weathervane for the storms blowing through the cultural divide between "high" and "low/' Mexicano and Chicano, art and theory, aesthetics and politics, self and Other. And mostly, it is a determined leap of faith into the future, with an affectionate nod to La Pelona (the Mexican death) whose embrace awaits us all, but not quite yet."

66

G6MEZ-PENA

BROWNOUT 2
(PERFORMANCE SCRIPT,

2000-2003)

Type of space: Ideally a small to medium size black box theater. However, it can be adapted for galleries, auditoriums, TV, and radio studios. Basic requirements: A lectern; a table covered with a black cloth for props; good sound equipment and a high-quality boom mike. A dressing room with soft-light, big mirrors, and good espresso is desirable. An SPX-sound effect machine is optional but desirable. A minimum of 4 hours prior to the event with two personable technicians to prepare the space and design sound and lights is necessary. Costumes: Complete attire of either "EI Traveling Medicine Vato," "EI S&M Zarro" or one of my shaman-personas in drag. Props to bring: Techno-glasses, rubber heart, robotic hand, bandanna, Stetson hat, Tourist "Indian" headdress, "Supermojado" wrestler mask, Spanish dagger, scissors and a handful of "lowrider" prosthetics and braces. Props to be provided by the producer: Battery-operated megaphone, hospital mask, realistic-looking handgun, "Mr. Clean" bottle filled with blue Gatorade, deodorant "blessing" spray can, and a bottle of Myers rum.

BROWNOUT

67 to be printed on the hand program)

BORDER BLESSING:

"Norte: Dear son, my only candle left, I promise I'll protect you from those norteno gangs. Remember: I am analog-you told me which means, I still know how to use my fists ... & my legs. Sur: Dear mother, my historical womb & genetic code, I promise I will clean up my act before I die Clean up my house de paso. Este: Carolina, mon amour, I promise I'll be beside you Catering to your most minute desires Licking your knees & palms Until globalization derails & the Popocatepetl ceases to smoke. Oeste: Dear clica, familia espiritual, I ask for your forgiveness. My absence was clearly a survival strategy. How else was I supposed to outlive the backlash, the INS, the IRS & the formalist art critics? How else was I supposed to finish this script? Dear criminals, pochos, locas y destrampados "Life without you all, my nomadic tribe, is virtual horror vacui en gringolandia." These words are for you, about you . My job tonight is to shatter the world with the word, my only weapon left. Am I delusional carnales?"

68

G6MEZ-PENA

The Script
AN AUDIO CD PLAYS AS THE AUDIENCE WALKS IN AND SITS DOWN. I WALK ON STAGE & POSITION MYSELF BEHIND THE LECTERN. THE TABLE WHERE MY PROPS LIE IS BEHIND ME; I BLESS THE SPACE WITH MY "SACRED SPRAY" THEN I DRINK FROM THE MR. CLEAN BOTTLE & SPIT IT OUT ON THE AUDIENCE.

lntro.
Dear audience/listener/viewer: Tonight from my multiple repertoires of hybrid personas, I have chosen to come as the embodied psyche of an existentialist mojado & it's quite a challenge my dear friends for I've been stripped by airport security of all my robo-baroque paraphernalia my ethno-technobilia ye-ye which means, no more hand-made lowrider prosthetics no mariachi robotic body wear no cheesy fog machines no hanging dead chickens, nothing not even a voice-effect processor to help me get rid of my accent just one costume, & a bit of make-up to protect myself o sea, back to the basics of performance It's Chicano minimalism a contradiction in terms but hell, I am a walking contradiction & so are you ... So, dear foreign audience: Welcome to my conceptual set Welcome to my performance universe Welcome to my delirious psyche Welcome to my border zone to the cities and jungles of my language las del ingles y las del espanol kick back, light up your conceptual cigarette ... a prop

BROWNOUT 2

69

I LIGHT UP A CIGARETTE & INHALE

& breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out rreelllaaaxxxx now, reach over; grab the crotch of your neighbor & massage yes .. . this is the basic exercise of Chicano Tantra

I SNAP MY FINGERS/BLACKOUT
I Day One

(NASAL) My never-ending tour to the outposts of Chicanismo finally crashed into the limits of my body while touring Brazil last year. Two weeks later, I was flat on my back in a Mexico City hospital bed hooked up to some retro sci-fi-looking maquina staring down my own death, Ia pelona, this time, she looked serious. I laid there in a free-fall through my psyche the digital mapa mundi of my vida loca I saw a bizarre infomercial In it I was a cheesy blond actor announcing some unspecific product Inner Infomercial (en Gringoiiol)
I love ... Galapagos-1 said (mispronounce) I mean, Galapenos, digo Gala-pennis Jala-penis Jala-pedos Jala-penos perdoun Io soy hapre-hendiendo Un poquitou di espanol Castillian, I mean Perro io soy solo

70
Un gringou loco de amorrr Per una chic-ana calienti De Mission Street Me mirra Como flourrecita de Chincuo Tamalo, digou Chingo di Malo, I mean Sink-oh diMaggio Translation please? Viva Coors culeros! Welcome to the colonized territory of your psyche Spanglish poltergeist, y que?

G6MEZ-PENA

Mojado Existentialism
(Donald Duck speak) This is the way English sounded to me when I was a kid (Indian tongues) This is the way my voice sounds when I'm on stage (French tongues) This is the way my voice sounds when I attempt to be comedic an eshek absolu Testing, testing ... (Telemundo announcer) En el proximo capitulo de El Malparido un Chicano se enfrenta a los demonios de Ia lengua Testing, testing ... This is the way my voice sounds when I'm rehearsing Testing, testing ... the limits of my identity, testing This is not my real voice, probando, probando ... This is clearly not my real voice, probando ... This is one of my many official costumes "EI Narco Mariachi" I wear it at least twice a week 'cause I am unable to discern between myself & my performance personas between art & life The dream of last century's avant-garde finally came true thanks to a Mexican... Not bad, but not true, either. SOFT RAP This is (name of the theater), a place in (name of city)

BROWNOUT

71

& this is America, a state of mind, a way of being while forgetting, a certain pain, a strange malaise, a cultural pathology, an intercultural purgatory America, my stage is your purgatory This stage is our battlefield "Robo-cop vs. the Global Evil Other" This script is my uncertain fate, my tongue, my compass, your unbearable headache (chanting) per ipsum, ecu nipsum, eti nipsum et TV video patri omni impotenti per omnia saecula saeculeros ... Ay!, que catholic I sound! Delete! (NASAL) True. It was a catholic hospital & the sisters, bless their hearts, were so totally weirded out by my tattoos, and pluri-flamboyant personality que Ia madre superiora kept coming to my room to offer me confession "Confiesa hijo de puta!," she thought, as if my death were imminent.
I OPEN MY JACKET TO REVEAL TATTOOS
" Madre,-! said these are my tattoos they are like ... heridas esteticas insects in the page, countries in my biographical map, My tattoos are like scripted words as opposed to my scars which are like unscripted sentences in the open book of my body My 46-year-old brown body, densely covered with Spanglish poetry unedited still. .." Excuse me sir/miss:

72

G6MEZ-PENA

(to an audience member) Can you read in Spanish? No? ... No big deal It's just that I'm obsessed with ... attempting to establish some basic connections between body, word & destiny between the politics of language & the physiology of politics verbi gratia: Casa, my head Cuello, going North Lengua, looking for your lips Pecha, I wish I had humongous freckled breasts Panza, my wisdom shows Pita, fionga, the untranslatable place Chocho, cofio, volcano Where all Vatos come from Way before the Bering Straight Way before Europeans first set foot on this continent Piernas, the journey North continues Pies, migrating in reverse Espalda, wetback back to the origins, memoria ombligo, video ... Cofio, my writing is getting real obscure I wonder if it's the medicine or premature dementia

II Day Two
(NASAL) I am surrounded by humongous doctors & nurses. They've got this sound scanner up my rectum. I tell you, loca, health & dignity don't always mix very well ....
(sounds of physical pain) If only I'd known before I parted that California was not a movie; that this psycho-tropical paradise sponsored by white hands was actually maintained by brown hands, precisely with their undocumented fingers deep inside America's sphincter (gutural sounds of sexual pleasure)

B ROWNOUT 2

73

"My fingers, your sphincter," I said on Public Radio & I lost my job for the third time. (to an audience member) You know, the best hamburgers in town are cooked by Mexican chefs precisely with their undocumented fingers Ese, do you feel them when you eat? Can you smell them right now? Are my undocumented words vivid enough o que? Dear audience, I've got 45 scars accounted for half of them produced by art & this is not a metaphor. My artistic obsession has led me to carry out some flagrantly stupid acts of transgression including: Living inside a cage as a Mexican Frankenstein Crucifying myself as a mariachi to protest immigration policy Crashing the Met as El Mad Mex led on a leash by a Spanish dominatrix. I mean, you want me to be more specific than say Drinking Mr. Clean to exorcise my colonial demons or, handing a dagger to an audience member, & offering her my plexus? (pause) "Here ... my colonized body"-1 said "My plexus ... your madness"-! said and she went for it inflicting my 45th scar. She was only 20, boricua & did not know the difference between performance, rock & roll & street life. Bad phrase, delete. Script change. "But if only I was a radical geography professor....

Lecci6n De Geografia Finisecular En Espaiiol Para Anglosajones Monolingues

Dear perplexed students, repeat with me out loud: Mexico es California Marruecos es Madrid

74
Pakistan es Londres Argelia es Paris Cambodia es San Francisco Turquia es Frankfurt Puerto Rico es Nueva York Centroamerica es Los Angeles Honduras es New Orleans Argentina es Paris Beijing es San Francisco Haiti es Nueva York Nicaragua es Miami Quebec es Euskadi Chiapas es Irlanda Ramallah is East LA Your house is also mine Your language mine as well And your heart will be ours one of these nights

G6MEZ-PENA

I DRINK BLOOD FROM MY PULSATING RUBBER HEART

(NASAL) A cross-eyed nurse asks me to please be quiet. Other patients are losing their patience with my Spanglish poetry. Carajo! I need a smoke real bad! Intercut:
(drunk-like/misspelled gringonol) after the 7th margarita (hiccups) after the 12th margarita (hiccups) the drunk tourist approaches a sexy senorrita at 'EI Faisan' Club, in Merida, Yucatan :
"oie prreciosa, my Mayan queen tu estarr muchio muy bela con tu ancient fire en Ia piel parra que io queme mis bony fingers mi pajarra belisima io comprou tu amor con mia mastercard" She answers in terrible French: "ne me derangez plus ou je vous arrache les yeux!"

B ROWNOUT

75

El S/ m Zoro (Gomez-Pena. Photo by Manuel Vason) Courtesy of Pocha Nostra

76

G6MEZ-PENA

III Day Three

(NASAL) I've been in and out of consciousness all day writing and sleeping, or rather, writing while sleeping and vice-versa writing shit like:

Poema en Robo-Esperanto
"ladies and gentlemen: enchiladas y burritos bagels and croissants; let's imagine for a moment a post-colonial robo-barroque esperanto composed of 5 European languages plus Latin, Nahuatl and Chicano slang what would it sound like? Alo? Alo Fortress Europa Yestem Mexicainskim arteston. Asken siquieren jodersen. I wonder que would happen if1 wenn du open your computero, finde eine message in esta lingua poluta et disoluta? No est Englando, no est Germano, nor Espano; tampoco Franzo; not even Spanglish ese. No est keine known lingua aber du understande! Cof\o, merde, wat happen zo! Habe your computero eine virus catched? Habe du sudden BSE gedeveloped o que? No, du esse lezendo Ia neue europese lingua de Europanto Uno cyber-melangio mas avec Ia Chicanoization del mondo (pausa dramatica)

(gringofiol accent) In the Americas, things are even more complicated regarding l'identite (stereotypical Vato Loco accent) ... yes que Ia neta escueta

BROWNOUT 2

77

we just don't know where exactly are the new borders located ... Tijuana, Bagdad ... plus o moin? Texas, Kaboul. .. aqui o alia? Earthlink, Yahoo ... ceci, cela? que esto/que aquello ici/ la-bas que tu/que yo, I mean not really wanting to decide yet 'cause for the moment, machin aujour d'hui tlacan;katl el mio IL corpo pecaminoso hurts un chingo especially my feet ikchitl pero tambien otras partes del cuerpopo-po-ca, capiscas guey? tenepantla tinemi y es que Ia pisca existencial esta ka .. ka . so drop your cuete mujer et fiches-moi Ia paix y hagamos Ia paz con Ia lengua babe, ici, dans Ia voiture sacre, en Ia mera rrranfla my toyota flamigero ... toy6-tl Ia salle du sex transculturelle my lowrider sanctuary tlatoani I say je n'ai rien declarer: "EI arte nunca sera suficiente" Translation: Art is just a pretext for...for.. .for... (I scream)

(NASAL) "Enough pretentious language poetry GP"

78

G6MEZ-PENA

-Myself #12 scolds Myself #7 "Get back to script# One ese & face the hard facts": "Hospital de Santa Catalina, Ciudad de Mexico, 10;00 am ... I wake up sweating. The IVs are clogged again. My left arm's the size of my thigh. I ring the emergency bell As I wait for the pinche nurse I write to Arthur Kroeker on a napkin: "Estimado senor K: The post-human body is not exactly sexy. Saludos desde Ia frontera del Mictlim. Sign: Mex-terminated" Dwelling in unnecessary wounds
But if only I was a good actor the bastard son of Klaus Kinski and Sophia Loren or the border twin of Nicholas Cage none of this would have ever happened. If only bad acting equalled good performance art or vice versa, as mediocre theater directors tend to believe, this performance would have never taken place. Que weird thought! If only I was a furious rocker. .. no a trendy painter? ... no I'm bored with art magazines and openings a sharp comedian ... ? Maybe, no, not really performance & comedy don't mix very well. The result is often a joke that no one understands. If only I had had the guts to join the Zapatistas for good the guts to fight the migra in situ, with my bare hands the guts to tell my family I am truly sorry for all the pain my sudden departure caused them 22 years ago, when I was young & handsome & still had no audience whatsoever. But I was a coward. I ended up making a 22-year-long performance piece to justify my original departure, el pecado original.

BROWNOUT 2

79

But if only I had never left in the first place what would have been of my life? It would be considerably simpler, perhaps I'd be less loco perhaps, less angry, less ... Chicano Awkward phrase, insensitive, sorry, delete! But if only I didn't have to worry about my audience. Entertaining them with stupid gadgets & jokes. Entertaining you to pay my bills, to avoid prison, deportation and mental hospitals to justify intellectually my socio-pathic tendencies If only I didn't have to perform to exercise my freedoms for I could do it every day, everywhere, but that's the subject matter of an essay, not a performance. Besides, you did not come here to witness a radical political mind at work. Or did you? Do you wish to experience a radical political mind at work? Politics as performance art or vice versa?

Exercise in Political Imagination #18 (Either beeping or subvocalizing the "censored" parts)
OK, I politely ask you to close your eyes and imagine a faraway country controlled by far-right politicians in their 70's they are supported by religious fundamentalists oil tycoons and gun manufacturers.. .Just imagine They believe (or rather pretend to believe) that "the liberal media" and experimental art have thoroughly destroyed our social fabric, our moral and family values, our national unity. and they are determined to restore them at any cost. Under the pretext of national security they have decided to carefully scrutinize everything that goes on radio, TV, printed journalism, the Internet, performance art; including this very (beep). So, from (beep) to sitcoms, and from news (beep) to (beep) programming, they have digital censors which can detect key words that trigger ideological or (beep) difference. Since it is practically impossible to monitor everything, they have devised a mechanism via which (beep) the syntactic and conceptual coherence of a thought is (beep),

80

G6MEZ-PENA

especially when dealing with conflicting opin(beep). So, when it comes to expressing political di(beep) most critical words have been (beep) . And I mean, just words, such as (beep) or (beep) or (beep) in order to ensure that tende (beep) information does not pollute the minds of American patriots, they have (longer beep) forbidding also the use of terminology like (beep) or co- (beep) or even an innocent term like (beep). In a world such as this, content would be restricted to (beep) and the possibility to make intelligent civic choices would be affecting our funda- (beep) to

(long beep intertwined with diptongues).

Imagine, what kind of a world would this be? I GRAB THE MEGAPHONE Locos & locas, perdonen but If I stop moving, performing, talking back... I simply die.

IV
Day Four Today I got to take a shower & write some e-mails: "You won't believe it tocayo but At first I couldn't retain any food or liquids & then I started vomiting blood bien draculero. My lower body began to swell up until I looked like some kind of medieval walrus. The American doctors said it was a "tropical disease" A standard diagnose for UMP (Unexplainable Mexican Phenomena) at which point, in an act of desperation, I flew to Mexico City, & put myself in the hands of the family doctor. The tests revealed an alarming catalogue of problems: Parasites blocking circulation in my limbs my lungs, infested with scary-sounding bacteria, & my liver, my liver had just about quit, closed up shop, lights out, caput. Medical linguists & mediaeval poets call it "esteatosis," en latin but in reality I was having a tete a tete with my own death.

BROWNOUT

81

She loves me so much I could smell the Brazilian desire on her breath."
I BRUSH MY FACE & PUT ON STETSON HAT Border Love/linguistic misunderstandings.

(I sing)
Kiss me, kiss me my chuca Como si fuera esta noche The last migra raid Kiss me, kiss me pachuca Que tengo miedo perderte Somewhere in LA.

Ayyyy! If only I had known the true motivations of my past lovers when falling in love with El Charromantico or el Mariachi Liberacci instead of myself #2, el Border Hamlet me ama/no me ama me caso/no me caso me canso/no me canso Chicano/Mexicano que soy o me imagine regreso o continuo me matojno me mato en Mexico/in Califas to write or to perform en Ingles or in Spanish ... I hate you, no, I forgive you, no, I crave for you locota, Where are you? Are you still blonde?

(NASAL) It took me 43 years to find her. She's here tonight laying next to me on this hospital bed, her warm hand on my shivering plexus, my right hand on her left breast blue fog covering the stage; My memory wanders around in the everglades of my laptop:

82
If only I had a decent command of English when I got involved with my past lovers.

G6M EZ-PENA

If only I had known the difference between jerk around and jerk off,
between napkin and kidnap, between prospect & suspect, between embarrassed & embarasada . If only I had known the difference between desire & redemption between political correctness & personal computers, between us & U.S. between humanity and mankind We've only got one word for both in Spanish : Humanidad, perd6name por ser tan bi-rollero

If only I had known the difference between loneliness & solitude ...
We've only got one word en espanol soledad. Forgive me for being so ... pa-ra-dox-i-cal soledad on stage, my flaming queen, forgive me chuca for spilling the beans of my very spicy beanhood.

"He thinks like Octavio Paz," -wrote the theater critic of the Boston Globe, "but behaves like Geraldo Rivera on acid."
But if only I had known the gringo implications of "Mi casa es su casa" meaning, y tu pais tambifn or "Hasta Ia vista babe," meaning, die fuckin ' meskin Or "Vaya con dios vatous locous, " meaning, deported back to the origins. The South is always the origin & crossing the border is the original sin. Placazo: Un emigrante mas equals un mexicano me nos... Delete!

B ROWNOUT

83

During a Performance in Sydney, G6mez-Pena takes a knife to his throat at the request of an audience member. Photo by Heidrun Lohr.

84

G6M EZ-PENA

v
Day Five (NASAL) My f riends and relatives are all here sitting around my bed. I'm entertaining them with a new performance text The tone is clearly much less personal & tortured
Two months before election day, The Third Party Chicano candidate addresses the Brown House:

Campaigning for the Brown House.

I PUT ON DARK GLASSES & BANDANA
Dear Chicanos and honorary Chicanos, The historical mission of the U.S. is to put the world at risk and then to save it from the very risks they created; for example, to arm other countries and then to attack them for being armed; to provide weapons and drugs to the youth of color and then to imprison them for using them; to endanger species and then to raise consciousness and create programs to save them; to evict the poor and then punish them for living on the streets; to turn women and people of color into freaks & then laugh at us for acting out accordingly. The historical Mission of the U.S. is very, very peculiar.

FROM NOW ON I TAKE OFF GLASSES EVERY TIME I SHIFT VOICES

(Bold lines delivered in normal voice/others in hyper-Chicano accent) Dear audience, If I were a politician, would you vote for me? Despite my outlaw looks, my obvious vices? Despite my lack of theatrical training? If this was, say, a presidential campaign and not a performance art piece, what would I say? What should I say? I maginary political speech #5

B ROWNOUT

85

ABRASIVE W/MEGAPHONE Dear citizens of the millennia! barrio, We are faced with a very serious dilemma: we have now entered the post-democratic phase of advanced capitalism, and there's simply... no return .

Orale! Parezco Malcolm Mex.

We politicians have total disregard for human pain, for the homeless, the migrants from the South, our elders and teens, the artists, the enfermed, the crazy ones like you . We have gotten used to living without seeing, without sharing. For the moment all we share is ...the moment

No, no, no, t hat's a bad Daoist phrase. I'll try imaginary political speech #7.

I DROP MEGAPHONE & RAISE MY RIGHT FIST (Grave voice) Dear orphans of the nation/state, We now live ... we now live in a fully borderized world composed of virtual nations, transnational pop cultures & hybrid races. & all we share is fear & vertigo (to an audience member)
Hey, that's a great line
Fear? fear of the future, of war, love, & loneliness

And vertigo?
The feeling of standing on the edge of a new millennium. Yessss!! Pure horror vacui: Y2K, y que, Apocalypse Manana! We feel it in our crotch & it goes up our spine & into our throat & out of our nostrils and eyes & its fucking unbearable!!! !!

I'm overdoing it, I know, but I see no other way to make my point. Wait, there might be another way ...a j oint!

I LIGHT UP A JOINT & SMOKE IT

(stoner voice)

Imaginary political speech #12

86

G6MEZ-PENA

Dear generic American citizenry, If you vote for me I can assure you that as the first Mexican president of the USA, I will fulfill your fears and desires like no other politician ever did & all your stereotypes will come true carnales, uufff! I'll open all borders, legalize drugs, create nude university campuses, make daily sex mandatory, make Spanglish the official language/ expropriate all TV stations and hand them over to poets, abolish the police force & the national guard 1 ban all weapons1 from handguns to missiles, deport Bush back to Texas & Ashcroft back to his Episcopalian Inferno. Orale, feels great to imagine ... I TAKE OUT BANDANA & DARK GLASSES I DRINK FROM MISTER CLEAN BOTTLE AGAIN

VI Day Six (NASAL) Since my liver canrt tolerate the medicine I need to fight the infections, the doctors needed a way to simulate its functions. So, they connected me to a myriad more IVs and made me look precisely like one of my Mexi-cyborg performance characters, like some kind of cheesy self-fulfilling prophecy featured on the sci-fi channel en espafiol ....
(Voice of sleazy Latino TV announcer) A continuaci6n en Telemundo Un emigrante asegura haber sido atacado por Migrasferatu (normal voice) If only I had been more cautious when crossing the border but1 to tell you the truth, I'm glad I wasn't, 'cause we are who we are because of every mistake werve made & all the locos & locas we've met in the process including the pinche migra & every caress we/ve given & received including those of our worst lover

BROWNOUT

87

& if you want to get real He-ge-lian we are who we are because of every performance we've done & every performance we chose not to do. Like tonight, I chose not to do a lot of things, for example, I chose not to make you laugh too much so you wouldn't mistake me for a stand-up comedian . I chose not to shock you unnecessarily so you wouldn't get a bad impression of performance art. I chose not to bring my gun So you wouldn't think that all Mexicans are violent And precisely because I chose not to do all these things I am who I am doing what I'm doing echando rolla profeta chance-thinking as I go, go, Go-Mex. I'm going, we are all going through the Biiiiiiiiiiig Smoke, (tongues) el in-ter-cul-tu-ral Poltergeist, (tongues) driving along the information superhighway (tongues) surfing the mindscape of the net (tongues) the subconscious of America, (tongues) It's scary but we are all writing this text as I speak. I spik, you gringo... no I speak, you listen. Voice change; special effect #187 : MUTE LANGUAGE FOR 30 SECS

(NASAL) The nurse enters the room stage left. She takes my performance temperature & changes one of the IVs. Action:
Where is the pinche teleprompter I asked for? I told you guys I was unable to memorize a full script.

The nurse does not understand my concern

88

G6MEZ-PENA

I told you very clearly that this was not a theater monologue Hey Pancho, that light over there is too bright Can we put a blue gel to add some artificial melancholy to my words? Tonite, my words are my conceptual stage And you my dear audience You are my... hostage Nevermind! Testing, testing, probando "Estoy muriendome en voz alta y nadie se da cuenta, probando ..." This mike sounds crappy que no? Don't you guys have another one That can actually improve my voice? Make me sound more dignified, sensual, compassionate, smart I mean, isn't technology supposed to enhance humanity? (pause) nevermind! Back to my main subject matter: Mapping Mapping the immediate future so you and I can walk on it without falling inside the great faults of history. You & I, verbally walking together, You & I, an ephemeral community You & I, a tiny little nation-state You & I, a one-hour-long utopia titled "You & I" Alone on stage Fighting together the World Bank, the WTO & the Bush Cartel Tu y yo, juntitos. But who are you, really? I POWDER MY FACE & PUT ON MY STETSON HAT

(NASAL) After a week at the hospital, I look at myself in the mirror & see someone else, a pale skinny man with a frail gaze., I don't recognize myself, and neither do my other selves. I am the most other & fragmented I've ever been. I'm literally talking to this Other self on the other side of the mirror

BROWNOUT

89

HOUSE LIGHTS (addressing an audience member) Ese ... Where is the border between you and me? Between my words & your mind? Between my mouth & your fears? Where exactly is this performance taking place? Are we webcasting tonight? Am I alone on stage? Where are my dear colleagues?(name present friends) Are you locos still here? Are you ... my audience tonight? Do you feel lonely when I speak? What time is it, by the way? It's so fuckin' late in the show! And I am still asking all these existentialist questions: Is there still time? Time for...making love ... For dreaming ... For reinventing ourselves ... For returning to the homeland, to her arms Is there enough time? to wait to stop the war, another war to cry collectively to cry for the world for no apparent reason, the way Fassbinder used to cry whenever he took a city bus & saw other suffering humans? their perplexed & lonely faces? "Ish bin ain Mexicanishes monster in Berlin" Poor German citizens, if only they had been born in Mexico they would be less tortured ... perhaps. Bad phrase. Delete. (to someone in the audience) Miss, why were you crying the last time you cried? You beautiful, you ... Were you truly aching or just performing? Am I really, sincerely aching, or just performing? Is this a mere exercise in linguistic manipulation? (to someone else) Sir, are you in touch with your heart? Can you see mine, hanging out like a wandering viscera? (to someone else)

90

G6MEZ-PENA

"Carnal, are you in touch with your genitalia?" This guy asked me this question at a party the other night: What does it mean to be in touch with one's genitalia? I answered rhetorically with a question : "To be sensitive to people's eros? or to engage a-critically in sexual harassment or, in Spanglish, "sexual agarrasment?" Is anyone, right this moment, besides me experiencing incommensurable horniness? No one? (pause) Anyone willing to come on stage & take off your clothes As a homage to early performance art? (to an audience member) Hey, do you know your genetic code? Do you know your civil liberties? How many have you lost so far? (Hindu accent) I don't ever recall asking you if you were a foreigner (French accent) ne me derange plus u ye vous arrache les yeux bad French accent, co no... terrible! I told you I was a bad actor! 'Cause I was never trained ... to perform ... your desires Much less to entertain ... the possibility of... lying.

(NASAL) La madre superiora, remember? She returns once again to my room to offer me confession: "Confiesa hijo de puta!," -she says encabronada as if my death were imminent. I turn on my inner TV News update:
(Voice of typical American newscaster) The war goes on in Baghdad As the performance continues in(name of the city where I'm performing)

BROWNOUT

91

Miento: The war goes on at the US-Mexico border As the performance continues on HBO Same war; different performance Blackout! BLACKOUT/I PUT ON A WRESTLER MASK

VII
Day Seven (NASAL) Carolina comes in with a hidden avocado torta she smuggled from the corner taco shop. She breaks the good news: I'm leaving tomorrow, orale!. This epic is almost over. The older nurse, Ia coqueta, asks me for the 10th time "Perdone senor, what did you say you were? Per-for-man-que?"
A contra-dic-tion in terms -respondo A straight transsexual -elaboro a wrestler without a ring a rocker without a band a cyber-pirate without "access" a theorist without methodology a shaman expelled from his tribe a poet who writes his metaphors on his/her body 7 locos, locked inside an empty room my mind, mex-plico? My mind, not theirs

She looks at me With a combination of tenderness and fear and says: "No entiendo nada ... del arte ... mo-moderno"
an artist who sells ideas, not objects, not images, not skills a per-for-man-ce artist, which means that when I am pissed I tend to speak in tongues (angry tongues) performance is a weird religion, I told you (chant) per ipsum ecu nipsum, eti nipsum

92
et T-video Patri Omni-impotenti per omnia saecula saeculeros, I te watcho (tongues)

G6ME Z-PENA

I TAKE OFF WRESTLER MASK

This is the way my voice sounds when I'm losing my mind, Testing, testing ...

El Phony Shaman.

FAKE NAHUATL (I sing the traditional Hare Krishna) Hare Krishna, Krisnahuatl Hare grandma, hairy nalga Ommmmmmm (imitating Pow-wow-like chanting) Christian girls, Christian girls, Christian Girls, Christian Girls, Oh how I love, oh how I love, oh how I love those Christian girls, Oh how I love, oh how I love, oh how I love those Christian girls. ahhhhh ... New age girls... (repeats chant) Skinhead girls ...(repeats chant) Muslim boys ... (repeat chant) SHAMANIC TONGUES INTERTWINED WITH WORDS tongues...Tezcatlipunk tongues.. .Funkahuatl tongues... Khrishna huatl tongues.. .Chichicolgatzin tongues.. .Chili con Carne tongues.. .Taco Bell Chihuahua tongues.. .Santa Frida tongues...Santa Selena tongues.. .Santa Pocahontas tongues.. .Santa Shakira tongues...Virgen Tatuada NAFTA, Viagra, Melatonin, NAFTA, Viagra, Melatonin, (screaming) Melatonin!! Now everybody, take your pill. Ginseng, Gingko, Guacamole, Ginseng, Gingko, Guacamole, (screaming) Guacamole !! Now everybody, take a dip.

BROWNOUT

93

Kava, ecstasy, chili beans, Kava, ecstasy, chili beans, (screaming) Rosarito!! Now everybody, take a shit.

(NASAL) The day I was released Doctor Hernandez gave me the bad news: "Guillermo, you need a total change of lifestyle." I hate that pinche word, "lifestyle"..."lifestyle ... " I pi nche hate it

VIII
One month later (NASAL) I'm back in San Francisco learning how to be a lap-top intellectual, coiio! I miss the road, the troupe, our dangerous cross-border adventures. I badly miss Myers rum & Marlboro reds. I'm filled with millennia! doubts, chingos! Post-script: Millennia! Doubts.
Damas y caballeros; I'm feeling a bit insecure & introspective tonight. I just turned 48 & I wonder if I'm still asking the right questions or am I merely repeating myself? Am I going far enough, or should I go further? North? But the North does not exist, South? Should I go back to Mexico for good? Regresar en espaf\ol a las entranas de mi madre? But the Mexican nation-state is collapsing as I speak so stricto sensu, Mexico en espana! no longer exists 'cause everyday Mexico & the U.S. like Fox and Bush. look more & more like one another & less & less like you y yo which means, "we" are no longer foreigners to one another. Follow my Kantian logic? Therefore, as orphans of two nation-states

94
we've got no government to defend; no flag to wave. We've only got one another which sounds quite romantic, I mean, politically speaking, but it is a philosophical nightmare...

G6MEZ-PENA

I mean, if neither the North nor the South are viable options anymore, where should I go? East? EST? Should I go deeper into my global psyche & become a Chicano buddhist? Or should I cross the digital divide west & join the art technologist cadre? How? Alter my identity through body enhancement techniques, laser surgery, prosthetic implants, & become the Mexica Orlan? A glow-in-the-dark transgenic mojado? Or a post-ethnic cyborg, perhaps? A Ricky Martin with brains? That's a strange thought.
Maybe I should donate my body to the MIT artificial intelligence department so they can implant computer nacho chips in my *&"%"76%78 implant a very, very sentimental robotic bleeding heart and become the ranchero Stelark? What about a chipotle-squirting techno-falo jalapeno to blind the migra when crossing over? Or an " intelligent" tongue ... activated by tech-eela? You know, imaginary technology for those without access to the real one. I mean, I'm arguing for an obvious fact: When you don't have access to power Poetry replaces science And performance art becomes politics Mex-plico? No, I got to get me a "real" job, a 9 to 5 job. But the question is, doing what? Hey, I could be an inter-cultural detective A forensic expert in X-treme identity analysis ...nay! Que tal Ia pedagogfa radical? Translation please?

BROWNOUT

95

I can teach "Chiconics" in Jail, I mean Yale "What's up esos, chinguen a sus profesores. Saquen Ia mota y el chemo. Forever, Aztlan nation." How about posing as a model for a computer ad:

I PUT ON MY TECHNO GLASSES & STETSON HAT

"EI Mexterminator thinks different, y que?" Or posing as a wholesome eccentric for a Ben & Jerry's poster? No, I'd have to loose 10 kilos at least & use lots of coppertone que no? Wait, I could conduct self-realization seminars for Latino dot-commers: "Come to terms with your inner Chihuahua."

(I BARK)
Que tal a workshop for neoprimitive Anglos? : "Find your inner Aztec." (I speak in pseudo-nahuatl) I look the part que no?... kind of I could write a best-seller for conservative minorities titled ... "Inverted Minstrel!: 100 ways to camouflage your ethnicity to get a better job;" or "Using make-up & wigs to get a loan from the bank or to buy a home at a trendy hood" I just don't know anymore It's tough to find a useful task for a performance artist nowadays. In the age of the mainstream bizarre, revolution-as-style & globalization-gone-wrong, weapons of mass distraction, asses of evil shoved into your face, in this time and place what does it mean to be "transgressive"? What does "radical behavior" mean after Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, Bin Laden, Ashcroft, Cheney 6-year-old serial killers in the heartland of America, a First World Banana Republic ... Florida, tampering with electoral ballots, an AA theological cowboy running the so-called "free world" as if he were directing a Spaghetti Western in the wrong set? Conan the Barbarian running for governor in California

96
Cono, I ask myself rhetorically, what else is there to "transgress"? Who can artists shock, challenge, enlighten? Can we start all over again? Can we? May I Mear... los? Should I burn my bra or my green card? Damas y caballeros, I thought maybe I might have one more chance to make a deal with my personal death So, I wrote this script It begins like this ...

G6MEZ-PENA

BLACKOUT

TEMPORARY END

Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004)

RE- SHAPING THE FUTURE: AFTERTHOUGHTS ON A (OMMUNilY ROUNDTABLE

Edited by
CARlOAD SVICH

A couple days after the roundtable was held in November 2003 at INTAR in New York City, I asked the playwrights who had comprised the panel to continue our discussion online. Since many of us are separated by geographic borders, communicating via e-mail is one of the most "tangible" ways we can stay connected. In the virtual realm, some of the playwrights expand upon the ideas touched on in our "live" public encounter. Below is an edited version of e-mail exchanges from late November 2003-January 2004, which reflect the varied position of the Latina/o writing community to not only the act of writing for performance, but its role in the contemporary world . What follows are responses that shift and expand upon my initial questions, sometimes circling back to the original question, but often taking off into new territories, as befits this issue, of expression .

Caridad Svich : As the global map reconfigures itself, where do you see Latina/a dramatic writing heading? What is its concrete future? Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya: First note. On language. There's an advantage. For example, in having learnt English in a blatantly bad second language school system . To this day I'm not sure if that was in the island or on the island. There's an advantage. In knowing how to write a language, but not to speak it. In viceversa. In having, the syntax of classroom, law and TV is different from the syntax of intimacy, family tongue. In lacunae, fragmentation, substitution, amalgamation, spanglinization, forgetting. In more. Una n6-ma-da que sf-da-mas. Comiendo y friendo terminologies (medicas, burocraticas, academicas, sci-fi religion & irreligion). What better site for the posthuman than a minor language? Resistance is not "F" (una efe). Because "puertorriquefio punto org" is not the same as "boricua. net"
-Don't be afraid of nonsense that senses. (It's the real contemporary naturalism-and fun.) -I used to think that my community as an artist centered on those who could better follow the codes of my writing . Then I thought about my family-who sometimes see me as an extraterrestre and who does not

98

SVICH

always follow. One's public then is ultimately in those who are able to bear the gaps, to emotionally re (a) son-ear in them. -The words, which occupied the following measures, have been eaten up.
(-- '') (clave with my tongue) This tongue is canfbal.

Ricardo Bracho: I see U.S. Latina/ o dramatic writing as a multiheaded beast that cannot decide on a direction. Luckily this keeps many strands alive: community based teatros who perform bilingually for families and the politically affiliated and culturally aligned, sit down straight ahead 'serious' theatre in English or Spanish (but rarely in both and hardly ever in Spanglish) performed mainly to the middle classes with a pitch towards building a subscriber base and a nod towards multiculturalism, hip hop teatristas and spoken word artists who spit spectacle to each other, performance artists, avant-gardists, feminists, pop futurists. Like lull water we are simultaneously stagnant and regenerative. I like the way we are continuously remaking maps. Whether that is as a corrective to a reductive read on history, geography and memory or when we play with character, language and form to formulate both dystopic and joyful visions of the past's stain on the future. Migdalia Cruz: The global map reconfigures itself so slowly-what it is it? Like a millionth of a millimeter per second. I hope Latino/a writing changes more quickly. It changes with our integration into a society that despite our growing numbers seems intent on keeping us the other. Isn't that a miracle? That we continue? There is no map to where we're going-if we continue to tell the truth in our work. There is no concrete binding us in form or structure to get there. Latino/ a theatre has a future because we are still here and still have stories to tell in a way that no one else is telling them. That is like hope, I think. Our future cannot be concrete-like any art form it must be ephemeral and ethereal to exist, because it presumes that humanity needs it to feed its soul. Concrete does not equal soul. Amparo Garcia-Crow: It is my hope that the burden of representation facing the first generation of Latino/ a writing-having to educate (not only the public, but our own communities) about what it means to be Chicano/a or Cuban/ a for example-no longer dictates what the playwright needs to concern themselves with when they decide to tell a story. Ideally, the notion of race can now be delegated to a stage direction or a character description and the situation captured in the play is enough to inform the audience about "the

RE-SHAPING THE FUTURE

99

particulars." Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, is a perfect example of a play with "particulars" that introduces members of a very specific culture (at a very particular time and place) while also speaking to another culture's treasured writings, creating a "global map" of universality in the process.

Oliver Mayer: There is no concrete future in the American theatre, for Latinos or anybody else. As the spiritual says, eventually the walls come tumbling down. In these dark times, political and otherwise, the theatre is a place to play - to build stuff up, then tear it down. Not only are we approaching majority status in voting terms, but also we are finally settling into the middle classes (or what passes for them in this debt-ridden age). The best news is that our culture - whether spiced with Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, or other picante - is the sexiest and tastiest stuff around. No one has any guarantees, but we as artists who happen to be Latino have the happy chance of an opportunity. Each of us needs to write towards that opportunity, as each of us defines it. Big fissures have happily lined the walls of our limitations and it's high time they tumbled. Carmen Rivera: Latino drama will continue evolving and playing a major role in the American Theatre Landscape-albeit against the will of the American Theatre Landscape . I think we all feel a sense that we are still considered the other and the fierce loyalty that many have for the stereotypes is astounding. We have no control over how we are perceived but we do have control over what we create and that is power. Waiting for acceptance, respect, and representation is a waste of time and energy is better spent in writing, producing, directing and marketing our own work. It is a matter of numbers-to date it is safe to say there are more and more Latino(a)s writing in all mediums despite the precarious times in which we are living-a dark ages if you will-in which freedom of expression in America is incredibly marginalized; and voices considered "non-mainstream" (which means us among others) are even further marginalized. We are very lucky to have a thriving National Latino Theatre community. I believe 'the reconfiguration' begins there. The Latino theatres in the United States are very under-rated and under-appreciated. These theatres produce work-from Latinos in the U.S. to international artists from Latin America and beyond - that is experimental, socially critical, and provocative on a regular basis. Yet their efforts are not recognized by the press, the American culture or among many Latino artists themselves. Of course we must try to cross over so that our stories can reach a wider audience but we cannot underestimate our own community. Reconfiguration of how our work is disseminated begins with us, not with them.

100

SvrcH

Elaine Romero: I think we're headed in as many directions as there are individuals. Spending the last few years as a playwright-inresidence at a large regional theatre has forced me to confront, at the deepest level, how theatres might operate. I bring this up because I think our visibility as Latino theatre artists might depend on all of us learning how things work. It is our responsibility to know how we fit in, or don't fit in, to the visions of the theatres where we hope to see our plays produced. And when I say that, I'm not talking about compromising our work, but truly confronting and challenging our lot. If we're not a blip on the radar screen, we need to know it, then find out what constitutes a blip, and then figure out how to become one. Writing wonderful plays may simply not be enough.
CS: The first generation or so of Latina/a writing for the theatre seemed, to an extent, to be focused primarily on cultural nostalgia. What happens after nostalgia for lands remembered, longed for, or imagined?

Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya: I have a problem with nostalgia and that is that I enjoy it immensely. I put it away and I become nostalgic for the nostalgia, yo cargo un muerto, I carry a phantom of a phantom. Consider, instead, a movement from one type of nostalgia to another, from a longing of a past that freezes action, that closes on (an experienced or constructed) identity to a memory/emotion that explodes in the present in-forming it; that makes "identities-alterities" sure and safe enough to shift and share. From a defensive stance to the offensive motor. Nostalgia after all is desire. Another thought. On e/ deveniror The placement of the home. It's for me still intriguing that after so many years and so much puertorriquefiismo de ambas partes the traditions, themes, aesthetics, learning, appreciation, institutionalization, and repertoire related to the practice of playwriting in Puerto Rico versus Puerto Rican communities in the U.S. remain distinct and, to a large degree isolated. I cherish the distinctness but question the isolation. I work in both ambits-that is I work in that isolation. I dream of measures (artist exchanges, residences, organizational collaborations, cross publications, expanded curricula) but we also dream of a nation. Ricardo Bracho: What I find irritating is our sentimentality and nostalgia, not as it is localized in land, but around notions of the family and the cultural familiar. I'm glad that we seem to have fallen out of love and obsession with the family romance as a biologized representation of cultural tradition and alienation even if that led some of us, myself included and implicated, into an Oprah-ized depiction of

RE-SHAPI NG THE FUTURE

101

blended and non-blood families that can be as tedious as its neo-liberal source texts. I'm fond of but in no way nostalgic for plays that take seriously land-based struggles and peoples. Cuz I come from the urban west coast Chicano variant of such indianist ideology and because it is one of the many strands of Caribbean and Latin American political performance that is neither taken seriously, well funded or investigated often in the Latina/a U.S. So I don't think the moment is sufficiently decolonial to know what happens after land is remembered, longed for or imagined but I always want to practice my playwriting with that question buzzing near me.

Migdalia Cruz: As a Nuyorican writer, I have not had much time for nostalgia. I write about liberation, rage, confusion, violence, and love. I write about the search for home. That is not nostalgia. That is a fact. I cannot long for what I have not known and what I have not felt entitled to. To have nostalgia is to believe there was a better time. I don't think there has been one for my people. We live in the present. That is a fact. Sometimes we write about our ancestors when we write about ourselves, but that is not nostalgia when it feeds your present and lives in the present. I don't dream of moving to the campo like my father did, but I need to understand the impact of his poverty that continues to make me always feel poor. No amount of money will change the things I know in my bones. Amparo Garcia-Crow: While the mythic "Aztlan" may have made its way into the first generation or so of Chicano writing, the notion of lands remembered is not the same for the Mexican-American as it might be for other immigrant groups. The Mexican-American was already at home, and in the homeland. If cultural nostalgia shows up, it's more about coping with having been conquered or oppressed within our own territories. So in that sense, the Chicano is more concerned with an inner kind of freedom. An inner landscape, if you like, in the midst of becoming disenfranchised. Oliver Mayer: As long as our nostalgia is active - as long as our memories and fantasies actively and actually hurt us - we should write about them. Despite the years, the therapy, the public relations marketing of our culture for TV audiences, we still bleed with a rabia that predates La Ma/inche. We still don't belong . This may be a good thing. El Maestro Alfonso Arau likes to say that when he is in here in the USA, everything is 100% about money, whereas when he returns to Mexico it is perhaps 92% about making money. I am sure that we in the theatre reside somewhere in that 8% - reminding our dollarcrazed brethren that they have souls, that there is more in the world

102

SviCH

than capital, that there are other ways to value a life.

Carmen Rivera : Nostalgia is not part of the Puerto Rican psyche. Puerto Ricans do not look back on a place as a home nor can we return to a golden, innocent time, when we were whole-we are still waiting to become. We haven't been offered the luxury of looking back-so we must look into the future, longing for a place to belong, knowing that, in the meantime we exist as people in diaspora and that place of belonging resides within us. What I do long for has nothing to do with my heritage-a cultural environment conducive to creating . How I wish I was a playwright in the 1960s. But that may be more Romanticism than Nostalgia. Elaine Romero: As a Chicana, I might be in a different position on this question. I don't feel it is for me to say that we should retire cultural nostalgia. We are a people who were already here. My own family has an over 400-year history in New Mexico, so their presence there predates New Mexican statehood. When I was a little girl, my mother used to tell me, "We used to be rich. We used to have land. Then, the Americans came and took it all away." She would tell me that she was teaching me things I would not learn in school-that our family did not come through Ellis Island or Plymouth Rock-that although George Washington was our forefather and we believed in the U.S. Constitution, we had these other fathers, too. Cultural nostalgia or not, Mexican-Americans are still grappling with that loss and their dual American identity. One only has to look at my grandfather who was a Marine at Iwojima and completely bilingual to see the embodiment of that identity. As long as Mexican-Americans are perceived as the other, even as they die for this country, there will probably be a need to wrestle with what some might consider cultural nostalgia. For me, it's still a very active state of being and not nostalgic at all. When I look at other Latino cultures, I consider the refugee who might have that experience so ingrained in his or her psyche that it is perhaps his or her defining moment, and for that writer, worlds may grow out of that loss of place. Again, for that individual that loss lives in the present. Candido Tirado: Nostalgia is dangerous because it keeps us looking back. It's hard to go forward while looking over your shoulders. However, we must know where we come from and how we got here, what were the rules back then and what are the rules today. But we know that nostalgia is a sugar coated idealized world in most instances. We most use it as background information much like the way we develop a character's background . It's there. It plays a part in the make up of the character, but the character has his eye on the future.

R E-SHAPING THE FUTURE

103

CS: What dreams do you have for the theatre's present?

Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya: On the "Ahora es." Ni manana, ni pasao. No, ahora es que es. The time is here. The topography of the now: Desde el tope, Ia graffa, del ahora es. By participating on a panel on the future of Latino Theatre, we inherently assert that Latino theatre has a future. I would like, for a moment, to suggest the contrary. Like a bride planted on the altar, like a malo condemned to perpetual chain, like an ay bendito el pobrecito, Latino Theatre has no future. I ask you to imagine a non-future. How do you conceive the modalities of a void? The total control of diffusion and visibility of art by hegemonies of the market? Someone else writing and enacting your stories? Or no stories? No text? No page? Graffiti. Being swallowed up en nuestra musica? Non-political theatre (is that particular void possible?) Going back? Channeling? A spiritista session? The casting as minor characters or no casting? No types? Fluid genders. Fluid genres. Virtual presences. Screen stages. The insides of the body stages. Plays in which language codes are not the media, but the end . Other materialities. A non-future in which discourse, this, what we are doing this evening, what we are doing aquf y ahora is the true play. Some of these visions might make us say: No, that can not happen, ahara es. While others pose the question: Can the non-future of Latino theatre be a prelude to the non-future of theatre? Of change? Something that might make us say: Sf, it can be possible, ahora es. Can we, like Artaud 's plague, kill without destroying? Ricardo Bracho: My dream for North American, English dominant theatre is a year with out Shakespeare, still the best produced playwright in this country. This fact speaks most to the US's persistent sense of itself as an Anglo colonial/settler society. In his stead I advocate for the staging of new work by local playwrights in all those parks, stages and school auditoriums. By local I mean someone who can walk, take public transport or drive on less than a whole tank of gas to rehearsals and the proposed production site. This is unlikely given the NEA's recent funding of the expansion of Shakespearean productions to remote parts of Alaska, military bases and more rural spaces, but completely possible given how many actors, technicians, designers and writers that would be created, nurtured and temporarily liberated from iterations of the terrible same. Migdalia Cruz: I do not have one. If I had only one dream or wish, I wouldn't waste it on theatre. The world is in too much turmoil. I long for my daughter to one day know a world at peace. That's my dream. Theatre is not something I dream about. It is something I do. Like a carpenter, I build houses to fill with voices. And I would like to see

104

SV!CH

each person whom society has tried to make disappear, find the strength to build their own houses, filled with their own stories, giving them the truth and beauty they deserve. Each person of color, each poor person, each person who been disenfranchised by society-I would pray that each one of us would finally feel entitled to our own poetry. Let us fill many sturdy houses with our voices. Let our voices be our path to truth. Maybe that is the way to peace.

Oliver Mayer: I dream about an American Theatre which buries its personal hatchet, not in any of our backs, but deep enough away so that we can all start clean. I dream about a clean slate. I don't want producers or critics to compare our artists with themselves in earlier life (never a fair thing!), and I don't want any of us to feel like slaves to our blood. We need to write outside our skin. I dream about the real theatres being bigger than they have been recently, embracing the memory of forebears like Joseph Papp, and saying "What the hell, let's do your play. And what's more, we'll do your next one regardless what the critics say." Candido Tirado: I dream of the theatre of the 1970s and 1980s. Latino writers were being produced by many different kinds of theatres and the term "Latino Writer" hadn't been coined. Back then Latino theatres were also thriving. A house that wasn't sold out was an aberration. Of course there was much more money in the arts. The right wing agenda hadn't been born and the religious right, as we know it, was just a baby. There wasn't any right wing, hatred laden, talk radio. Art wasn't a four-letter word. Today theatre has become more conservative than ever. It kind of resembles the movie industry without the money. The point of view of transnational trade is that we're slaves. Or worse, interchangeable low wage earners! They might look at Latino playwrights as thorns in their side, who don't deserve their time on stage. The mass culture doesn't decide what gets seen. Actually producers with agendas do the choosing. Usually, that agenda is the propagation of their culture and their cultural biases. Where does the Latino playwright belong in this world?
CS: How do you identify your community? And how does this affect what or how you write for the stage?

Ricardo Bracho: I don't feel like I currently have a community, mainly cuz I'm still relatively new in town and because I don't currently do political work in and or for a community. I've done time in gay men of color local, regional and national drama; the AIDS economy; the house underground; prisoner research and services; youthist work, various Marxist sects and cells, Third Worlder forums, Chicano

RE-SHAPING THE FUTURE

105

nationalist/artist/indigenist circles and have been a student of feminism. All this makes me rather typical specifically as a Latino gay playwright and generically as a Latino artist and social agent of my time and temperament. I am very excited by my peers, mostly other coastal Latina/o commercial and fine artists, especially those who work in film/video and other visual artists. And because they seem beyond me in their alchemy I like knowing musicians, especially DJ's, and fashion industrialists and graphic designers, cuz they can always get you free shit or into some swaggy party. I think this makes me seek out collaboration with film and video artists, like Vero and Ela Troyano, attune my staging to the cinematic and the club dance floor and try to get all these people I know who normally would never spend a night in a theatre to spend some of their time and money in one.

Migdalia Cruz: My ideal audience member is a single mother under the age of 30 who has no time for dreams but can't stop herself from dreaming, who has never seen herself respectfully and honestly represented in any art form . When she leaves the theatre, she will feel like she has seen herself or her family there. Welcome to the table. She will feel that her story is important and she will feel like she too can share her story and someone will listen. When I write, I always try to write for her. The people I commune with are my community. The characters I create are composites of people I have known. On the stage, the characters speak for people who have felt silenced, either by economics or race or gender or sexuality. This community may change with each play. What remains is what my teacher, Maria Irene Fornes, would call the truth. Amparo Garcia-Crow: Those I dance with define my community. Those I cook and eat with. And those I create with. As a playwright, my community is anyone called to the story I want to tell. As a professor, my community is those who come into my classes to learn how to identify the essential in themselves in order to cultivate a "voice of their own as young artists. As a parent, my community is that of my children and their counterparts. How this affects what or how I write has to do with the questions that sex and death pose? Sex has everything to do with how and why we're here and death has everything to do with where we're going. To come to some kind of peace and process of wisdom within that is why I cultivate community.
CS: Transnational trade and market economy dominates much of what is seen and/or documented of work made for the public eye (i.e. dramas). Where do you stand in embracing, critiquing, bypassing, or challenging capital pressures?

106

SVICH

Ricardo Bracho: I would love to put more pressure on capital but I can pretty safely say that the feminist, gay, and Latino theatres that have produced me did so without thinking they were going to make money. And they didn't. I don't think about playwriting as a useful way to accumulate capital, and luckily as a playwright and not a producer, E.D. or agent, I don't have to. What I want to be able to do is represent intellectual and artistic labor, my own, the other artists involved and the characters, in un-cliched ways. Migdalia Cruz: Do I write for money? I would have to say, "Not yet." I have thought about writing for money, but my ideas don't seem to gel with the ideas of people who give out large sums of money. But I am not ready to change how I think and write in order to make money and work at bigger theatres. It doesn't interest me-though I am contemplating writing a film with the working title: "I Need New Furniture ." Although workshops and commissions have blessed me, productions seem a more elusive prey, that is, productions that pay money enough to live on . In the earlier part of my career, I managed to make as much as I made as a bank teller at East River Savings Bank. I thought that was pretty good. It was almost as much as my mother made as a laundry worker at St. Luke's Hospital and my father made as a porter in a west-side high-rise. I don't make that much anymore. Amparo Garcia-Crow: Because I grew up as a poor kid and in a very poor ranching community, the notions of transnational trade and market economy have very little to do with how I live my life in its simplest and most essential way. And while I don't kid myself that I'm writing in a void or that I don't need or want an audience, I have learned my whole theatrical aesthetic from my economic challenges. That's why I was drawn to theatre in the first place, and the immediacy of being able to stand outside this building on the street corner and do my one woman show, if I absolutely have to. Oliver Mayer: We're not going to make any money. We need to be honest with ourselves. We need to make rent, and make our credit card payments, and have enough left for margaritas and regalitos for our long-suffering loved ones. But riches, no. We need to find another way to gauge what we do. We need to be sure it is not what the press says about us - that is the ultimate slippery slope. We need to determine for ourselves that playwriting, acting, directing, designing, and playwatching, are all God's work. Which gods we call on are up to us, but come they will if we call them with the passion and pain we put into art.

RE-SHAPING THE FUTURE

107

Carmen Rivera: We can't avoid "the market"-we live in a fiercely capitalistic society and market pressures are a reality. But we, fortunately or unfortunately, are making art. When I write I do not really think about how much money I will make, but I understand that producers need to look at a bottom line. I've never made decisions based on money, which is probably why I don't have it. I've worked for corporate America and for television and I was incredibly miserable. One has to know what one can live with . But we do have to make a living, so we juggle and juggle and try to keep many balls in the air at once. Again, it's about the quality of life one desires and what is most important.
CS: In what ways can theatre transform and/or heal a culture?

Ricardo Bracho: Healing and transformation, while feeling a bit Judea-Christian for my taste, are better metaphors than Aristotelian catharsis for what I think we're trying to do here. But I'm not sure of my own role. I like plays, going to them and writing them and hearing and reading about them, and while I've enjoyed my own forays into the poem and prose, its dialogue and three dimensionality that I got a jones for. But I'm unclear and madly ambivalent about how my theatre can transform and/or heal anything let alone something as vast and amorphous as a culture. I'm not sure I've gotten my plays to act upon the social in such a focused way yet. Perhaps then my writing for the stage is a way to continually ask and interrogate that question. Migdalia Cruz: Since the first peoples gathered around a campfire, theatre/storytelling/recording of history/telling of news has always been crucial to the survival of our tribes. It heals by exposing the truth; it transforms by enabling the audience to move forward with the information gathered-both emotionally and literally-making their souls wiser and assuring that the wisdom of the past remains present. At its best, theatre is the Mass of the Human Spirit held in the Church of our collective knowledge. It heals because it proves that we were and still are alive. Again, it is about hope. Amparo Garcia-Crow: My writing is where I go to worship. Writing is a kind of prayer, or at least, a meditation for me. And that very act of meeting with that which would come through me is how I transform myself. And if someone asks, that's what I can share with him or her. As my creative process heals me, in the most essential way perhaps it can heal my neighbor, my friend, my son, a colleague, a student, or someone who buys a ticket to see my work at the fringe theatre downtown. I'm here right now because I sat down with myself, once

108

SVICH

upon a time, to write some thing and that one thing connected to another. And that process of connection continues to finds its way as it must.

Oliver Mayer: We transform by doing. We heal over time. Our epoch is a poisonous one, but our opportunity is extraordinary. To touch one person! To anger another! To make another think, and still another dream about something in a play, and how it miraculously relates to his/her life? We do this better than any other medium can, because we do it TOGETHER. We have the memory of Miguel Pinero, Luis Valdez, Maria Irene Fornes. We have our very fissured concrete present, the limits of which each of us knows too well. And we have a future of amazing uncertainty to bash our plays against like a battering ram of furious beauty until the limitations are no more. But we won't know unless we do, do, do. Carmen Rivera: For a person growing up in diaspora in the United States, where it is drilled into your head that your culture is not significant-stories are life saving . Being heard, seen and acknowledged is very important to survival. If you do not see yourself -you do not exist. To have your voice marginalized is a form of death. Seeing "ourselves" is a revolutionary stance. I see the act of documenting one's experiences much like the ancient role of the "griot," the storyteller who takes you on journeys and brings you back transformed with a new awareness of yourself and your place in the world. I love stories and their ancient survival/history/existence is proof that stories are powerful and vital to life. They possess magic that can be used to heal or to poison. When theatre/film/books present stereotypical images of a people-poison is fed into the soul. When the images presented are honest-they transform, uplift, reveal, provoke, inspire and/or confront-healing is possible and usually inevitable. We can never take for granted the power we have as writers. Candido Tirado: My friend and teacher Guillermo Gentile wrote an incredible play Hablemos a catzon Quitado. The play was seen by two thirds of Argentina. The government banned the play, but people kept flocking to it. There was a psychic connection between the play and the Argentinean nation. Eventually, the government tried to kill Guillermo and he's been living in exile ever since. So, in a way the play had a healing quality for that country. They had to see it. By seeing the play they began to understand in a profound way the situation their country was in. Healing is the major purpose to do theatre. I think that's a major reason why we keep writing for the cruelest profession in the world.

RE-SHAPING THE FUTURE

109

Elaine Romero: Theatre heals the culture one audience member at a time.

110

CONTRIBUTORS

ARAVIND ENRIQUE ADYANTHAYA is Artistic Director of Casa Cruz de Ia Luna, a theatre based on the historical district of San German, Puerto Rico whose mission is to break conventions in representation. In the U.S. his original plays have been presented by Intermedia Arts, Red Eye, the Guthrie Theatre, Pregones, and the Public Theater (reading series) . STEPHEN J. BoTToMs is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. From 2005 will be Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds, England. He is the author of Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off Broadway Movement (University of Michigan Press, 2004), The Theatre of Sam Shepard (1998) and Albee: Who~ Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (2000), both published by Cambridge University Press. RICARDO A. BRACHO was a participant in the NEA/TCG Residency Program for Playwrights and a recipient of a Creative Work Fund grant. He is a participant in the Resident Artists' Program of Mabou Mines, and the 2004 Tribeca Film Institute All Access Open Stage program. JORGE IGNACIO CORTINAS is a playwright-in-residence at New York Theatre Workshop, and resident playwright at New Dramatists. He has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and the Millay Colony for the Arts. MIGDALIA CRuz's work has been produced across the U.S. and abroad in venues as diverse as Houston Grand Opera, Latino Chicago Theater Company, and Cornerstone. Among her awards: a Kennedy Center New American Plays award, a McKnight, and two NEAs. She received her M.F.A. degree from Columbia University, and is an alumna of New Dramatists. MARIA DELGADO is Professor in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of London, Queen Mary. She is author of Other Spanish Theatre (Manchester University Press, 2003), editor of Valle-Inc/an Plays: One (Methuen, 1993 and 1997), and co-editor of In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre (MUP, 1996). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. HARRY GAMBOA, JR., has been creating works since 1972 in various media (photography, performance, video, fotonovelas, fiction, and installation) that document and interpret the contemporary urban Chicano experience. He was a co-founder of Asco (Spanish for 'nausea') 1972-1987, the East L.A. conceptual-performance art group

111

that invented the No Movie concept and created numerous absurdist intermedia performance works. Gamboa has produced more than thirty video works and he is the author of Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (ed. Chon A. Noriega). A permanent collection of his media works/papers has been established and archived at Stanford University. MICHAEL JoHN GARCES is a director, performer and playwright. His work has been presented at INTAR, Beyond Baroque, and PS 122. As a director, he has staged new work at theatres across the U.S., including Yale Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Playwrights Horizons. AMPARO GARCIA-CRow is an inter-disciplinary artist who acts, directs and writes plays, screenplays, and songs. Garcia-Crow is a professor of Acting and Directing at the University of Texas where she also teaches playwriting. GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA was born and raised in Mexico City. His work, which includes performance art, video, audio, installations, poetry, journalism, critical writing, and cultural theory, expresses cross-cultural issues and North/South relations in the era of globalization. His books include Dangerous Border Crossers (Routledge, 2000) and Warrior for Gringostroika (Graywolf, 1994). QuiARA ALEGRIA HUDES is a playwright, compose~ and performer from West Philadelphia. Her play, Yemaya's Belly, is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Clauder Competition. She has an M.F.A. in playwriting from Brown University. AsHLEY LuCAs received her Bachelor of Arts in English and Theatre Studies from Yale University in 2001. In 2003 she earned an M.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California-San Diego. She is now pursuing a duel Ph .D. in Theatre and Ethnic Studies from UCSD. EDUARDO MACHADo's plays have been produced at many of the major regional theatres throughout the United States, Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway, and in Europe. He is an Alumni of New Dramatists and a member of The Ensemble Studio Theater and The Actors Studio. Mr. Machado is the head of playwriting at Columbia University and Artistic Director of INTAR. OuvER MAYER is the author of Blade to the Heat, which premiered at the Public Theatre in New York City directed by George C. Wolfe. He is Assistant Professor of Playwriting at USC. He is a graduate of Cornell and Columbia Universities, and attended Worcester College, Oxford.

112

His literary archive can be accessed through Stanford University Libraries. ALEJANDRO MORALEs's expat/inferno was recently produced at the NY International Fringe Festival, where it was awarded Best Production. His work has been presented and/or developed at South Coast Repertory, Dixon Place, Mabou Mines, and HERE. He is resident playwright at New Dramatists. CARMEN RIVERA holds an M.A. in Playwriting and Latin American Theatre from New York University. Founding Member of L.E.F.T. Off-Broadway productions include: La Gringa (in repertory at Repertorio Espanol OBIE Award 1996) and La Lupe: My Life, My Destiny (2002 ACE Award - Best Production). ELAINE RoMERo's producers include Actors Theatre of Louisville, Borderlands Theater, and the Working Theatre, among others. Her plays are published by Samuel French, Vintage Books, Smith & Kraus, and UA Press. A former Guest Artist at the Mark Taper Forum and SCR, Elaine has received support from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. ALBERTO SANDOVAL-SANCHEZ is Professor of Spanish and U.S. Latino Literature at Mount Holyoke College. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Jose Can You See?: Latinos On and Off Broadway (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) and co-editor of Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology(The University of Arizona Press, 2000, in collaboration with Nancy S. Sternbach from Smith College). His latest book is Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance and Identity in Latina Theatre (The University of Arizona Press, 2001), also in collaboration with Sternbach. Luis SANTEIRO is a long-time writer of Sesame Street, for which he has earned fourteen Emmy Awards. He was also head writer of the highly acclaimed PBS series Que Pasa USA?which earned him another Emmy. He is the recipient of the 1993 Hispanic Heritage Award. A member of the Dramatists Guild, he lives in New York City. OcrAvro Sous is a playwright and director in San Francisco. Awards include NEA and McKnight fellowships, the Roger L. Stevens Award, and grant from Pew Charitable Trust. He is resident playwright of New Dramatists. JENNIFER FLORES STERNAD is a student at Harvard University in the Literature Department. Her current research focuses on theories of

113

avant-gardism, performance studies, Chicano/a art and the work of Georges Bataille. Sternad began doing research on Chicano/a art in 2001, through the Foothills Art Center in Colorado. Since then, she has interviewed over sixty artists, curators and scholars in the field. She also has worked for composer and performer Meredith Monk. NILAJA SuN is a 2003 winner of the Princess Grace Award. As a performe~ she has worked with LAByrinth Theater Company, INTAR, and Epic Theater Center. CARIDAD SviCH is resident playwright of New Dramatists, contributing editor of TheatreForum, and on the advisory committee of Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge/UK). Her plays have been staged across the U.S. and abroad . She is editor of Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries (Manchester University Press, 2003). She is co-editor of Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes (Smith & Kraus, 1999), Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latinajo Theatre & Performance (TCG, 2000), and Theatre in Crisis? (MUP/Palgrave, 2002) Some of her translations are collected in Federico Garcia Lorca: Impossible Theater (Smith & Kraus, 2000). She holds an M.F.A. from UCSD, and was a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard University. She has been selected for inclusion in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino History. CANDIDO TIRADO is a three-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts' Playwriting Fellowship. He has taught playwriting at Fordham University and has worked as a Playwriting teaching artist in schools for over fifteen years. KAREN ZACARiAs's new play, Marie/a in the Desert will premiere at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago in the 2004-2005 season . She is the founder and artistic director of Young Playwrights' Theater, an awardwinning non-profit dedicated to nurturing the artistic voice of a new generation by teaching playwriting in DC public schools.

MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS

THE HEIRS OF MOLIERE

The Heirs of Moliere

Translated and Edited by: Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four representa tive French comedies of the period fn the death of Moliere to the French Revolution: Regnard's The AbsentMinded Lover, Destouches's The Conceited Count, La Chaussee's The Fashionable Prejudice, and Laya's TJ Friend of the Laws. Translated in a poetic form that seeks capture the wit and spirit of the originals, these four plays suggest somethi of the range of the Moliere inheritanc from comedy of character through th( highly popular sentimental comedy o: the mid eighteenth century, to corned: that employs the Moliere tradition for more contemporary political ends.

FOUR FREN C H COMEDIES OF THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES

@ .Regn..rci.:TheAI-nt--Mincledl.over @ Destouches: The ConceitedCount

@ La Chaussee: The Pasluonahle Prejudice

@
~a: The Friend o the Law.
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY MARV I N CARLSON

In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that shov. changing ideas about such perennial social concerns as class, gender, and politics through the turbulent century that ended in the revolutions that gave birth to the modem era. USA $20.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 International Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Mail checks or money orders to: Circulation Manager Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016-4309 Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868

MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS

Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas

Translated and Edited by: Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon, or Jafar and Zaida, The Dog of Montatgis, or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher Columbus, or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice, or The Scottish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."

fOUR MELODRAMAS
ALICE
THE RUINS Of BABYLON CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS THE

"Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, TRANSLATED AND EDITFO BY and brought the classic situations of DAN IF I GEROULO & MARVIN CARl SOli: fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century ... Pixerecourt determined that scenery, music, dance, lighting and the very movements of his actors should no longer be left to chance but made integral parts of his play." Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels USA $20.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 International Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Mail checks or money orders to: Circulation Manager Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016-4309 Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868

Doc

OF MONT ARGIS

MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS

Contemporary Theatre in Egypt contains the proceedings of a Symposium on this subject held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of 1999 along with the first English translations of three short plays by leading Egyptian playwrights who spoke at the Symposium, Alfred Farag, Gamal Maqsoud, and Lenin El-Ramley. It concludes with a bibliography of English translations and secondary articles on the theatre in Egypt since 1955. (USA $12.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $12.00 plus $6.00 shipping)

Zeami and the No Theatre in the World, edited by Benito Ortolani and Sarr Leiter, contains the proceedings of the "Zeami and the No Theatre in the W< Symposium" held in New York City in October 1997 in conjunction with "Japanese Theatre in the World" exhibit at the Japan Society. The book cont: an introduction and fifteen essays, organized into sections on "Zeami's Theo and Aesthetics," "Zeami and Drama," "Zeami and Acting," and "Zeami and World." (USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $15.00 plus $6.00 shipping)

Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus contains translations of four plays by the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, novels, and collections of poetry. The plays collected here with an introduction by David Willinger include The Temptation, Friday, Serenade, and The Hair of the Dog. (USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $15.00 plus $6.00 shipping)

Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive ca Iogue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars. Within 1 indexed volume, each facility is briefly described including an outline of its ho ings and practical matters such as hours of operation. Most entries include el tronic contact information and web sites. The listings are grouped as follm Libraries, Museums, and Historical Societies; University and College Librari Ethnic and Language Associations; Theatre Companies and Acting Schools; a Film and Other. (USA $5.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $5.00 plus $6.00 shipping)

Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail checks or money orders to: Circulation Manager Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016-4309 Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868