"The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa"
at Miracle Theater
and the post-play panel discussion on "Seeds of Latino Identity: The Art of El Teatro Campesino," featuring the Center Theatre Group's associate director and director of new play production, Diane Rodriguez, as well as Portland-based regional director and Amy Gonzalez and 'Pancho Villa' actor Elrubiel Valladores, founder of Woodburn's newest youth theater through PCUN, Oregon's farmworkers union.
Where to begin? The panel, for me, was like a scroll tracing back and intertwining the roots of all the theatrical forms that have pulled on me throughout my life, and seeing how it all goes back to the same tree, where those roots were once joined.
I was lucky enough to have met Diane in LA circa the late '90s, when she was the head of the Mark Taper Forum's Latino Theater Initiative - this was a time where the Taper had arms to specifically grow theater speaking to Latino, African American, Asian American and I think, physically-disabled populations. Diane was and is a vibrant and approachable artist/producer working for diversity and great art in LA's most vaunted theatrical institution. My friend had told me, "Diane's the real deal. She was an actress with Teatro Campesino in the 70s." I knew enough to be impressed by that thanks to Mady Schutzman, who'd schooled me on Campesino's grassroots, taking-theater-to-the-migrant-farmworkers-in-the-fields-where-they-worked aesthetic. Of course this led to Cesar Chavez's
legendary organization of those farmworkers, with help from Campesino and another of his favorite outfits, Los Lobos. I got re-schooled on all this from interviewing Dan Guerrero, who's "Gaytino," performed at Miracle last year, Diane directed; Dan couldn't rave enough about Diane.
Hearing Diane talk story about those days was like "Everything you've ever wanted to ask Diane but were afraid to ask," as I told her: her insistence on wearing platform shoes and short, short skirts even as she climbed in and out of the flatbed trucks that served as the Campesino's stages; performing with no tech, meaning "your props and the sun," as she described it, in broad daylight, or under a carpa.
Like 'Pancho Villa,' written around 1962, the Campesino's work used a broad, comic style to communicate its social commentary on issues like underpaid workers, unacceptable working conditions, and the larger struggle of Latino assimilation in America. The company would improvise, and the young playwright Luis Valdez would write from their improvisations; conversely, he'd bring in dialogue and the company would work it, morphing it into something else. Re-Theatre Instrument is doing that same process right here right now with their rewritings of 'Lear' and 'Much Ado' from actors' improvisations, and our reinvention even of the classic text by using 20s dances to suit the roaring New Orleans era.
Amazing that that tradition continues today - a process Diane cited as then being inspired by the San Francsico Mime Troupe
and Carlo Mazzone-Clementi, the founder/mad genius behind Dell'Arte International, which I attended 03-04 and which continues to churn out graduates every year for the past 30 years. For Valdez, we're talking Italian commedia dell'arte tradition, Mexicanized. Now there is some food for a fundraiser: Mexican Italian. Chicano theater tradition even has its own version of circus - Diane described doing sommersalts (!) in the aisles as the audience took its seats (stands?) in the house. Like any living organism, the work was in constant rewrites - with any one work, they had The Delano version, the San Jose version, etc., all company shorthand for the way the piece had changed from town to town and how they'd do it next.
Of course for D'A the Mime Troupe's work is still alive and well, and Carlo has near Godlike status (he even haunts the place as a ghost). Diane also connected it to her later studies with Peter Brook, who had everyone sit on the same piece of carpet in a circle and would invite them in one by one to die in front of one another. Representing your willingness and ability to leave it all behind the moment you step on stage, a complete shedding of your own life and personality for the character who must live completely; "that you come half empty and half full" to the work, Diane said. Of course Valdez was more or less doing the same thing Julian Beck and Judith Malina were doing with The Living Theater in New York, where (Mady's father arrested them for tax evasion, but that's another post, and) their work was totally avant garde if orgiastic. It follows that this stuff goes back to Boal and even Brecht, and you could say Moliere, and dare I say "Mutt,": it's all social satire delivered through laughter. 'Pancho Villa,' written while Valdez was still a college student, certainly delivers on both ends: the metaphor of Pancho's insatiable appetite for justice and slapsticky slurs live side by side. Director Olga Sanchez brought it all together for a tight and funny production.
Amy Gonzalez connected with El Teatro Campesino in the 90s, when it had become more of a community based theater. She described Luis and his family members as still involved (one of Luis' sons has taken over as artistic director), but the company/community members perform the works created twenty years before. The work is passed down to them like lore that they they revive. Interesting that during the q & a when Diane was asked by 'Pancho Villa' castmember Yolanda Suarez (also in "Mutt") 'What are you doing to make your theater accessible to Latino population in your community?' Diane was very clear: I brought theater to the people at one time in my career; now I make theater for people who want to come to it. (For recent examples, see "Lydia" and 'Bengal Tiger.') Valdez himself went on to write for large regional theater, even getting close to Broadway with "Zoot Suit" and directing a film version. How do these roots inform their work today? No one wanted to speak for Luis, but Diane mentioned writing a play that is about a middle class Latina woman, where the play is not directly about the woman's ethnicity - because, like Valdez, she wants to create what isn't being seen or represented. A regular middle class woman's struggles and challenges, who happens to be Latina.
The feeling of Teatro Campesino now as described by Amy reminded me of Cornerstone Theater Company in LA, where I'm proud to be an associate artist and a better artist for having worked with pros and community members in many productions. Elrubiel Valladores carries the torch forward with his new youth theater group, who as Olga and Diane pointed out, believe that they can do theater as a result of the work that's gone before by El Teatro Campesino and others.