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PHOENIX (By Kerry Lengel, Arizona Republic) March 12, 2006 — Teatro Bravo, the Valley's only Latino theater company, this week opens El Vagón, the second and final production of its 2005-06 season.
Two plays from one troupe, out of more
than 60 incorporated theaters. At first glance, this seems a paltry
offering considering that nearly 1 million Hispanics live in
Maricopa County, for 28 percent of the population.
In contrast, Black Theatre Troupe, serving a community about one-ninth the size, offers five plays a year and enjoys a far more stable base of support, in both attendance and donations.
Inevitably, however, such numbers tell
only a fraction of a complex story.
The Valley's large
Hispanic population is not a single audience but several, and
marketing theater to Hispanics presents unique challenges. On the
other hand, companies besides Teatro Bravo have made strong efforts
to reach out to those audiences, bringing Latin themes onto stages
throughout the Valley.
Still, even the most
optimistic members of the Latino theater community say it has a long
way to go to meet its potential.
"What I'm going to point to is not a very popular sentiment: Do we have the talent here in the Valley to warrant more companies, or a professional company?" veteran actor Richard Trujillo says.
"We're not seeing the (population)
numbers translate to the professional level. Nine years ago I was
the only male Latino (Equity) union actor in this town. Nine years
later, I still am."
In recent years Trujillo
has starred in such Latino-themed plays as Bordertown and
Spic-O-Rama for Actors Theatre as well as more traditional fare,
including Arizona Theatre Company's Macbeth. While he may not
be the most optimistic member of the Latino theater community, he is
one of its most vocal advocates.
"We need a strong pool of Latino talent: actors, directors, designers, writers," he says.
"(But) it's not just where do you get the art. Where
are you getting the audience from? The audience will be there for
some shows, but how do you get the consistency? You'll have a hit,
and the next three are a miss."
Attendance problem
Teatro Bravo, founded in 2000 by
playwright and Arizona State University professor Guillermo Reyes,
has had success with issue-oriented plays in Spanish, such as Las
Mujeres de Juárez, as well as edgy English-language material,
such as Bowl of Beings, by the Los Angeles collective Culture
Clash. But Reyes agrees that consistent attendance has been a
problem.
Indeed, while Teatro
Bravo is the only Latino theater in the Valley, it is not the first;
none of its predecessors survived and matured into a stable
professional troupe.
"There's a long,
established tradition in English of plays that will make money,
whether it's Hamlet or Oklahoma! or Dickens' A
Christmas Carol," Valley playwright James Garcia says. "That's
not as easy a thing for a new Latino company to do. Culture Clash,
they're sort of our Dickens. When Teatro Bravo does Culture Clash,
they sell tickets."
Arizona Theatre Company,
the state's largest theater, also has had mixed results at the box
office when producing plays by Hispanic writers.
"In general we've had
more success reaching into the Black community than the Latino
community for audience members, but there are complicated reasons
for that," artistic director David Ira Goldstein says.
"You take a play like Anna in the Tropics, which is highly touted as being the first Latino play to win the Pulitzer Prize, but it's written by a Cuban-American and might have less currency here in the Southwest."
Theater in infancy
From the outside, the sheer size of the Hispanic minority can obscure the diversity within it.
"Just assume that half of those people aren't my audience. They might be recent immigrants who speak only Spanish. They listen to Radio Campesina and read La Voz," says Garcia, whose Voices of Valor, about Latino soldiers in World War II, had its world premiere Saturday at Gammage Auditorium.
While foreign-born Hispanics have
turned out for certain Spanish-language plays, particularly those
(like this week's El Vagón) that deal with immigration and
other hot-button issues, many of them do not have a theatergoing
tradition.
"Theater has generally
been the playground of people with leisure, people with disposable
income, and as much as we have a growing middle class, the majority
are not," says Jorge Huerta, a professor at the University of
California-San Diego and an expert on Chicano theater.
Besides, Trujillo says,
when it comes to Latino theater - meaning U.S., not Latin American -
"we're talking about a movement that's 30 years old. It's in its
infancy."
"There's a lag. Just
because we've gone from 15 or 20 percent of the population to (30)
percent doesn't mean the infrastructure has caught up," says Garcia,
founder of Colores Actors-Writers Workshop, which produces his plays
under the aegis of the alternative troupe Theater in My Basement.
Infrastructure means more
independent troupes, with better marketing and better funding.
Garcia says that given the potential audience, there should be room
for three or four Latino companies in the Valley, but it's not
something that will happen naturally, just because the numbers are
there.
"It's going to take
another five Guillermos to come along and say, 'I'm going to start a
theater company,' " he says.
Reyes, for one, would welcome the competition, and a relief from the burden of being the Latino theater in the Valley.
