Josefina López, writer of Real Women Have Curves, founded Casa 0101 Theater with the intent to provide “vital arts, cultural and educational programs in theater, digital filmmaking, art and dance to Boyle Heights, thereby nurturing the future storytellers of Los Angeles who will someday transform the world.”
Casa 0101 Theater’s inaugural performance of "The King of the Desert," written by Stacey Martino, is about the life of her husband, René Rivera, who is the play’s solo performer. Martino shares certain insights about her husband’s life that he might be hesitant to share himself. So many solo shows, because they are written by the performers themselves, are light in tone and self-deprecating. After all, it is tricky to write a hero’s journey from the first person point of view.
But because Martino wrote this play about the life of her love, it is an homage to him and to his people and to the notion of holding others up so that they might be admired. It becomes a model for others, and even a dare to others, to write plays about others who then write plays about others. It is an example of both adoration and of the true nature of community.
"The King of the Desert" starts off meta, with a play within a play – actually this play within a play – introducing a theme that is brought up again and again, that the separation between person and persona is akin to the separation between performer and audience, brown and white, you and me, and that such separation breeds misunderstanding and ultimately a profound brokenness.
And this play within a play functions as comedic ice-breaker during which the audience of strangers is eased into sharing an intimacy.
The entire play is beautifully written. It bridges drama and comedy, English and Spanish, political and personal, then and now, and because it was written by an Italian wife about the life of her Chicano husband, it binds male and female, dark and light, in a way that upholds the play’s intent which is to build unity as you might build a house. As you might build a skyscraper. As you might build a revolution. This play is about building people up.
La Virgen, which is a recurring motif, then becomes a symbol of the self built up.
Rather than a culture clash, this play is a culture dance, consisting of soft reminders of historical travesties, such as the Irish Potato Famine and kindred hanging of Irish-American ‘traitors’ in a Mexican zócalo, but also implorations to hold onto hope for the sake of the self and for the sake of stories of the self and for the sake of shared histories.
The play is a dare ‘to be or not to be’ one’s own id no matter skin tone, location or assigned theatrical role, to not ‘walk around the perimeter’ of a life but to submerge oneself in the ‘mud’ of it.
While one theme is: in order to be free to move forward you must return home to face your past, the opposite idea is also explored – that to become yourself you must run away. You must transcend the limitations of family baggage in order to return to your family intact.
The play’s protagonist, René Rivera, goes from a Texas barrio to Julliard to Broadway and back to the barrio and now, of course, to Boyle Heights to be with us who have each travelled ourselves and acquired stories of our own so that we might end up together in a theater surrounded by art made by locals.
Sometimes the past we must face is not a literal, temporal past – it is not those friends in middle school who were not very friendly or even our parents who have perhaps passed away – but it is the stories of our ancestors and certain traditions that make our ancestors’ lives eternal.
La Virgen, then, becomes a symbol of the self made eternal.
The theatrical elements that bring this play to life work together so well, it is hard to believe that they are the culmination of so many collaborators and not of just one or two maternal visionaries. The ‘too many cooks’ theory does not apply here! Perhaps because in a Chicano kitchen there are many hands?
The set (Danuta Tomzynski), art work (Astrid Chevallier), projections (Blair Thompson), video (Mat Hale) lighting (Jeremy Pivnick), sound (David B. Marling, Jade Puga, Richard Montes) and direction (Sal Romeo) combine with Rivera’s robust performance to create a magic that is wonderfully Mexican-American.
Photos of Spanish churches and American barrios and universal, wooden school chairs blend with lights formed into galaxies that are redolent of Christmas in Oaxaca where parades of lights and candles and singing overpower the exchange of material goods and also of the 4th of July in Downey where grown men place firecrackers in their pants and lie in the street to shoot them upward for a risky, hefty laugh.
The glorious whole of this Mexican-American show reminds us that when we denounce others for being “different” it is usually for being beautiful in a way that we are not. It is not hatred but jealously that we espouse.
And this denunciation in lieu of adoration results in a shame that is passed on. People pass it onto their deepest selves and to their families and to others and to the children of others. ‘Prieto’ (“dark one”) becomes a word of injury rather than of pride, which is unfortunate because it is derived from the Latin word for chest, which is what encases the heart.
La Virgen, then, becomes a symbol of a word’s journey back home to the heart.
When considering what to do this weekend, or any weekend, and for a terrific example of theater, comedy, drama, visual art and community, travel to E. 1st and N. St. Louis, to the pulsing core that is Boyle Heights, and see "The King of the Desert." There is simply no better way to spend a Los Angeles evening.
And, if you go on a Friday, head there early so you can enjoy the Boyle Heights Farmer’s Market complete with free Zumba class in the Plaza del Mariachi.
The King of the Desert plays at Casa 0101 Theater every Friday and Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 7 through February 12, 2012.
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