The Bread and Puppet Theater

 

[Bob Morris’s article on Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater ran in the New York Times’ “Arts and Leisure” section on 20 August 2023; it was reported from Glover, Vermont, Bread and Puppet’s longtime home base.

[Peter Schumann was born in 1934 in Lüben, Silesia, which was then part of Germany (in 1945, it was returned to Poland).  In 1945, just before the end of World War II, his family fled to Germany and they eventually settled in West Berlin in the early ’50s and Peter finished his education there. 

[He worked in sculpture, graphics, and dance in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and, moving to Munich, he founded a dance company.  He met a young Russian-born American woman who was studying in Munich, and in 1959, they were married.

[In 1961, he moved to the United States with his wife, Elka, and together they founded the Bread and Puppet Theater in New York City on the Lower East Side in 1963.  In 1970, the Schumanns moved to a farm in Glover, Vermont, and reestablished Bread and Puppet there, where it’s been based for 53 years.  (Elka Schumann died in 2021; her obituary is posted below, following “He’s Still Kneading Art.”] 

“HE’S STILL KNEADING ART, AND SOURDOUGH RYE”
by Bob Morris 

But Peter Schumann’s is 89. What happens to Bread and Puppet Theater when he’s gone?

Under an unforgiving sun during a heat wave in July, Peter Schumann, the 89-year-old artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater, rang a hand bell on a rolling hillside in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before him a post topped with a giant grasping papier-mâché hand towered high like a maypole. Two dozen performers encircled it.

“Walk slower, get closer to each other,” shouted Schumann, a tawny bearded man. More giant hands on poles rose up, seemingly reaching to the clouds in prayer. Then the group sang a dirge-like song as birds called from a nearby pine forest that is home to handmade memorial huts for friends and family. In two days, this surreal ritual was to be recreated in the debut of “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant,” part of the 60-year-old company’s season of Sunday shows.

In July and August, the theater’s events run on weekends and are either free or modestly priced: indoor avant-garde performances, an outdoor circus featuring playful political sketches with towering effigy-like figures and a rowdy band, and side shows created by company members on compact stages are among the offerings.

Schumann, a German immigrant who has retained his accent, came to New York City in the 1960s and found a potent way to respond in the streets to the war in Vietnam and social injustice: towering papier-mâché and cardboard figures. Influenced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham and exposed to the happenings of Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, he conceives his experimental collaborative pieces from a cauldron of ideas about the joys and ills of a conflicted capitalist world. Often they are drawn from the news, sometimes from legends. Some are reviewed well, others not. Schumann, uninterested in praise or media attention, keeps making them.

In addition to directing, he sculpts, paints (on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard), and creates posters, calendars and printed chapbooks. He also uses an outdoor oven to bake coarse sourdough rye bread to feed audiences that can grow to a thousand or more in August.

“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said on that pre-opening Friday last month while baking for about 50 summer company members. He knows that like his work, his bread can be challenging to chew, but hopefully nourishing and worth the trouble.

Lately, Bread and Puppet Theater, which performs all over the world, has been growing. Its domestic touring schedule — to colleges, theaters, city plazas and small towns via a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life (coffee cups, flowers, the occasional “Ah!”) — included 66 stops last fall with a company of 30, twice the size of previous years. Print sales are up, too. Renewed interest in live performance and the current political climate may explain it. But appreciation for the company’s sustainable, handmade tactility and poetic anti-authoritarianism is nothing new.

Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” cited its “beauty, magic and power” in a blurb for “Rehearsing With Gods,” a 2004 book about the company. Grace Paley marched with the group starting in the 1960s, and wrote a poem inspired by its policy of speaking up and speaking out. Julie Taymor, who used natural materials, papier-mâché and puppets in the stage adaptation of “The Lion King,” referenced some of Schumann’s stock puppet figures in her 2007 Beatles movie, “Across the Universe.” Kiki Smith, the sculptor, in an interview on the Smithsonian’s archive website, talked about the company’s “epic and biblical qualities” and of seeing its performances often in her youth.

Guided by Schumann’s uncompromising views about greed, racism and militarism, the collective has questioned the World Bank, the treatment of Indigenous people and, to some in-house and public consternation, the providing of arms to Ukraine instead of ways to negotiate.

“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann said of a childhood in which he experienced bombings in Germany’s Silesia region, which is now part of Poland. “There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.”

The printing press posters, chapbooks and calendars he designs drive his messages home and come from an uncompromising faith in “Cheap Art.” His manifesto about it states the importance of its unimportance — cheap, lightweight, undermining the sanctity of affluence and in opposition to the money-hungry “business of art.” For decades, his wife, Elka Schumann, who died in 2021 [see her obituary below], on a Sunday in August, oversaw the printing press that turns out countless pieces, all drawn with his bold and expressionistic hand and celebrating life while questioning abuses of power. (One poster of an iris reads “Resistance to the Empire”; a chapbook on courage urges “Dig through the dirt.”)

But for all the questions firing like flares at society, with Schumann’s humor and pathos, there is one — far more insular in focus — on the minds of those around him: What will happen to his company when he is gone?

“It’s been an ongoing conversation for 15 years, and we’re still figuring it out,” said his son Max Schumann, 59, an artist and the departing executive director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit based in New York City that sells artists’ books.

“This company has always been an iffy little enterprise that depends way too much on me,” his father said of Bread and Puppet, which has a million-dollar annual budget raised through touring, print sales, tickets and donations, but no direct corporate or government funding. “Is it sustainable when I’m gone and will people recognize it as important?”

Those questions remain unanswered as Schumann’s incessant creation of new work keeps the focus on the present.

Inside a barn last month, a couple of hours after the rehearsal for the “Heart of the Matter” pageant, several dozen performers from around the world — paid puppeteers, interns, community volunteers — presented their proposed circus acts. Schumann typically reviews and critiques the sketches.

Most of the acts had a whimsical tone. A man imitating a bee (collapsing bee colonies the inspiration) did a frenetic waggle around a cardboard city that transformed itself into a tangle of dancing urbanites. An orca ambushed yachting billionaire puppets. When somber-looking tree figures appeared with a narrator reading facts about boreal forests versus the more flammable monoculture ones burning in nearby Canada, Schumann became agitated.

“It’s too cliché, something everyone already knows,” he shouted. “You have to stop using so many words and solve things puppetry-wise.” Then he jumped to his feet and started moving people and puppets around. He had puppeteers throw the trees and then dance with them, causing some confusion.

“It’s what you do, not what you say,” he said. “It’s puppetry, not preaching.”

He told them he would return in a half-hour to see a revision. Then, as dinnertime approached, he excused himself to help the kitchen staff make potato pancakes — a recipe from his war-torn childhood.

With admirable control, the puppeteers discussed how to rework their savaged piece, each giving the others time to suggest solutions. It was a utopian vision of collaboration, agile and practical — and typical of how the company functions.

“Peter has a strong directional voice,” said Ziggy Bird, 26, a company member who took notice of Schumann’s work in a theater history class at Temple University. “It’s never personal and some of the most beautiful moments come from frustration, which can be a kick in the pants.”

“Schools of art are teaching solo enterprises, but what people do here is the opposite — they collaborate,” Schumann said while smoking a cigar, drinking a can of beer and stirring a vat of potato pancake batter to be fried on an outdoor stovetop. This collaborative process has birthed companies far beyond Vermont, including Papermoon Puppet Theater in Indonesia, Y No Había Luz in Puerto Rico and Great Small Works in New York City.

“It’s a way of making art and living with a strong level of engagement and concern,” said Clare Dolan, a puppeteer and a Bread and Puppet Theater board member who assists Schumann. She was preparing a circus act about the sending of cluster bombs to Ukraine. “There are incredible ripples that come from Peter that show up in theaters, parades and art-making around the world.”

John Bell, the board’s president and a professor who runs the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, has been with the company since 1973, around the time it relocated to Vermont from New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, first to Goddard College and then to the land in Glover.

“In a way Bread and Puppet is an art project of Peter’s and we are only here to help him realize it,” he said. “So we don’t know what will happen once he’s gone, especially because he believes in responding to the present.” While Schumann is “dealing with being an older person these days,” Bell added, the moment he starts working, his pace accelerates.

That seems an understatement.

At the dress rehearsal on Saturday for the circus (canceled the next day because of a rainstorm that flooded Vermont) Schumann aggressively finessed the burning forest act and others. Later he performed in an indoor show billed as a mass, “Idiots of the World Unite Against the Idiot System”; it was a good-natured critique of everything from “the empire’s false sense of freedom” to a highway system that kills wild animals. He fiddled a hybrid violin and trumpet while making an abstract speech and then led the cast of 30 in an exasperated “Aaaagh.”

After that a quartet performed a Beethoven fugue.

Done listening, he drove his Subaru wagon up a dirt road to a studio to finish one of his “Heart of the Matter” paintings.

“He’s always had a manic creative energy and right now he’s been working with wild abandon, trying to squeeze it all in,” Max Schumann observed. “When our mother passed away, his grief was intense, but the work helped keep him alive.”

In fact, when Elka Schumann died, the circus and pageant carried on the same weekend.

Now Schumann lives without the life partner who helped make many things work at Bread and Puppet. He thinks about her often and visits the memorial he made to her in his pine forest — a sculptural relief of a couple embraced. At night he sometimes sits on his porch listening to the parties down on his farm, pleased about what he and his wife have inspired and sustained. Sometimes he joins in, dancing with abandon.

“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral, and I’ve already had a stroke and a second is probably on the way,” he said as he painted with a steady hand. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”

He put the last paint stroke on his recycled bedsheet and stepped away.

“OK, this series is finished,” he said. “Now I can go on to what’s next.”

[Bob Morris is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and is the author of Assisted Loving (Harper, 2008) and Crispin the Terrible (Callaway Editions, 2000).  He’s written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Southampton Review, Town and Country, and other publications, and has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered.  He also collaborated with actress Diahann Carroll on her award-winning memoir, Diahann Carroll in Conversation with Bob Morris (Audible Audiobook; Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, 2009).

[I’ve written a great deal about experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) on this blog.  Shapiro came to New York City often as a young teenager, hitchhiking from his boarding school in Massachusetts in the early 1960s.  The young theater novice encountered Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater at that time, and they became a significant influence on the nascent theater artist.]

*  *  *  *
“ELKA SCHUMANN, 85, ANTICAPITALIST MATRIARCH
OF THE BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER”
by Annabelle Williams 

[Elka Leigh Schumann, Peter’s wife of 62 years and the co-founder of Bread and Puppet, died at 85 on 1 August 2021.  Her New York Times obituary ran in section B (“Business”/”Sports”) on 12 August 2021 (updated online 3 September 2021).]

She and her husband ran a Vermont-based troupe that has taken on social and political issues in productions featuring enormous puppets.

Elka Schumann, who with her husband, Peter, ran the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, known for its countercultural messaging through avant-garde puppeteering, died on Aug. 1 in a hospital in Newport, Vt. She was 85.

The cause was a stroke, her son Max Schumann said.

As its name suggests, the Bread and Puppet Theater is dedicated to two types of art: baking and puppetry. Fresh sourdough bread, milled and baked by Mr. Schumann, was distributed to troupe members and the audience while monstrous papier-mâché puppets, propelled by actors inside them, told stories that took on social and political causes like housing inequality and antiwar and anti-draft activism.

Among the recurring characters was the troupe’s first antagonist, Uncle Fatso, whose roles included a slumlord and allegorical representations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. The troupe’s productions included renditions of plays by the leftist German playwright Bertolt Brecht and shows based on the diaries of the anarchist Emma Goldman.

The critic Holland Cotter of The New York Times described a visit to Bread and Puppet Theater in 2007 as surreal, “an impossible trick of stagecraft, a miracle experience.”

The Schumanns ran their operation out of a farm in Glover, Vt., in the northeast part of the state, and toured the country in a sky-blue school bus with a mountain landscape, an angel and a beaming sun painted on it. The company made a point of putting on shows in underserved communities and involving children from there in making costumes and sometimes performing.

But the troupe was best known for its annual festival, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a puppet-dense two-day Woodstock-like affair with a pageant, a parade and politically bent skits about climate change, global consumerism and nuclear annihilation. For many years the event, “a countercultural spectacle,” drew crowds of nearly 40,000 and was the troupe’s main source of funding, John Bell, a puppeteer and theater historian, wrote in a paper.

The Resurrection Circus started in 1970 but abruptly ended in 1998 after a fight broke out on the grounds resulting in a man’s death.

Ms. Schumann was an avowed anticapitalist, and the farm in Glover, complete with livestock and a maple-sugaring operation, became her own quasi-society operating on socialist principles. As the troupe matriarch she kept the books and managed the finances and sometimes performed in shows.

She also managed the Bread and Puppet Press, which distributed pamphlets, broadsheets and posters delivering political and cultural commentary. In a manifesto titled “Why Cheap Art,” which Ms. Schumann printed on posters, her husband wrote: “Art is food. You can’t eat it but it feeds you.”

It continued: “Art is like good bread! Art is like green trees! Art is like white clouds in blue sky! Art is cheap! Hurrah!”

Elka Leigh Scott was born on Aug. 29, 1935, one of two girls, in Magnitogorsk, a city in Russia about 1,000 miles east of Moscow. Her mother, Maria Ivanova (Dikareva) Scott, was a teacher. Her father, John Scott, was an American who worked as a journalist in the Soviet Union. Her parents had supported the Russian Revolution.

When Elka was young, as German forces invaded, the family fled the country, taking a train to Japan and an ocean liner to Hawaii before continuing on to San Francisco. They lived for a time in Pennsylvania, moved to New York City and spent four years in Berlin after the war before returning to the United States in 1949, settling in Ridgefield, Conn.

Elka attended Ridgefield High School for three years before transferring to the private Putney School in Vermont, where her grandfather Scott Nearing, a prominent left-wing economist, was a lecturer. She went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, graduating with a degree in art history in 1958.

In a 2016 oral history with the Vermont Historical Society, Ms. Schumann said that her first years at Bryn Mawr were somewhat disappointing: Her classmates spent more time darning socks for their boyfriends than anything else.

In her junior year she studied abroad in Munich, where she met Peter Schumann. They married in 1959 and had five children while living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they started the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1963. The heated political climate of the ’60s made the couple’s work more urgent.

Some of the company’s first performances were street parades and protests supporting rent strikes and the labor movement. One protest involved Mr. Schumann parading a puppet of Jesus in Manhattan holding a sign that simply said, “Vietnam.”

The family moved to Plainfield, Vt., in 1970, and lived on a farm there, owned by Goddard College, for four years until Ms. Schumann’s father purchased the Glover farm that became Bread and Puppet’s home, complete with a museum.

In addition to her son Max, Ms. Schumann is survived by her husband; another son, Salih; three daughters, Solvieg, Tamar and Tjasa Maria Schumann; five grandchildren; and her sister, Elena Scott Whiteside.

In 2001, Tamar Schumann and the activist DeeDee Halleck made a documentary film titled “AH! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet.”

Ms. Schumann was buried in a pine grove on the farm.

[Anabelle Willams was an obituaries fellow at the New York Times from June 2021 to June 2022,  She’s currently publishing editor at the Wall Street Journal.]

*  *  *  *
“DRAMATURGY AND THE THEATER OF MASKS AND PUPPETS”
by John Bell 

[This essay by the dramaturg of the Bread and Puppet Theater was originally published in volume I, number 3 (Winter 1988-89) of the LMDA Review, the journal of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas).]

If defining the job of the dramaturg in our present American theater is sometimes difficult because so many people in the theater have little understanding of the need for or function of that occupation, it should be apparent that explaining the function of dramaturgy in theaters of masks and puppets is that much more difficult because those theatrical techniques are in general so little analyzed and thus so little understood.  But there is an important role for dramaturgy in theaters that use masks, puppets, and other performing objects, and I would like to attempt an explanation of that role by exploring the formal necessities of mask and puppet theater, and then specifically focusing on the dramaturgy of one example of this performance style, the Bread and Puppet Theater.

There is an implicit difference of approach between the theater of masks and puppets and the theater of actors, and that difference can be clarified by considering the possible meanings of dramaturgy.  In relation to the theater of actors and dramatic literature, dramaturgy exists as liaison between dramatic text (the primary source) and that text’s transfer to the stage.  But another aspect of dramaturgy is possible, one that includes a more general concern with the art of theatrical representation that in the theater of masks and puppets is based on the movement of those performing objects.  The first rehearsal of a production of dramatic literature is a reading of the script by actors, while the first rehearsal of a mask or puppet production is probably one of movement of particular objects by performers in a particular space.  While a dramaturgy of images and a dramaturgy of language are essential to productions of both theatrical forms, these two dramaturgies appear with opposite emphasis in each.  But an understanding of both is essential, not only in order to work with today’s theaters of objects and images, but to understand where these various stage languages had their precedents.

Text and the Theater of Objects

Although the various theaters of masks and puppets around the world, which we shall categorize (with the possibility of including other theaters) as theaters of performing objects, generally utilize language they do so in ways often essentially different from the manner in which dramatic text tends to be used today on most American stages.  While language in the theater of dramatic literature is based on the playwright’s script, language in the theater of objects by tradition often involves the following features: narration or a narrator as opposed to dialogue or actors in conversation; epic as opposed to Aristotelian form; improvisation as opposed to fidelity to a certain text; poetry in preference to prose; and oral rather than written transmission of text.

As popular theaters often falling under the quasi-scientific purview of folklore and anthropological study, traditional theaters of objects are (rightfully) seen in relation to the storytellers of community history.  That is to say, the content of traditional mask and puppet productions often has to do with the legacy, cultural history, and the origin of the community in which the theater belongs.  Consequently, individual productions of (for example) Javanese theater, Indian puppet and mask theaters or Sicilian marionette theater have to do with episodes in the mythological or idealized history of the Javanese, Indian, or Italian people, much in the same manner that Greek tragedies and comedies (mask theaters) referred to stories of Greek epic history, the Ordo prophetorum [sic] of European medieval theater certified the historical rectitude of Christianity, and Shakespeare’s history plays explained England’s past to the Elizabethans.

[The Ordo Prophetarum, or Procession of the Prophets, was a drama that was part of the 12th-century rituals celebrated during the festival of Christmas Eve.  In this liturgical representation the arrival of the Messiah is narrated by the characters carved in the temple of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, accompanied by the instruments that appear sculpted in the Portico of Glory.]

In the traditional theaters of performing objects an episode of the epic is presented, improvised upon and made to comment on present-day occurrences.  In south Indian Andhra Pradesh shadow theater, for example, a typical performance presents one episode from the Mahabharata [a major Sanskrit epic of ancient India, principally compiled in the 3rd century BCE-4th century CE, revered in Hinduism].  The audience judges the performance according to the skill the performers show in presenting variations or improvisations on the theme of the particular episode.  Comic characters having little to do with the main story are utilized to comment on current events in the community.  The basic language of the performance is the poetry of some orally received version of the Mahabharata memorized with the aid of regular verse and rhyme patterns.

We should compare this to the very different technique through which that same epic was interpreted by Peter Brook in his version of the Mahabharata [1985; Brooklyn, NY: 13 October 1987-3 January 1988] which, Brook’s innovative performance methods (often involving performing objects) aside, inevitably depends on fidelity to Jean-Claude Carriere’s script.  In both versions language is at the center of the work, but in quite different forms according to the different functions each theater performs for the communities in which the works are staged—in one case the story of a community in and for that community, in the other a work of modern art for the specific community of modern culture consumers.

Not all theaters of objects. of course, are constructed on the epic form.  Japanese Noh [a heavily formalized masked theater form] and Bunraku [puppet theater employing doll puppets] theaters depend quite clearly on the exact transmission of a written play script but the way in which they do shows another different function of text in the theater of performing objects, the separation of theatrical elements.  This separation, one of the clearest examples of what Brecht termed verfremdungseffekt, is an essential aspect of the theater of objects in which movement, sound (spoken or sung text and music) and light are all presented separately to the audience, which then performs the active receptive function of combining those elements during the performance.  Thus, in Bunraku theater, one can variously choose to watch the puppets themselves, the operators, or the chanter and samisen player who present a musicalized version of the text.

An emphasis on oral tradition as opposed to written text in some theaters of objects has three aspects relevant to our discussion of dramaturgy.  First, the fact of oral transmission in non-literate cultures obviously negates the power of written text (although certainly not at all the power of the language of the poetry itself, the memory of which is of the utmost importance), and full written texts often first appear, as was the case with Commedia dell’Arte or the French Guignol theater, as the after-the-fact remembrances of the performers or folklorist observations by writers uninvolved with the productions.  Secondly, the element of improvisations circumvents the need for a script as the performers become on-the-spot playwrights (although we do know that improvisations have their own rules and forms).  Third, as we might infer from the preceding elements, there is a corresponding necessity of a dramaturg of images at work in the theater of objects that involves the understanding of mask and puppet languages of movement (various lazzi of the Commedia theater, for example) and are traditionally handed down orally, sometimes along with the texts, from one generation of performers to the next, but which now, especially in modern western theaters, tends to be created anew with new techniques.  It is that modern and postmodern re-discovery of the theaters of masks, puppets, and performing objects, from the avant-garde of the beginning of this [the twentieth] century (Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists in particular) to the recent works of Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, Squat Theater, Theodora Skipitares, Lee Breuer, and the Bread and Puppet Theater that makes an understanding of the dramaturgy of performing objects necessary.

A Contemporary Dramaturgy of Performing Objects

One of these theaters that bases its work on the dramaturgy of performing objects is Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater, now entering its twenty-fifth year of existence [as of 1988; it’s now in its sixtieth year].  I would like to explain how this theater uses dramaturgy of text and dramaturgy of image in its productions, and begin by looking at the process of the initial choices necessary to begin work on any particular production.  In the case of Bread and Puppet, these choices, following the initial selection of theme, involve space and performing objects in that space.  The theater space, whether it is a proscenium stage (from a hand-puppet booth to a full-size theater), a circus ring, a 25-acre outdoor space, or a street site for procession implies certain restrictions for effective theater having to do with scale and design—giant figures might not work inside a small theater, and small two-dimensional figures will not be effective in a large-scale space with a surrounding audience.  More important are questions about the make-up of the ensemble of performing objects—i.e., masks alone, masks with puppets, puppets, puppets alone and the relative size and scale of each.  In the visually-strong theater of objects, color is also of immense importance.  The introduction of red, for example, in a show with a basically black and white color scheme (e.g., Bread and Puppet’s recent Life and Death of a Fireman [1987]) has an immense effect as important to this theater as the recitation of a strong soliloquy is to a Shakespeare play.  Finally, the design of the performing objects will determine their use and range of possible movements in any particular production, a factor the same for a theater like Bread and Puppet as it was for the classic Greek drama, which fact an Italian director discovered when mounting a production of Menander’s fourth century B.C. comedy Samìa [The girl from Samos/La Donna di Samo; dir. Mario Prosperi, 1979, 1981] with masks based on recently discovered [1973] originals.  “Each mask,” the director realized, “wants to be ‘animated’ in its own way . . . [.]  The actor must conform to the authority of a code [of movement for each mask].”  (Mario Prosperi, “The Masks of Lipari,” TDR 26:4 [Winter 1982] T96, p. 35).

The function of text in Bread and Puppet Theater generally falls into one of two categories.  At times, a prewritten text will serve as a structural element in a Bread and Puppet production, oftentimes as a libretto in a music-based piece as in recent theatrical productions of Mozart’s Requiem or Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.  On rare occasions, a script is utilized from the beginning, as was the case with a 1981 production of Büchner’s Woyzeck.  But generally texts are selected and utilized as part of the production’s process, and finalized as scripts (if ever) after the show has been constructed.  Text in these productions is often the result of a type of collective dramaturgy the likes of which was attempted in Berlin by the Piscator-Bühne in the late [nineteen-] twenties and used more successfully by the Federal Theatre’s “Living Newspaper” in New York in the late thirties.  An aspect of Bread and Puppet’s two-day-long annual Domestic Resurrection Circus is an intensive period of research by various participants in the event on the Circus’s particular (and usually political) topic: the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution (1987), the Politics of Hunger (1986), Bach and Nicaragua (1985), etc.  In other production situations—workshop/productions, for example—Bread and Puppet employs a similar approach to collective playwriting based on the participants’ experiences.  In the spring of 1987 the texts for The Passion of San José de Masatepe, created and performed at Easter time in the Nicaraguan village of the show’s title, were written as collaborative reflections of the workshop participants (members of the campesino [farmworker] cultural organization MECATE) as a contemporary biblical exegesis based on Liberation Theology.

More often than, or in combination with, specifically written text the Bread and Puppet Theater utilizes “found” text as an element of a production.  Thus for the 1987 Domestic Resurrection Circus sections of the U.S. Constitution were juxtaposed with an earlier American constitution, the Iroquois Nation’s Kaianerokova [sic; Kaianerekowa, the Iroquois Great Law of Peace; thought to date from the late 12th century (ca. 1190)].  For The Story of Ben Linder [1959-1987], a political street show on the life and death of the young American engineer killed by the contras [a loose confederation of rebel groups funded by the U.S. government] in Nicaragua, a combination of newspaper accounts, Congressional testimony, Linder’s letters, original dialogue and rhymed couplets, and an Appalachian folk song were all employed as textual means to tell Linder’s story as a Dance of Death.  Finally, in addition to texts spoken or sung, by narrators, in dialogue, or in choruses, Bread and Puppet employs the visual effect of written text, as signs identifying characters, or in the case of longer texts, as the physical presence of a comment on a particular scene.

This brief effort has, I hope, served to outline the general nature of dramaturgy (of image and of text) in what night be the most widespread style of live theater in the world—the theater of masks, puppets, and performing objects, and to assert that although texts (and therefore the nature of that theater’s dramaturgy) are employed differently there than in theaters of dramatic literature, dramaturgy itself (and hence someone performing a dramaturgical function) is an essential element of that theater.

[I direct readers to my two-part post “A History of Dramaturgy,” published on Rick On Theater on 31 December 2022 and 3 January 2023.

[John Bell, a puppeteer and theater historian, is the Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and an Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts, both at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, and was a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater company from 1971 to 1985, where he was, among other positions, the company’s dramaturg.  

[Bell received his doctoral degree in theater from New York City’s Columbia University and is the author of many books and articles about puppet theater, an editor of Puppetry International, a founding member of the Brooklyn-based theater collective Great Small Works, one of the creators of the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, Massachusetts, and a member of the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band of Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

"An Artist Who Inflated People To His Whimsical Proportions"

by Stephen Kinzer with Ashley Shannon Wu 

[Colombian artist Fernando Botero died on Friday, 15 September 2023, in a hospital in Monaco.  He was 91 and the cause was reported as complications of pneumonia.  His obituary appeared in the New York Times the next day, 16 September 2023 (updated online on 17 September).  I’ve posted the notice below, followed by some personal remarks about the artist.]

His voluptuous figures, both in paintings and in sculpture, portrayed the high and mighty as well as everyday people through an enlarging prism.

Fernando Botero, the Colombian whose voluptuous pictures and sculptures of overstuffed generals, bishops, prostitutes, housewives and other products of his whimsical imagination made him one of the world’s best-known artists, died on Friday in Monaco. He was 91.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a close friend, Mauricio Vallejo, a co-owner of an art gallery in Houston, who said the cause was complications of pneumonia. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia earlier announced the death on social media.

As a young artist, Mr. Botero developed an instantly recognizable style and enjoyed great and immediate commercial success. Fans sought his autograph and were known to wait for him at airports.

“‘It’s the profession you do if you wish to die of hunger,’ people used to tell me,” he once recalled. “Yet I was so strongly impelled to take it up that I never thought about the consequences.”                      

Mr. Botero was permanently associated with the florid, rounded figures that filled his pictures. He portrayed middle-class life and bordellos, clerics and peasants, bulging baskets of fruit and the grim effects of violence. 

Fernando Botero Angulo was born on April 19, 1932, in the Colombian city of Medellín. His father died when he was a child. An uncle enrolled him in a Jesuit high school, encouraged his artistic interests and supported him for two years as he studied to be a matador. Bullfighting scenes figure in some of his earliest work, and he followed bullfighting all his life.

After publishing an article titled “Pablo Picasso and Nonconformity in Art,” Mr. Botero was expelled from his Jesuit school because it expressed ideas said to be “irreligious.” Among his early influences were Cubism, Mexican murals and the pinup art of Alberto Vargas, whose “Vargas girl” drawings he saw in Esquire magazine.

He began publishing illustrations in a local newspaper while still a teenager, worked as a set designer and in 1951 moved to Bogotá, the capital. After his first one-man show there, he moved to Paris and spent several years living there and in Florence, Italy.

In 1961, the New York curator Dorothy Miller bought a Botero work, “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve,” for the Museum of Modern Art. It was a surprising choice, since Abstract Expressionism was then the rage, and Mr. Botero’s sketchy portrait of a chubby-cheeked child seemed out of place.

The Modern’s attention to his work helped set Mr. Botero on a path to renown. In 1979, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. Many of his pictures were of corpulent figures poised between caricature and pathos.

“A perfect woman in art can prove banal in reality, like a photograph in Playboy,” Mr. Botero reasoned. “The most beautiful women in art, like Mona Lisa herself, were ugly in real life. There are those who see the monstrous in my work, but my work is what it is.”

One review of the Hirshhorn show was headlined “Botero, One Hundred Thousand Dollars for a Painting by Him in Washington.” That reflected the view of some critics that Mr. Botero’s work was banal, self-referential and out of touch with vibrant currents in contemporary art.

“The critics have always written with rage and fury about me, all my life,” Mr. Botero groused.

Writing in The London Evening Standard in 2009, the arts writer Godfrey Barker marveled, “Wow, do they loathe him.”

“The high priests of contemporary art in London and New York cannot stand him because he defies everything they believe in,” Mr. Barker wrote. “They hate him more because he is rich, an immense commercial success, easy on the eye, and very popular with ordinary folk.”

Mr. Botero and his first wife, Gloria Zea, who became Colombia’s minister of culture, divorced in 1960 after having three children: Fernando, Lina, and Juan Carlos. He spent much of the next decade and a half living in New York. Ms. Zea died in 2019. He was married two other times, to Cecilia Zambrano and, in 1978, to Sophia Vari, a Greek painter and sculptor. Ms. Vari died in May.

He is survived by his three children from his first marriage as well as a brother, Rodrigo, and grandchildren.

Two misfortunes marked Mr. Botero’s family life. In the 1970s, his 5-year-old son, Pedro, from his second marriage, was killed in a car crash in which Mr. Botero was injured. His son Fernando Botero Zea, who had become a politician in Colombia and rose to minister of defense, served 30 months in prison after being convicted in a corruption scandal.

It was during the 1970s that Mr. Botero’s interest in form led him to sculpture. His sculptures, many depicting florid, whimsical large people, brought him a new level of public visibility. Major cities clamored to place them along main avenues, including, in New York, in the median strips of Park Avenue in 1993. Several are on permanent display in nontraditional spaces ranging from the lobby of the Deutsche Bank Center (formerly the Time Warner Center) in New York to a lounge at the Grand Wailea resort in Hawaii called the Botero Bar.

Mr. Botero was an enthusiastic art collector, and in 2000 he donated part of his collection to a museum in his hometown, Medellín. Some of his works are interpretations of masterpieces by artists like Caravaggio, Titian and van Gogh.

Mr. Botero usually depicted his men of power with at least a touch of irony or satire. Yet, although they may appear foppish or self-important, and nearly all are of exaggerated proportion, he infused them with a measure of dignity.

Jesus was Mr. Botero’s subject in several evocative works. He painted portraits of Delacroix, Ingres and Giacometti. His images of authority, like “Cardinal,” “The English Ambassador,” “The First Lady” and two called “The President,” painted in 1987 and 1989, are gently sympathetic. He brought portly dignity to a man who smoked and a woman who stroked a cat.

Many of his subjects, though, were swollen tapestries of flesh, bursting from the confines of uniforms, dresses and towels unable to cover exaggerated acreage. He insisted that he never painted fat people, saying he wished simply to glorify the sensuality of life.

“I studied the art of Giotto and all other Italian masters,” he once said. “I was fascinated by their sense of volume and monumentality. Of course in modern art everything is exaggerated, so my voluminous figures also became exaggerated.”

Mr. Botero and Ms. Vari maintained homes in Paris and Pietrasanta, Italy, where an exhibition was held to mark his 80th birthday in 2012.

Some who considered Mr. Botero’s art to be essentially playful and lighthearted were surprised when, in 2005, he produced a series of graphic paintings based on photographs of prisoners abused at the American jail in Abu Ghraib, Iraq.

“These works are the result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world,” he said.

The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote that the Abu Ghraib paintings “restore the prisoners’ dignity and humanity without diminishing their agony or the injustice of their situation.” The novelist and critic Erica Jong called them “astonishing” and asserted that they argued for “a complete revision of whatever we previously thought of Botero’s work.”

“When we think about the Colombian artist Fernando Botero, most of us visualize his roly-poly people flaunting their fat, their fashionable headgear, their cigarettes and cigarette holders, their excess,” Ms. Jong wrote. “I never thought of these as political images until I saw Botero’s Abu Ghraib series." Now, she added, “I see all Botero’s work as a record of the brutality of the haves against the have-nots.”

Mr. Botero had dealt with political themes before, notably the Colombian drug trade, but he always returned to more calming projects afterward. Following the Abu Ghraib series, he produced a series of circus pictures and then rediscovered his longtime love of still life.

“After all this time,” he said in 2010, “I always return to the simplest things.”

[Stephen Kinzer is an author, journalist, and academic.  A former New York Times foreign correspondent, he’s published several books, and writes for several newspapers and news agencies, including the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and the Boston Globe; he left the Times in 2005.  He’s a senior fellow in international affairs and diplomacy at the Watson Institute.

[The Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero is an artist in whom I’m especially interested.  My first exposure to Botero’s paintings was when I was 11.  I thought his work was grotesque (though I don’t think I’d have come up with that word at the time) and disturbing. 

[Two years later, when my mother bought one of Botero’s paintings as a birthday gift for my father, I wasn’t sure I could live in a house with it on the wall.  I did, however, and it happily remained in my parents’ homes for the rest of their lives.

[In September 1958, my father bought a part ownership in the Gres Gallery in Washington, a respected venue for contemporary one-artist and theme shows (see “Gres Gallery,” posted on Rick On Theater on 7, 10, and 13 July 2018).  From 29 October to 25 November of that year, Gres mounted Fernando Botero, becoming only the second—and the first commercial—gallery in the U.S. to put up a one-man show of Fernando Botero’s work.  (The first was at the Pan-American Union, now the Organization of American States, or OAS, in April and May 1957.)

[Ambassador José Gutiérrez Gómez of Colombia officiated at the opening, which made the scene that much more impressive, especially for an 11-year-old boy.  The diplomat had given a reception at his embassy the day before in honor of the painter, who would become arguably the most famous of all the artists Gres showed.

[Between 18 October and 12 November 1960, Gres had its second solo show for the Colombian artist, Fernando Botero: One-Man Show.  It was from this exhibit that my mother (with moral support from my brother and me—though, of course, at not yet 12 and a month shy of 14, we didn’t really contribute any cash to the purchase as we didn’t have any) bought Boy with a Guitar.  (Botero’s Mona Lisa, Age Twelve was exhibited at this Gres Gallery show as well, and it’s my recollection that the Museum of Modern Art bought it there.)                                                                        

[After that, Botero was one of the artists we paid attention to as his career and reputation blossomed and he became an internationally known and respected artist.  We read and clipped articles on him and went to exhibits of his work in galleries, museums, and public spaces. 

[When my parents came to New York City to visit me and we’d go to an art show or just wander around one of Manhattan’s gallery centers, we’d frequently make a stop at the Marlborough Fine Arts on W. 57th Street, which handles Botero’s work, just to see what was on view.

[On one particular visit, there was a wonderful bronze sculpture of a dove, a frequent subject of the artist’s, perhaps a little over life-sized, sitting on a six-foot perch.  I think it was going for $35,000 (about $100K today), lightyears out of my price range—but I kept lying to myself, ‘I can come up with that somehow.  I should do it.  I have a perfect spot for it in my living room!’

[I didn’t, of course.  More’s the pity!  (I just wouldn’t have eaten for a couple of years.)

[On that same trip, we walked up Madison Avenue for several blocks, “window shopping.”  In almost every gallery, there was at least one Botero sculptures in the window.  In one shop, we could see a full-scale bronze dinner table set for a meal—all cast in bronze.  We had to go in and see it. 

[Over his lifetime, Botero donated hundreds of pieces to cities, museums, and public spaces all around the world.   When on a visit to Puerto Rico in 2008, I spotted what I was sure was such a piece in the Plaza de la Cultura on Avenida José de Diego in San Juan across from the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.  When I asked in the art museum if that was a Botero, no one knew—even though it was right across the street!  It turned out to be Reclining Woman (Mujer reclinada, 2006) which the artist had given to the people of the city. 

[In 1993, 14 of Botero's monumental, voluptuous bronze sculptures of people and animals (Botero in New York) were exhibited for about 2½ months along the grassy median strip of Park Avenue from 54th up to 61st Streets (about a third of a mile).  The gigantic bronzes, portraying men, women, children, birds, and cats, remained on display from 5 September to 14 November.  Parents brought their children, who sat on the grass of the medians and sketched the bulbous figures.  Some even clambered atop the statues, which I recall was encouraged.

[In November 2007, I went to D.C. to visit my mother and we went to the nearby American University Museum to see Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib (see my report posted on 26 November 2017), the artists series of paintings depicting the abuses visited upon Iraqi prisoners by their American guards as revealed by the photos that were released in April 2004.  This was Mom’s second visit to the exhibit as she’d gone to the opening because Botero was there.] 

"Voces del Teatro: Let Our Voices Be Heard"

by Liane Schirmer and Minerva Garcia 

[The article below, subtitled “The untold history of the Latinx theatre movement in modern Los Angeles,” appeared in American Theatre, the monthly magazine of the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), on 2 August 2023 (posted on the website at AMERICAN THEATRE | Voces del Teatro: Let Our Voices Be Heard).  Voces del Teatro (Voices of the theater) is a project of Latinx Theatre Alliance/Los Angeles.]

Voces del Teatro Oral History Archive is an ongoing project whose ultimate goal is to research and fully document the collective history of professional Latinx theatre in contemporary Los Angeles, from the late 1960s through the present. As our research is evolving, this article does not claim to be a definitive analysis of this subject and period.

Los Angeles, March 2020. The unthinkable happened. In a matter of hours, the devastating realities of COVID-19 impacted every aspect of normal life. Theatres were hit especially hard, shutting their doors, as actors and other theatre professionals all over the city wondered when they’d open again. Particularly vulnerable to the resulting economic fallout were our Latinx theatres, most of which work in spaces with 99 seats or less and struggle to find audiences even in the best of times.

Weeks later, our community was dealt a second blow: Diane Rodriguez, a Renaissance artist, actress, playwright, director, and producer died suddenly [10 April 2020 at 68]. One of Diane’s many legacies was her untiring advocacy for Latinx theatre, not only in Los Angeles, but on a national level. Defying the odds of a segregated field, she made her mark as the associate artistic director of Center Theatre Group (CTG [Los Angeles]), one of the most influential nonprofit theatre companies in the nation. 

Diane had been the keynote speaker at the first convening of the Latinx Theatre Alliance/Los Angeles (LTA/LA), an organization formed in 2012 to advocate for and empower the L.A. Latinx artistic community. In her speech, she made us recognize the importance of our theatrical legacy, reminding us that our theatres served not only as a creative outlet but as a vital community forum.

Diane’s passing came as a wake-up call. We were in the entertainment capital of the world, yet the media had all but erased us from the cultural narrative, largely excluding us from mainstream venues. Despite the last 50-plus years of producing theatre in L.A., only a small segment of the city knew our story. 

It was up to us to record, preserve, and champion this story, because no one else would. We had to do it now, or we’d risk losing the voices of the people who made it happen. It would take a formal archive, and the resulting scholarship, to establish Latinx theatre as a genre in itself. So LTA/LA made the decision to create and sponsor the Voces del Teatro Oral History Archive. 

This is the first formal attempt to chronicle the history of Latinx theatre in contemporary Los Angeles from the late 1960s to the present. To date, we’ve completed two phases totaling 40 hour-long interviews with the key theatremakers who pioneered this genre. Interviewees were selected based on age as well as length and breadth of career. What follows is a brief chronicle of how L.A. Latinx theatre came into being, and how it grew and developed into the largest Latinx theatre scene in the country.

1960s 

In the 1960s, the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, inspired by the gains of the Black Civil Rights Movement, came into its own. A grassroots effort by U.S.-born Mexican Americans, this new generation fought for social and political empowerment and championed Black-Brown unity. In Los Angeles in 1968, thousands of Mexican American high school students, protesting inferior education, staged the East L.A. Chicano Student Walkouts, the first major mass protest against racism by Mexican-Americans in U.S. history.

In California, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta fought for the rights of migrant farm workers. Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino [The farmworker’s theater], founded in Northern California in 1965, arose to educate and inspire workers to organize. This groundbreaking company performed “actos,” short, comedic sketches, in the fields, illustrating the cause of the farmworkers and advocating for unionization. Within 10 years, Teatro Campesino had almost single-handedly fostered a national theatre movement. 

Luis Valdez inspired poet and activist Guadalupe Saavedra de Saavedra to co-found Teatro Chicano along with David Saucedo, in East Los Angeles in 1968. Later, Saavedra, working with Latino student activist groups at Cal State Long Beach in 1969, founded Teatro Popular de la Vida y Muerte (Popular Theatre of Life and Death), focusing on intercultural and political themes.

In Hollywood, a female-led company, Seis Actores (Six Actors), was co-founded by Cuban director Margarita Galbán. She cast the legendary Mexican American actress Carmen Zapata in her first Spanish-language play. This collaboration would lead them years later to co-found the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts (see below).

1970s

On Aug. 29, 1970, between 20,000 and 30,000 demonstrators formed the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, marching through East L.A. to protest the disproportionate number of Mexican American troops drafted, killed, or injured. This peaceful demonstration erupted into violence when the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department arrived, injuring and killing three individuals, including L.A. Times journalist Rubén Salazar.

This decade saw a proliferation of teatros, beginning in 1970 when Vibiana Aparicio Chamberlin, responding to the dearth of creative opportunities for Chicano youth, founded Teatro de los Niños. It was the first Chicano children’s theatre in the U.S. in which children not only wrote and performed their own plays but were compensated for their performances. Their work addressed cultural identity, immigration, and the threat of deportation.

By the early 1970s, Chicano theatre had established itself as a movement. In 1971, El Teatro Nacional de Aztlán (TENAZ), a group of nine Chicano-identified theatres led by El Teatro Campesino, held its first conference. “Fiesta de los Teatros” took place at L.A.’s Inner City Theatre (home of the Inner City Cultural Center). These gatherings continued until 1990, at which point no similar national convenings took place until the advent of the Latinx Theatre Commons in 2012.

In response to prejudice and stereotypical casting in the media, the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts (BFA) was co-founded by Carmen Zapata, Margarita Galbán, and Estela Scarlata in 1973. Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, BFA’s mission is to foster cultural pride through the performance of classic Spanish theatre, from the Golden Age of Cervantes to Lorca, to contemporary original Latin American works. Plays are performed, alternately in Spanish and English versions, with a single cast. Many Latino actors began their professional careers here.

Teatro Urbano, a Chicano-focused group founded by Rene Rodriguez and his wife, Rosemary Soto Rodriguez, in 1974, tackled police brutality, deportation, workers’ rights, women’s issues, and lack of political education. Silver Dollar, their signature work, documenting the murder of journalist Rubén Salazar, opened in 1976 and was last performed in 2022, making it the longest-running Chicano play in Los Angeles.

In 1978, the Los Angeles Actors Theater (LAAT) housed El Teatro de la Unidad [The theater of unity]. Founded by Argentine theatremaker Jaime Jaimes, it was an integral part of LAAT’s mission, which was to “provide education and the theatre experience to low-income populations,” with a particular focus on the city’s marginalized cultural groups. Unidad produced more than 20 critically acclaimed plays in Spanish and English until 1983.

Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in 1978. For the first time in its 11-year history, Center Theatre Group presented a play written by a Chicano playwright and performed by Latinx actors. Thanks to its box-office success, the CTG bought the Aquarius Theater in Hollywood, where the show ran for a year and a half to sold-out houses. [Zoot Suit played on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1979.]

1980s

The 1980s, despite being proclaimed the “Decade of the Hispanic,” continued to see under-representation of Latino creatives in mainstream media. The L.A. Summer Olympics in 1984 led to a crackdown on crime and gangs that severely targeted Black and Latino youth. By the mid-’80s, the HIV/AIDS crisis had hit the Latino community hard. Though only 18.5 percent of the U.S. population, Latinos constituted 25 percent of people with HIV. The mass migration of Central Americans, fleeing U.S.-backed wars, transformed the neighborhoods of Pico/Union and the Westlake District. The decade was marked by gang violence, the crack epidemic, and poverty in the Latino community, which destroyed a generation.

One company, Stage of the Arts, chose to work in the economically challenged neighborhoods of Echo Park, the Westlake District, and East L.A. (at the Teatro Estudio Jorge Negrete). Founded in 1982 by Cuban director Jorge Luis Rodríguez, the company’s original focus was on producing absurdist theatre in Spanish. Though the company’s trajectory evolved, Rodriguez consistently sought to develop multicultural awareness and provide artists a space in which to work.

Another Cuban theatremaker, José Armand, founded the Latino Ensemble in 1984 as a nonprofit pan-Latin American company. They produced experimental Latino plays in various locations around the city,  dealing with class, racism, and homosexuality. By the 2000s, Latino Ensemble had relocated to [Dania Beach,] Florida, where it remains active.

In an effort to increase opportunity and visibility, Orange County’s South Coast Repertory (SCR [Costa Mesa, California]) established the Hispanic Playwrights Project (HPP) in 1985. Under the direction of playwright José Cruz Gonzаlez, HPP focused on developing the canon, and challenging decades of preconception and prejudice. Juliette Carrillo, a writer/director, helmed HPP from 1997 to 2004. During those years, 50 playwriting workshops were held, half of which received full productions at SCR. HPP playwrights included Cherrie Moraga, Josefina López, Luis Alfaro, and Pulitzer winners Nilo Cruz and Quiara Alegría Hudes. 

José Luis Valenzuela arrived in L.A. in 1985, staging the award-winning play Hijos [“Children”] at the Teatro Estudio Jorge Negrete. This led to an invitation to work at the newly formed Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC). There, Valenzuela established the Latino Actors Lab, a collective that produced mostly English-language plays with Chicano/Latino themes.

1985 saw the creation of Havanafama Theatrical Company, co-founded by Cuban theatremakers Juan Roca and Roberto Antinoo Sorí. They produced entertaining, accessible works in Spanish, including cabaret and musicals. In 2005, they relocated to Miami under the banner of Havanafama Theater Company.

Two years later, in 1987, Grupo de Teatro SINERGIA was founded by Anibal Apríle, Yvette Cruise, and José Salgado. Its artistic leadership later passed on to director/playwright Ruben Amavizca Murúa. SINERGIA moved to the Westlake District in 1994 and took up residence in the Frida Kahlo Theater, a space named after their signature play. Dedicated to challenging, original works in both English and Spanish, SINERGIA’s plays focus on historical, political, and social themes affecting the Latinx community. The Frida Kahlo Theater is also home to many itinerant Latinx theatre companies in the city. 

CalArts [California Institute of the Arts, private art university, Santa Clarita, California] alumni co-founded About…Productions in 1988, which later came under the sole artistic direction of Chicana Theresa Chavez. Its mission is “to unearth and illuminate cultural histories of Latin America, the Southwest, California, and L.A.” As an itinerant company, About... brings its multimedia work and youth programs to a variety of audiences around the city.

1990s

By 1990, the Reagan years were in the rearview mirror, and as a one-term president, Bush took the U.S. into the Gulf War. In 1992, Los Angeles exploded in a wave of civil unrest, known thereafter as the L.A. Uprising, following the acquittal of LAPD officers who had savagely beaten a Black motorist, Rodney King, an incident that helped expose decades of police brutality against the Black and Latinx communities. In 1994, Southern California was hit by the 6.7 Northridge earthquake, which caused extensive damage in densely populated neighborhoods, including the Westlake District. The same year saw a ballot initiative in California, Proposition 187, that targeted undocumented people by denying them access to emergency health care, public education, and other services. It backfired on its supporters, though: It was later deemed unconstitutional, and backlash to the law galvanized a new generation of Latinx activists.

1990 saw the advent of a refreshing Latinx comedy troupe, Latins Anonymous, who in an eponymous show at LATC challenged the stereotypes faced by Latinx actors in the media. Co-founded by Luisa Leschin, Armando Molina, Rick Najera, Diane Rodriguez, and Cris Franco (who joined the group in 1992), this popular troupe received critical acclaim and enjoyed box-office success. By 1995, the group had ceased to create and perform together, but its founders have gone on to highly successful careers in film, theatre, and television.

Festival Latino L.A., an arts festival produced by Latino Ensemble in 1990, offered more than 20 productions, with plays from local L.A. Latinx companies as well as work from Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and Chile. The festival, which also included theatre workshops, intended “to build bridges between Anglos, L.A. Latinos, and their counterparts in Spanish-speaking countries.”

LATC, after several years of fostering ethnic-based and gender-based labs and productions, closed in 1991, leaving many companies, including the Latino Actors Lab, without a home. Fortunately, in the case of the Lab, they were invited to take up residence at the Mark Taper Forum. Following the move, this company changed its name to the Latino Theater Company (LTC), remaining under the artistic direction of José Luis Valenzuela.

Culture Clash also entered the L.A. scene around this time. It had its origins in 1984 in San Francisco, when José Antonio Burciaga recruited performers Monica Palacios, Marga Gómez, Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza. In 1991 Montoya, Salinas, and Siguenza relocated to Los Angeles under the name Culture Clash, and created new work for the Huntington, the Getty, the Pasadena Playhouse, and Center Theatre Group. Culture Clash became the most prominent Chicano/Latino performance troupe in the country, satirizing the historical, social, and political issues faced by Latinos in the U.S. Their sharp wit, character work, and comedic skills led to national recognition (and work at theatres from San Diego to Miami). Today, Culture Clash maintains a strong influence on new generations of Latino performers, who continue to stage their plays. 

By the early 1990s, Center Theatre Group, no doubt wanting to tap into this emerging market, formed the Latino Theatre Initiative (LTI) in 1992. Designed to provide аccess to emerging Latinx artists and increase the Latinx audience base by offering culturally relevant programming, it was initially helmed by José Luis Valenzuela. In 1995, leadership passed to Diane Rodriguez and to artist/poet/playwright Luis Alfaro. This progressive duo provided a community-based approach, establishing playwriting workshops that launched several influential artists. In 2005, Gordon Davidson, CTG’s founding artistic director, retired, and his successor, Michael Ritchie, eliminated funding for playwriting programs, effectively ending the LTI. 

A new group arose in 1992. East L.A. Classic Theater was co-founded by Roberto Beltrán, Rubén Sierra, Tony Plana, and Julie Arenal, with the mission of highlighting the talents of classically trained Latino artists in the performance of classic works—i.e., Shakespeare and the American canon, but in culturally specific adaptations. They also developed strong theatre programs for under-served youth, which included performances of the classics. They ceased operations in 2012. 

Starting in 1994 and running through 2014, actor Luis Avalos produced an English-language Latino-themed holiday musical, Paquito’s Christmas, which ran for many years at various venues across the city, including LATC. In 1999, Avalos was invited to stage his play at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theatre in Washington, D.C. Avalos established the Americas Theatre Arts Foundation in 2000, to support productions based on Latin American themes.

Finally, Teatro Apolo, under the artistic direction of Mexican actor/director Jesús Castaños Chima, was founded in 1998. Apolo produces Spanish-language works and tours them extensively throughout Mexico, Central and South America. Castaños Chima also serves as the coordinator of Latino Theatre Programs at 24th Street Theatre.

2000s

The first decade of the 2000s was marked by war, beginning with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. This led to the Afghanistan War, which dragged on until the U.S. withdrawal in 2021. The Iraq War began in 2003 and lasted until 2011. The decade finished on a dismal note, as the Great Recession of 2008 devastated the economy and severely impacted homeowners of color.

On a positive note, the 2000s welcomed the next generation of L.A. Latinx theatremakers, armed with professional training and political awareness. Globalization brought an influx of young practitioners from all over the U.S. as well as from various Spanish-speaking countries. These newcomers started a slew of companies with a fresh international perspective. The rise of social media in 2004 and its widespread use in theatre marketing had a huge impact on the growth of these companies.

In 2000, two major female-led companies were established. Casa 0101, under the artistic direction of renowned Chicana playwright/screenwriter Josefina López, provides arts programming, playwriting workshops, and classes to the community of Boyle Heights. MACHA Theatre Company (Mujeres [Women] Advancing Culture, History, and Art) was founded by Cuban American playwright/director Odalys Nanín, with the mission “to build social, cultural, and artistic bridges . . . and provide the LGBTQI community a sense of belonging.”

Tierra Blanca Arts Center, founded in 2002 by Mexican actress/director Blanca Araceli Soto, fosters pride in Latin American culture through the arts of dance, music, and Spanish-language theatre. That same year, Chicano director/arts administrator, Jesus Reyes, founded East L.A. Rep (ELAR). They originated a summer program for the community, using local artists and staging free Shakespeare plays in neighborhood parks. In 2008, ELAR evolved into a creative, collaborative workspace which was open until 2017.

In 2002, Cuban director Jorge Folguiera organized the Festival Internacional de Teatro Latino (FITLA). Importing plays from Spain and Latin America, as well as staging work by local Latino theatres, FITLA’s events were conducted primarily in Spanish. These included conferences and workshops with leading Latin American theatremakers. This annual festival ceased operations in 2009.

Guatemalan actor/director Emanuel Loarca founded Teatro Akabal in 2005. This itinerant company produces original work written and performed by Central American artists. Their plays, primarily in Spanish, focus on issues relating to the Central American diaspora.

In 2006, the Latino Theatre Company was granted a multi-year lease to operate LATC, marking the first time that a Latinx company was entrusted with such a large performing arts complex. Since then, LTC, still under the direction of José Luis Valenzuela, has continued its exploration of Chicano themes, producing 155 plays, including several by local playwrights. They also rent space to a variety of groups in an effort to “highlight new voices within the Latinx, First Nation, Black, Asian American, Jewish American, and LGBTQ+ communities.”

Another driving force in Latina theatre was established in 2007 in nearby Orange County. Breath of Fire, currently under the artistic direction of Chicana CalArts alum Sara Guerrero, is dedicated to the development of new work covering topical issues that touch the Latina community.

Two years later, in 2009, Mexican writer/director Jorge Duran founded Nirvana Theatre, producing original work in Spanish that focuses on contemporary Latinx life. Eschewing stereotypes as well as border politics, Nirvana has built a solid following in Los Angeles, particularly among young urban adults 

2010s 

The second decade of the millennium posed new challenges to the Latinx community. As the country was trying to emerge from a recession, a renewed wave of anti-immigrant sentiment rose. But the community fought back, and the 2012 passage of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) allowed select undocumented individuals who came to the U.S. as children to receive a renewable two year period of “deferred action” from deportation.

Los Angeles saw the birth of two companies in the early teens. Off The Tracks, founded in 2011 by Salvadoran theatremaker and CalArts alum Juan Parada and Mexican actor/director Gerardo Davalos, produced work in Spanish by contemporary Latin American playwrights. Housed for many years in a space in El Sereno, they are now an itinerant company. Teatro Luna, a primarily Latina/Hispana-centered ensemble founded in Chicago in 2000, moved to L.A. in 2013, under the leadership of Alexandra Meda. Rebranded in 2022 as Studio Luna, they are now a creative incubator focusing on artists’ wellness.

Meanwhile, advocacy for Latinx theatre continued to evolve. On a national level, the Latinx Theatre Commons emerged from a meeting in 2012 in Washington, D.C., which addressed the pervasive sense of discrimination against Latinx artists in the American theatre. Today, the Commons advocates for increased Latinx representation to reflect the realities of our ever-changing, multi- and polycultural world. 

This organization led directly to the formation of several regional branches, including the Latinx Theatre Alliance/Los Angeles  (LTA/LA), established in 2012. LTA/LA held its first convening in 2013. At the second convening, in 2014, the participants attempted to create a handwritten chronological record of seminal L.A. Latinx theatre events.

The Latino Theater Company hosted two “Encuentros,” in 2014 and 2017. These national festivals, in association with LATC and Latinx Theatre Commons, consisted of full-length productions of contemporary plays. The 2014 Encuentro [meeting] included the following L.A. Latinx theatre companies: Latino Theater Company, Grupo de Teatro SINERGIA, About…Productions, Teatro Luna, and Casa 0101. The second Encuentro, in 2017, included participants from the U.S[.], Canada, and Latin America. Twelve L.A.-based artists presented Patas Arriba (Upside Down), a late-night “micro-theatre festival,” at LATC.

Meanwhile, anti-Latino rhetoric continued to escalate across the country. In 2018, the Trump administration adopted a policy of “zero tolerance,” which criminally charged migrants seeking asylum at the Southern U.S. border, resulting in thousands of children being separated from their parents. In 2019, in El Paso, Texas, a white supremacist opened fire, killing 23 people, most of whom were of Mexican descent, in one of the worst hate crimes against Latinos, as well as one of the worst domestic terrorist attacks in modern U.S. history.

2020 to 2023

By March of 2020, COVID-19 precipitated a worldwide lockdown, separating society into “essential” and “non-essential” workers. The former, mostly Blacks and Latinos, didn’t have the option to work from home and thus faced continual risk of infection. 

Exacerbating an already tenuous situation was the murder of George Floyd in May of that year. Thousands took to the streets to protest police violence against communities of color, spurring a racial reckoning across all sectors of American society. In the aftermath of the protests, BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] theatre artists drafted a collective letter, “We See You, White American Theater,” demanding that the nation’s predominantly white-run institutions “examine, change, and dismantle their harmful and racist practices.” More than 60,000 artists signed their petition.

In response to a surge of anti-Latinx sentiment, Latinx Theatre Alliance/Los Angeles held its third convening, “Awake and Activate,” in June of 2020 as a virtual program. This event spoke to the moment, offering tools for artists to combat hatred and prejudice. At the convening, LTA/LA also honored the life of Diane Rodriguez.

Through the pandemic years, virtual performances filled the internet, with many theatres offering play readings, short plays, or monologues as a creative outlet and a way to stay connected. By 2022, most Los Angeles theatres had slowly begun to open, having survived the pandemic and hoping to re-engage audiences.

As of 2023, the temporary arts funding that kept companies afloat dried up. Additional challenges, in the form of legislation such as California Assembly Bill 5, California Senate Bill 3, and the latest Actors Equity 99-seat agreement threaten to make it even harder for smaller theatres to operate. 

In light of these challenges, our story must be told, because Latinx theatre matters. We began as activists and grew into consummate professionals. Against all odds, we took the initiative to build a theatre movement. Now we must honor that legacy and inspire the next generation. 

We hope that the Voces del Teatro Oral History Archive can serve not only to recognize our collective achievements, but to pay tribute to the contribution we’ve made to the arts in Los Angeles and beyond.

Let our “Voces” be heard!

[Liane Schirmer is an actor and director who’s worked extensively in Latinx theater.  An avid L.A. historian, she’s a member of L.A. as Subject, a research alliance dedicated to preserving and improving access to the archival material of Los Angeles history at the University of Southern California (https://laassubject.org/; e-mail: posas@usc.edu), as well as several historical societies.

[Minerva Garcia (she/her) is a professional actor and theater director.  She’s also one of the founding members and a Co-Facilitator of the Latinx Theatre Alliance/Los Angeles (LTA/LA – https://www.lta-la.org/; e-mail: latinoalliancenow@gmail.com).

[Voces del Teatro: An Oral History of Latinx Theatre in Modern Los Angeles (1960s to Present) is a series of 40 video and audio interviews which comprise a groundbreaking formal oral history archive of Latinx theater in Los Angeles.  This archive encompasses the period from the 1960s (the beginning of the Chicano movement and the civil rights movement) to the present.

[The Voces del Teatro oral history archive is attempting to compile the first official chronicle of Latinx theater-makers in Los Angeles in the words of the creators o that history.  These 40 interviews are a living record of the challenges and triumphs experienced by Latinx actors, directors, designers, playwrights, producers, and artistic directors in Southern California.

[The archive is an ongoing project by LTA/LA whose ultimate goal is to research Latinx theater in contemporary LA from the late 1960s through the present.  For all matters concerning Voces del Teatro Oral History Archive, e-mail latinoalliancenow@gmail.com.]