"Austin theater company works to preserve Latin American culture"

by Journey Love Taylor, Marcos Sanchez, Natalie Erzal,                    Tara Bordeaux and Gil Garcia

[The following report on the Latino theater troupe Proyecto Teatro of Austin, Texas, was aired on PBS NewsHour on 5 March 2024.]

The Austin, Texas theater company, Proyecto Teatro, aims to promote and preserve Latin American culture. Its latest project is helping redefine Latin American history. Journey Love Taylor of our Student Reporting Labs Academy shares the story as part of our arts and culture series, “CANVAS.”

Geoff Bennett, “PBS NewsHour” Co-Anchor: The Austin, Texas, theater company Proyecto Teatro aims to promote and preserve Latin American culture. And its latest project is helping redefine Latin American history.

Journey Love Taylor of our Student Reporting Labs Academy shares this story as part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Journey Love Taylor: At The VORTEX Theater in Austin, Texas, Proyecto Teatro is in the middle of rehearsal “Cabarex 2,” the second installment of a trilogy of stage plays that explore Latin American history, from the times before the arrival of Columbus all the way through to an imagined future.

Luis Armando Ordaz Gutierrez is the longtime artistic director for the company.

Luis Armando Ordaz Gutierrez, Artistic Director, Proyecto Teatro: We’re wanting to use this show to raise awareness of what we can do as a local community to take back our culture, to take back our art form and our identity.

Journey Love Taylor: But this isn’t just a play. It’s a cabaret, and it’s performed completely in Spanish.

Luis Armando Ordaz Gutierrez: This type of work, you don’t really see it so much in Spanish, and you don’t see this type of work in the Latino community, because cabaret is derived from European art forms, and so it’s a little odd and a little different and new to see it in the context of our culture.

And so when people saw it, they were just so happy to be able to see their stories, their people, their characters in the lens of cabaret with, like, the musical numbers and the dance sequences and the jazzy music.

Valeria Smeke, Dancer and Performer: My favorite part about being involved in this production specifically, I think, would be the dances.

There’s one with, like, chairs. You have your little, like, chair dance routine. I love that one.

Rachel Rivera, Choreographer, Makeup, Costume, and Hair Artist: Being a part of something so impactful in my community feels like a great responsibility, especially since I feel that I am a leader and someone who creates something for other people to see and other people that are not part of my culture to see, to make sure that what I’m doing always carries that intention that I want it to carry and the intention of respecting and honoring my culture.

Valeria Smeke: I really don’t get a chance to, like, connect with my roots, so being here and, like, Rachel teaching us these indigenous dances, just learning about the history, it’s a really beautiful thing.

Journey Love Taylor: For the “PBS NewsHour” Student Reporting Labs, I’m Journey Love Taylor.

[Proyecto Teatro was founded in 2007 and is located at 5700 Avenue G, Austin, Texas 78752-4510.  The Principal, or Artistic Director, is Luis Ordaz.  The company can be contacted at (512) 524-8555 or info@proyectoteatro.com; the website is www.proyectoteatro.com.] 

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[Because the NewsHour report was so brief, I went looking for some other coverage of Proyecto Teatro.  The two pieces below are both a little older (pre-pandemic) than the one above, but I found them informative and interesting.]

“TEATRO CON TENACIDAD
THE SHAPE OF LATINA/O THEATRE IN AUSTIN”
by Emi Aguilar and Roxanne Schroeder-Arce 

[This article was posted in the website HowlRound on 19 June 2015.]

This is the second of seven posts in a series about the state of Latina/o theatre in Texas.  In this series, each of the contributing writers presents insight into the happenings, developments, and future of Latina/o theatre and performance in their respective regions.

Austin, Texas hosts several Latina/o theatre companies, and each year more historically white institutions are producing plays with Latina/o themes and characters. In past the few seasons, Austin Latina/o theatre companies like Teatro Vivo, ALTA Teatro (Austin Latina/o Theatre Alliance), and Proyecto Teatro have produced and showcased plays from the Latina/o experience, while other mainstream companies like ZACH Theatre, Austin Community College, and the University of Texas at Austin have produced plays with Latina/o themes, characters, and bodies. Additionally, presenting houses like the Paramount Theatre presented productions from Latin America and US Latina/o theatres. Overall, the number of Latina/o productions being offered in Austin is growing, and represent a diversity of perspectives and aesthetics from Austin Latina/o communities. However, there is still relatively little Latina/o theatre in comparison to the number of Latina/o-identified people living in Austin. What exists is sporadic, hard to find, and in some cases reeks of appropriation and tokenism. In an attempt to paint a picture of the current Austin Latina/o theatre scene, we will highlight some of the challenges Latina/o theatre in Austin faces and articulate how the Austin Latina/o theatre community is responding to such challenges.

One issue faced by Latina/o theatre artists in Austin over the past several decades is the need for a consistent venue for Latina/o arts. The Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center currently hosts four performance groups, including ALTA, Teatro Vivo, Proyecto Teatro, and Aztlan Dance Company. Each company has its own artistic and social objectives. This center, often referred to as “the MACC,” has helped with the need for a consistent space where the Latina/o community and those interested in Latina/o arts can find theatre told from the uniquely Latina/o perspective. This magnificent new facility also provides free parking for sanctioned events, though it is taking some time for the Austin community at large to become accustomed to attending events at the MACC.

One resident company of the MACC, ALTA, has been in existence for over fifteen years. The company’s mission has recently changed, and it now works as a community of artists and volunteers to foster new Latina/o theatre talent in Austin. ALTA promotes collaborative productions among local and international artists. ALTA’s productions are typically written by Latin American playwrights, and produced in Spanish with English subtitles. One exception is their annual Pastorela. Conceived and directed by Patricio Villareal, La Pastorela 2013 engaged the Austin community in a way that is rarely experienced elsewhere in the City. At the end of the play, the young and young at heart pummeled a Satan piñata in a joyful community ritual. 

[La Pastorela dates back many centuries, performed during the Christmas season by amateur and professional artists, in theaters and churches, in Mexico and in Mexican communities since the middle part of the last millennium. La Pastorela changes from year to year and from production to production, but at its core its always the same story. It’s the story, usually told with humor and song, of the shepherds who are visited by angels and told to go to Bethlehem and see the newborn Jesus. In the course of the trip to Bethlehem, the devils come and try to trick the shepherds. The details of the story are often changed to reflect the current state of the world.] 

Proyecto Teatro also typically produces work in Spanish. The company’s mission is “to preserve and promote the Latin-American culture through theatre, providing a source of transformative arts education and quality cultural entertainment.” Proyecto Teatro strives to offer theatre artists and audience members a space conducive to human development through the arts. Recently, Proyecto Teatro produced an original piece called Por Los Mojados, which was devised and performed by young people ages seven to seventeen, under the direction of the company’s executive and artistic director, Luis Armando Ordaz Gutiérrez. Combining visceral dialogue, contemporary dance, and comedic elements, Por Los Mojados showed the realities of border crossings from the youth perspective. Working as an ensemble, the young artists courageously implicated the US and Mexican governments in these violent experiences to put truthful narratives on stage. The production is set to tour to Los Angeles this fall.

Teatro Vivo produces and promotes bilingual theatre, and strives to “nurture a window into the community to make theatre accessible to all audiences, especially those underserved in the arts.” Founded by Rupert Reyes and JoAnn Carreon Reyes, Teatro Vivo’s mission is to produce culturally relevant Latina/o theatre that addresses critical social issues such as colorism, citizenship, and cultural fluidity. Teatro Vivo serves the community by telling stories that positively reflect the Latina/o community and uniquely celebrates the vibrancy of the Latina/o culture. A highlight of Teatro Vivo’s season each year is the Austin Latina/o New Play Festival, produced by Teatro Vivo in collaboration with Scriptworks. Now in its fifth year, the 2015 festival featured three Texas playwrights, Andrew Valdez from Austin, Jelisa Jay Robinson from Houston, and Adriana Garcia from San Antonio. Each playwright was selected through a blind panel and then given over a month to work with a dramaturg and develop their play. The process included auditions, a week of rehearsal, and a staged reading at the MACC followed by a post-show discussion. Teatro Vivo always offers these discussions as a mode of community engagement through which audiences affect the shape that each new play takes. Based on what they have discovered throughout the festival, each of the playwrights has expressed their desire to continue their own play development process.

ZACH Theatre, a historically white institution, recently began consistently staging plays with Latina/o themes, bodies, and characters. In collaboration with Teatro Vivo, ZACH is producing Latina/o works *through their Theatre for Families program. Cenicienta, a bilingual production for young audiences based on Cinderella, features a strong-minded Latina more concerned with becoming a writer than marrying a prince. Written and devised by two artists from Austin, Rupert Reyes (Teatro Vivo) and Caroline Reck (Glass Half Full Theatre), Cenicienta uses object puppetry to tell a new Cinderella story. Cenicienta marks the second collaboration between Teatro Vivo and ZACH Theatre.

Educational institutions in Austin have also begun to produce more Latina/o theatre. The University of Texas at Austin Department of Theatre & Dance produced Esperanza Rising in 2015, though their 2014 production of In The Heights faced challenges of representation in casting which led to student protests. Austin Community College also recently produced GUAPA by Caridad Svich. The value of representation of Latina/o stories on the stage is trickling down to the high schools throughout the state. Edinburg High School’s production of Zoot Suit from the Rio Grande Valley landed at the UIL state meet at UT Austin a few years ago, a grand and influential state theatre festival competition. Donna High School brought their production of blu by Tejana playwright Virgina Grise to the state meet this year.

As Austin continues to produce a diverse range of Latina/o stories in a variety of venues, we are hopeful that each company and artist gains more support and continues collaborations that engage deeply with the community. In addition to the theatre companies and educational institutions producing Latina/o theatre, several independent artists known on the national Latina/o theatre scene call Austin home, like Amparo Garcia-Crow, Adrian Villegas, and Raul Garza. New work is consistently generated in Austin and spread throughout the nation.

Through a newly founded theatre collective in Austin, TIA: Teatro In Austin, we hope to continue the dialogue about how each of these works is in conversation with one another and with the current national Latina/o theatre community’s momentum. Austin Latina/o theatre companies and artists are tenacious and eager to share their stories with diverse audiences far and wide.

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“AUSTIN THEATER TROUPE RECOGNIZED
FOR PLAY ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION”
by Marlon Sorto 

[Marlon Sorto’s article about Proyecto Teatro’s winning a local theater award was posted on the website of the Austin American-Statesman on 4 September 2016; it was updated on 25 September 2018.]

When the Latino kids in the theatre company Proyecto Teatro debuted their first play “Por los Mojados” in March, they aimed to expose Austin audiences to some of the not-so-well-known history of illegal immigration from Latin America to the United States.

They did not expect that many months and performances later they’d be nominated for five B. Iden Payne Awards, which recognize exceptional theatrical performance, production, and design in Austin.

Proyecto Teatro, a local organization which promotes Latino culture through theatre in Spanish, also plans to start a tour to perform this show across the country. The youth company is mostly made up of Latino kids 9 to 17 years old.

The Payne Awards nominations committee includes local theater performers, producers and advocates and nominated the play in the youth category for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Direction in Theatre. The production also was nominated for Outstanding Original Script, Outstanding Choreography and Outstanding Cast.

The awards ceremony will be held Oct. 26 [2016] at the Rollins Studio Theatre in the Long Center. The troupe will tour with the play across the country, beginning in Nov. 19 in Austin and before visiting cities such as San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, El Paso, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami.

“We are very happy to help change the perception about the Hispanic community here in Austin and in the United States,” said Luis Ordaz, executive and artistic director of Proyecto Teatro. Ordaz also wants to submit the play to the Festival Cervantino in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2016, he said.

“Por los Mojados,” which combines theater performance in Spanish with English surtitles, dance and video, was inspired by the border crisis in 2014. More than 60,000 unaccompanied minors entered illegally into the United States, escaping violence and gang threats in their home countries in Central America, said Ordaz.

The actors spent several months researching and writing the script, a process guided by Ordaz, he said.

The title of the production, “Por Los Mojados” — which translates to “For the Wetbacks” — aims to reclaim a derogatory term by reflecting the tough experiences and raw stories of Latino undocumented immigrants, Ordaz said. With this production, the ensemble has the opportunity to “highlight the work of Latinos and show that we are not (all) ‘criminals and rapists’ as a politician said recently, but a community which has a rich culture and the same artistic potential as Anglos.”

Ordaz referred to comments made by presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The show also challenges audiences, explained Ordaz, especially when it describes some darker passages of history, such as the Inquisition in Colonial Latin America and United States intervention through policies like the Truman Doctrine, which critics say was the beginning of a long process by which the U.S. increasingly played the role of world police force.

[With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972; 33rd President of the United States: 1945-53) established that the United States would provide political, military, and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces.]

“Although we are very young, we are professional actors and we have worked a lot under our director to create a great script about this very sensitive and controversial issue,” actress Briana Campos said.

"Elder Dramaturgy"

by Carlyle Brown 

[The website HowlRound (https://howlround.com/) states that it “is a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide that amplifies progressive, disruptive ideas about the art form and facilitates connection between diverse practitioners.

[“We envision a theatre field where resources and power are shared equitably in all directions, contributing to a more just and sustainable world.”

[The site also asserts: “The article is just the start of the conversation—we want to know what you think about this subject, too!  HowlRound is a space for knowledge-sharing, and we welcome spirited, thoughtful, and on-topic dialogue (Comments Policy | HowlRound Theatre Commons).”

[“Elder Dramaturgy]” was posted on 7 March 2023 at Elder Dramaturgy | HowlRound Theatre Commons.]

The journey of the play We Take Care Of Our Own by Zainabu Jallo began in the Summer of 2018 when I convened four African and four African American playwrights for a monthlong residency of the experimental Cultural Diaspora Project at the Camargo Foundation [https://camargofoundation.org/programs/cultural-diaspora-program/] in the town of Cassis in the south of France to explore their craft, their voices, and their African-ness in a beautiful Mediterranean environment without the white, Western gaze. The project supports established and mid-career playwrights from the African Diaspora for whom their Afro-Atlantic identity is an influence and a factor in their craft, the content they create, their thinking, and their world view.

Zainabu Jallo was one of the African residents. A true child of the African Diaspora, born in Nigeria of a Nigerian father and a mother with Brazilian roots, she refers to herself as a rolling stone, living in different cities on different continents, calling five cities her home. She lives and actively participates in the here and there of a diasporic condition. A playwright, poet, and scholar with her doctoral research in the study of diasporic consciousness with a special interest in the intersections of theatre and spiritual performance, she is a poster child for what we are exploring in the Cultural Diaspora Project. In our initial engagement, as curator of the project, I asked Zainabu what would she be working on over the course of the residency. She answered that she intended to focus on her research. I responded impolitely and half kiddingly that we didn’t bring her to Camargo for research and contemplation, but to write. We were looking for our shared work to be the center of our conversations. Without any rebuttal Zainabu replied, “Oh, okay.” What I had not realized at the time was that in part her acquiescence to me was an African’s cultural deference to an elder; deference to my age.

The play that Ms. Jallo penned, We Take Care of Our Own, is a tale of migration and aging in the diaspora. Three elderly gentlemen in the twilight of their lives find themselves in a lavish nursing home somewhere in Europe poring over their existential anxieties. Moon-So, an eighty-nine-year-old South Korean filmmaker obsessed with his unfinished documentary on dragonflies; Youssouf, aged eighty-nine, an African astrophysicist waiting approval of the naming of a star he discovered, Khadidatou, after the only woman he had ever loved and left in his homeland of Touba; and Bajran, from the Balkans, a former chemist who worked in the Albert Hoffman lab synthesizing LSD and who now, at the age of ninety-one, wants to be baptized again. Away from family and homeland in their twilight years they are all wondering, how the hell did we get here? I was immediately attracted to this play, to its use of language—playful, poetic, percussive—its slightly heightened nature, all of which to my ear contributed to the African-ness of the play. It is the kind of play I like: theatrical, authentic, grounded in simplicity, its themes relevant, with something to say. It makes you think and causes you to wonder. It’s a good play.

The following summer, 2019, in partnership with the Camargo Foundation and the Playwrights’ Center of Minneapolis, I selected three plays from the summer before to be workshopped and have staged readings at the Playwrights’ Center in the first ever Afro-Atlantic Playwright Festival. One of the plays was We Take Care of Our Own and I was its director. The first and perhaps most singular challenge was casting this three-character play with age-appropriate actors. While memory wasn’t an issue in preparing for a script-in-hand reading, I wondered if we could find three ethnically distinct actors beyond their mid-seventies who were still working.

Locally we had Richard Ooms, who at seventy-seven years old at the time was perfect for Bajran, who is either Albanian or Kosovan. His acting career began at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in 1970. In 1971 he became a founding member of John Houseman’s the Acting Company and toured in repertory for eight seasons. He was a member of the Guthrie company from 1981 through 2013.

But for the characters Moon-So, Asian, and Youssouf, Black, there were no age-appropriate actors in the local pool in Minneapolis, so we cast nationally. From California we were grateful to enlist Adolphus Ward to play Youssouf. A stage actor for more than thirty years, Adolphus had been a frequent visitor to the Twin Cities, often playing the elderly gentlemen in August Wilson plays produced by Penumbra Theatre Company. The Japanese-American actor, Sab Shimono, also from California, came to read the South Korean character Moon-So. Sab’s experience ranged from Broadway and off-Broadway to regional theatres, a two-year residency with La MaMa, as well as film and television. Both Sab and Adolphus were in their eighties. They were an interesting group of actors to have in a room together.

The first collective realization in our first rehearsal was they all had been old guys in all sorts of plays, but never old guys in an old guy play. This realization brought to the surface the fact that, in America at any rate, narratives about the elderly where their concerns are center stage are rare. Perhaps they thought they had found age-appropriate roles to display their artistry. Perhaps they found a way to face old men’s fears of being forgotten. In rehearsing We Take Care of Our Own, the fiction and the reality faded into one. The characters and the actors shared the same existential anxieties, the frailness, the fragility, the uncertainly, the finality of growing old. On the other hand, old age acquires a wisdom that is wrought from having lived long enough to see how things have played out, and a watchful humbleness when you look around and see who’s left. From the first read through they knew the play completely and embraced the poetic, ethereal, comic, and tragic world of this play about three old men facing the inevitable abyss. Among them there was a comradery particular to old men sharing their ailments, their aches and pains, and confessing the mechanical replacements of their body parts, always with humor and true sincerity. They worked leisurely as if preparing to go the distance. Nothing was fraught or overstated. They acted with the confidence won from more than sixty years of stage time between them. A great cast and a great script, our staged reading was well received and confirmed what we had expected, that We Take Care of Our Own was a very effective, evocative, and moving piece of theatre.

The first Afro-Atlantic Playwright Festival was something of a success and as a result the Cultural Diaspora Playwright Project was invited to bring the three plays to New York University’s Tisch School of Drama to be performed by students and directed by alumni. The other two plays were Deux Femmes on the Edge de la Revolution Part 2, the second installment in France-Luce Benson’s epic historical trilogy of the Haitian Revolution, and Canoes by veteran Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan, a study of three young Black women coming of age in Kwame Nkrumah’s newly independent Ghana who would become literary giants Efua Sutherland, Maryse Conde’, and Maya Angelou. The three young acting students who portrayed their elderly characters in We Take Care Of Our Own rendered the play well enough. Their director wisely discouraged them from acting old and to just do the scenes and reveal the play. They were fine young actors and they did a fine job, but just like the songs says, “Ain’t nothing like the real thing baby, ain’t nothing like the real thing.”

Somewhere in the next year, 2020, Adolphus Ward who played Youssouf passed on to the ancestors. On hearing that sad news, one could not help but note that his character, Youssouf, also passes away in the play.

In the interim I had received a Mellon Foundation National Playwright Residency Program fellowship with Illusion Theater in Minneapolis. In my statement of artistic intent, one of the things I proposed was to produce and direct We Take Care of Our Own. Producing directors Michael Robins and Bonnie Morris liked the idea. They liked the play. They wanted to have a public reading, but COVID was raging, so we did it online. Richard Ooms returned to us with his deep, resonant, baritone voice. Glenn Kubota who played Moon-So would come to us from California having played across mediums on stage and in film and television. And veteran actor Arthur French, an original founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company, played Youssouf. At eighty-nine years old, he was the same age as his character. I hadn’t prepared or really thought about how we would support an elder actor, much less an octogenarian, even though I was approaching that threshold myself, but Arthur had troubles with technology. Not only did he have troubles with technology, he had a fear of it that put him at an unhappy disadvantage and filled him with anxiety. He was home alone on his son’s computer. He lived with his son, but his son was at work when we worked and with the rest of us in California and Minneapolis, just talking heads on a computer screen, there was no direct way for us to help him. A consummate professional, Arthur became angry with himself, angry that he felt himself not prepared to do his job as an actor. The worst of it was when he couldn’t get his microphone to work. We somehow muddled through it. Arthur’s son, the playwright Arthur French III, took off from work to help his father with the technology and to put him at ease. In the end Arthur took on the character of Youssouf, the astrophysicist awash in technology, and rendered him with authenticity and depth. He lifted the character Youssouf off of the page and breathed him onto life in a play where his life is fading away. Four months later, on 24 July 2021, Arthur French himself, after suffering a stroke, in the uncontestable destiny of old men, faded away into the arms of heaven.

As we prepare for its premiere later this year in the fall of 2023 at Illusion Theater in Minneapolis, we are mindful and thoughtful of how to support our elderly actors: ear prompters, more rehearsal time, people to help them run their lines . . . understudies? Perhaps the work and doing what one loves is enough. To carry on to the very end a life of purpose. To use our art form to attempt to make sense of the incomprehensible.

I don’t quite know what to make of the journey of We Take Care of Our Own thus far, or how its author Zainabu Jallo at thirty-two years of age could possibly know such things, other than her own poetic and empathic imagination. “I have a specialty of love for the elderly,” she says, “old men especially,” as she demonstrates so clearly in her beautiful new play.

[Carlyle Brown (b. 1948) is the Playwright-in-Residence at Illusion Theater through the National Playwright Residency Program, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.]