In other words, instead of becoming the butt of some joke, Dolores Prida decided to rewrite the punch line. In every culture, the history of live theater has seen fools used for liberation, for exorcism, for empowerment--but never more effectively than when they are equally focused on tickling our ribs till they rattle. That was always foremost on the agenda when the author, as a journalist and a new American, began to work with the Lower East Side collective Teatro Popular in New York City in 1976. Mexican, Cuban, and South American theater, she said, was at the time either a brainlessly entertaining excuse for the wealthy to wear their silk outfits, or an absolutist, somewhat gloomy tirade by the politically and economically dispossessed against the status quo. Prida wanted to fuse the best elements of the two, while still maintaining a leftist bias toward sympathizing with those who have been made to feel lesser--often, if only by implication--because they are different from the dominant cultural image.
One of the first products of her work with Teatro Popular was 1977's Beautiful Señoritas, in which she beat George C. Wolfe to the conceptual punch. Both her musical and his oft-produced comedy The Colored Museum apply the same framework: A poker-faced host guides the audience through a revue of racial stereotypes to reveal how pebbles of truth can sediment into great big boulders that crush individuality. While usually fairly broad in execution, if brought off with a keen awareness of how folks too often cooperate with their own oppression, the shows ask the interrelated questions that make political art more than just an exercise in finger-pointing; when What have they turned us into? is coupled with What have we allowed ourselves to become?, then the theater keeps everyone on their feet.
The young Latino company Cara Mia has given Beautiful Señoritas its area premiere. What's most telling is how, 23 years later, the show has not aged a bit. Flip through The Colored Museum today, and you'll encounter African-American archetypes that are no longer as familiar (and thus less trenchant) as they were when the show was first staged. Disconcertingly recognizable and immediate are the caricatures in Prida's satire. It offers a series of musical vignettes played out during a beauty pageant in which a master of ceremonies (Frank Mendez) parades four "lovely Latinas" (Dolores Godinez, Christina Vela, Marinca Calo-Oy, Marco Rodriguez) complete with sashed titles such as "Miss Banana Republic" and, in one case, a Styrofoam headdress that says "We love you, Elián!" Mendez plays multiple roles, including a vicious father who rejects his newborn daughter and a clueless, sombrero-wearing Mexicano, while the women interact with him in variations of maid, Madonna, and whore. Whether sweeping up after him or begging on their knees to be taken back, these actors run through the hit list from servile to slutty. (Rodriguez makes an especially fetching señorita in a performance reminiscent of Scott Thompson's Spanish film siren Francesca Fiore, alternating between romantic desperation, foolish pride, and hair-flipping.)
The playwright has fashioned plenty of opportunities for them all to sparkle with the same cheerful tackiness as Duncan Burns' metallic-wrapped runway set. Unfortunately, director Marisela Barrera has not quite tightened and tuned everybody into the same band of jesters. Part of it has to do with Frank Mendez as the master of ceremonies. The guy can mug without annoying the hell out of you, a rare trait essential to the tone that has been established here, but he has not been guided to conduct the beauty pageant the way, well, a beauty pageant host should. Mendez, brandishing a foil-wrapped mike as glittery as the covered Undermain pillars that surround him, doesn't step up to fill in the pauses between the skits and caricatures with vaudevillian flourish. He is, frankly, just another one of the ensemble members here, and that sets a problem for pacing. As written, the character, although a patriarchal clown, still needs to control the show, to keep it "moving right along," as Ed McMahon would say. Sometimes you forget that you're supposed to be watching a beauty pageant, even if it's a satirical one. Because Barrera, through Mendez, sometimes takes her hands off the wheel, the other performers are left to offer disjointed songs and monologues.
As important a revival as Beautiful Señoritas is for this city (and the country, for that matter) at a moment when Hispanics are asserting their influence more than ever in the economy and matters of public policy, I'm not sure that director Marisela Barrera has let the material cook quite long enough. She co-directed Octavio Solis' Dreamlandia with Richard Hamburger at the Dallas Theater Center and wrote, directed, and starred in an equally confrontational one-act--los de abajo have nowhere left to fall--at the Festival of Independent Theatres, so it's curious that the political edge seems to have been blunted in Prida's show in favor of a goofier, more Fox Network/WB kind of approach. The gutsy ethnic partisanship surfaces constantly on the page, but the actors tend to go for the easy laughs more than an informed chuckle triggered by all the layers of the playwright's ideas. That they usually succeed means you'll have a good time for your ticket money, but you might leave the theater believing half of Prida's mission remains unfulfilled.
As a theater critic, I don't get as many letters to the editor as other writers. But the silence (with the exception of one e-mail from a local actor) was deafening about my angry outburst at Dallas writer and Teatro Dallas member Valerie Brogan over a letter she sent me concerning leotards, homosexuality, New Yorkers, Southern Gothic, book-of-the-month clubs, and former DTC director Adrian Hall.
A couple days ago, Valerie and I met over a lunch of gumbo and fried oysters and discovered that we agreed about far more than we disagreed: Multiculturalism has deteriorated from its original best intentions; theater should strive for the universal no matter what ethnic flavor it's served in; casts composed entirely of one gender or the other can be stifling; 98 percent of the human population looks awful in tights, etc. Then we got to The Letter, the one crucial point at which we parted. Brogan insists she didn't mean to include me among the ranks of men who write "like bored, gay, white, leotard-wearing, Fireside Theatre-subscribing New Yorkers...who only ever hung out with themselves." Maybe it's the Texas heat, editing a 432-page Best of Dallas issue, or that damned Dr. Laura (at this point in time, we gay men can blame everything from gray chest hairs to shoddy dating material on the good doctor), but I'm still not sure, and am a little sore over the isolation of gay and lesbian adolescents being, in my opinion, glossed over. But Brogan, a PFLAG member, was genuinely concerned and even apologetic that, in her estimation, I'd misinterpreted her sentiments as homophobic. And I, fixated on a couple of paragraphs, didn't remember she'd written, "And no, you cannot print a word of this letter" until after I fired cannons in my column.
Our meal included the exchange of some really tasty gossip. When people pick up dish, that usually means they've laid down their arms. Brogan herself saw no point in addressing the issue again in print, but since this is a pretty small theater town, and I will be encountering her work and encountering people who read the piece (very likely, at the same time), I felt that some clarification of a spat turned public should be noted.
And no, the editors didn't make me. I knew that a meeting and another mention would be inevitable after the vehemence of my statements about Brogan. But one bemused boss did suggest that what I wrote about Brogan last week pretty much killed any chance that I would get another mention on the "Letters to the Editor" page.
Ever.
