Los Illegals (review)

Los Illegals, the inaugural production of Cornerstone Theater's planned three-year cycle of plays based on the question of justice, is also the inaugural production of the Los Angeles–based theater's new artistic director, Michael John Garcés. Both of these factors signal a significant shift in the history of this multi-ethnic ensemble, which rightfully prides itself in its mission statement on "making theater with and for people of many ages, cultures, and levels of theatrical experience, and building bridges between and within diverse communities in our home city of Los Angeles and nationwide."

For its first twenty years, Cornerstone's artistic director was the visionary Bill Rauch, whose talents and contributions are documented in Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater, Sonja Kuftinec's important study of Cornerstone's history. The arrival of Garcés provides Cornerstone the opportunity to build on the artistic legacy that Rauch and his co-founders established since their first productions during the late 1980s. The first move marking this change is the justice-play cycle, an ambitious and timely effort to interrogate the concept of justice in contemporary US culture. For this project, Cornerstone has commissioned five world-premiere productions, each exploring how justice functions in society. Following its standard process of outreach and collaboration, Cornerstone plans to work with communities that have been created through—or disrupted by—laws surrounding illegal immigration, reproductive rights, incarceration, and the environment. The series will culminate in a bridge play that will bring each of these particular issues and their collaborators together. However, unlike earlier projects where Cornerstone identifies specific communities and collaboratively stages the group's particular concerns, the justice cycle inverts this logic by identifying the issues first before seeking out the communities formed around them.

Los Illegals, which tackles the contentious debates around immigration through the prism of day-laborers in Los Angeles, is loosely inspired by Lope de Vega's classic play of class revolt, Fuenteovejuna(1612), in which a Spanish village collectively stands up against tyrannical injustice and abuse. In Lope's play, the village members kill a military commander who has tormented the community. When the royal magistrate arrives to investigate the murder, the community refuses to identify the culprits even in the face of torture; instead, they claim it was "Fuente Ovejuna," the name of their village, who is responsible for the death.

Garcés's play updates the theme of collective political resistance through a unified voice in order to comment upon the social inequities, legal labyrinths, and dehumanizing conditions that undocumented workers and illegal immigrants face in Southern California. The play begins with scenes dramatizing two separate attempts at border-crossing. One young man full of energy and hope sets out to cross the southwestern desert from Mexico to the United States and join his brother, who is already living in Los Angeles; the second migration involves a young Guatemalan woman who is inhumanely stacked in an overcrowded refrigerated truck with innumerable others. These episodic solo vignettes, often no longer than a few minutes, accentuate the hardship of the border as they remind us of the lives behind the statistics. The play's main drama, however, takes place in the surrounds of Giant Hardware, a Home Depot–like business that attracts day-laborers searching for work.

As the audience arrives, we are led into the fenced-in parking lot of the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, which will serve as the main stage for the production. Picnic tables have been set up throughout the space and the action unfolds among them. A cast of nearly thirty professional and amateur performers, many of whom are seated alongside the audience, begins to dramatize the primary story. Tensions have arisen between the regulated day-laborers, who assemble daily at the sanctioned community center and are organized by the community advocates and business management, and the newly arrived immigrants, who for any number of reasons choose to assemble outside of Giant Hardware's...