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  • Teatro Bravo and remember the Mummers
  • Guillermo Reyes

As I approached middle age, I created Teatro Bravo, with a couple of friends, in Phoenix, Arizona. Age had something to do with it: call it the growing wisdom of a sage, or the middle-aged crisis of a potbellied playwright. I took up running, lost thirty pounds, and went to work on the creation of a theatre company that actually allowed Latino people to be seen onstage, as creative artists. Imagine that. I'm now the fit, trim, and muscular artistic director of Teatro Bravo—and sagacious in a dramaturgical sense as well, but we'll keep the bragging to a minimum. Let's just say that hard labor sometimes pays off. (In the American theatre, sometimes it's also hard to tell why.)

I'm a person first, that's what I try to tell anyone who cares about the still-living though struggling American theatre; the art follows the person, and out of life's rhythms the art emerges. The Ethnic Issue, the Latino Issue follows you along, too, along with your genes, like a curse, it seems. I would have, on second thought, created an entirely "unethnic" Teatro Bravo, but the American mainstream mentality doesn't seem to leave too much room for irony and nuance on this issue. Most of the work I yearned to write or direct would be Latino-themed, so, yes, I opted for a Latino theatre company, a teatro,with a rasquachi bent and minimal bank account to keep things humble. I was reacting to the compartmentalization of the Latino entity in this country. That is, for every mainstream theatre that sees US Latinos as a so-called funding opportunity for that Special Project that brings in extra cash, others see us as a nuisance. Latinos don't come to our theatre, or we don't have enough Latino actors in town to do Latino plays. We've all heard those lines. In fact, we've heard them right here in Arizona, in high places. So my friends and colleagues Trino Sandoval and Daniel Enrique Perez decided that, in Phoenix, with more than a third of its population of the Latino bent, we could actually do Latino-themed plays, and people would come, driving a stake into the heart of those dated assumptions. We built it. They came, to see [End Page 474] just about everything. The occasional flop was made up for by genuine hits, including our local renderings of early Culture Clash comedies such as A Bowl of Beings and The Mission; the bitchy, witty Spanish play Entre Mujeres; my own working-class romantic comedy, Miss Consuelo, andmy more scandalously sexy Places to Touch Him; a Spanish version of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues; and a docudrama by ASU playwright alumnus Jose Casas about undocumented workers and the attitudes of people in Arizona about them. We're here, alive and kicking, and preparing Neruda's version of Romeo y Julieta. The Bard in Spanish. We can do that, and we do.

Let me stop, therefore, to remember the Mummers. In his book of collected essays, Where I Live, Tennessee Williams reminisces about the Mummers, a St. Louis community theatre that allowed him to write plays in his youth, before he went off on "that Streetcar named success," which provided him with cash but nearly bankrupted his heart and soul. The theatre was "the open sky" of his youth, and, in these essays, he recalled it with poignancy. Unlike Williams, who could only look back upon youth, I have sought to create Teatro Bravo as my own attempt to cling to youth, to my own open sky, if you will, as I wonder how else to age a little less gracefully and more unpredictably. The fact that I ran three half-marathons in the past year has also contributed to my need to feel I need not surrender to the conventional wisdom that theatre must be a big, corpulent, and corporate entity responding to subscribers in business suits. Can I get away with it? After doing plays for Actors Theatre of Louisville, where the generous contributors have managed to create a...

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