Review/Reflection #2: Food 4 thought?
Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad at ELAC
The first time I heard of Luis Alfaro I was taking a playwriting class at Casa 0101 back in 2013. I learned he was adapting the Greek tragedies into an East L.A. context, but I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. At the time, I had never read a Greek tragedy, nor was I born and raised in East L.A. I did however briefly live in City Terrace when I was younger, and lived in East L.A. with my partner from 2011-2014. Nevertheless, I was aware of the perception and history of East L.A., and during that playwriting class at Casa 0101, a seed was planted about the playwright’s responsibility when it comes to stereotypes and representation. It is a seed that has been germinating in my mind ever since.
Fast forward to 2015, I’m attending the University of California, Riverside to earn my B.A. in Theatre, Film, and Digital Production and my family and I are living in the old family housing army barracks on campus. I had the privilege of seeing Luis Alfaro perform his solo piece St. Jude at the Culver Center for the Arts in Downtown Riverside. The performance tripped me out because he went into a pentecostal trance like state and started speaking in tongues with red lights illuminating a bloodletting ritual. It was pretty dope actually, and reminded me of a youtube video I saw of his earlier work “Orphan of Aztlan”. During this performance the question of stereotyping or representation never entered my mind. Perhaps it is the nature of a solo performance, but I took what the performer was saying as honest, authentic, and truthful.
Fast forward to 2019, I’m the Marketing Fellow at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco and I had the honor of actually being in the room with Alfaro. I served as his production assistant for A.C.T.’s New Strand Festival where he developed and workshopped an early draft of his play The Travelers. I was inspired by his work ethic. At the time he was gearing up for his production of Mojada at the Public Theatre, yet he still brought in new pages to the rehearsals like it was nothing. He would rewrite scenes during breaks, and even took time to conduct a playwriting masterclass that I attended.
I remember it was raining, and we shared an Uber from the rehearsal space on 30 Grant Avenue to where the master class was to be held on Market Street. We briefly talked about Southern California, the San Gabriel Valley, and to my surprise he even knew about St. Anthony’s, the catholic K-8th grade school I attended. At the end of the master class, I summoned up the courage and asked him about his views on stereotyping. I wish I could remember that he said something profound about it, but I think what it boiled down too was that each writer has to define what stereotyping means to them and then be aware if they are intentionally perpetuating it or not.
Later that season, the Magic Theatre in San Francisco produced a 10 year anniversary revival of Oedipus El Rey, and I was excited to finally check out the Magic Theatre and this adaptation of a Greek tragedy that I heard so much about for the past five years. Unfortunately, my expectations were undermined because my partner and I arrived a little late for the performance, it was still in previews, and when I looked around the audience, I noticed that my partner and I might be the only Southern Californian Mexican Americans in the room. As the play progressed, that question about stereotyping began to surface, and I got self-conscious sitting in my seat next to my partner, wondering if affluent Bay Area theater goers from the Marina/Pacific Heights neighborhood thought all people from East L.A. were like the characters they saw on stage. Did they think me and my partner had gang tattoos or that we have been to prison or had family members at San Quentin in the North Bay?
I left the theatre that day with a bad taste in my mouth. I also felt conflicted and confused because here I am, a playwright from Southern California, whose uncle was in fact murdered by his own gang, whose uncle was in fact in correctional facilities, and the plays that I write, especially those in my “Rhino Cycle” revolve around similar subjects and themes that Alfaro touches on, so am I stereotyping too? Is this the audience that I am writing for?
Fast forward to 2021, I'm pursuing my M.F.A. degree in playwriting from the University of California, Riverside, and during my first year, I take Dr. Erith Jaffe-Berg’s Advanced Play Analysis class. I had to read and analyze both Oedipus Rex and Oedipus El Rey, and after reading Oedipus Rex for the first time, I thought it was dope on its own, and did not understand the allure to adapt it to an “East L.A.” context specifically.
When I read Oedipus El Rey, I had the chance to slow down the plot and closely analyze the script. I tried to articulate, with evidence from the text, why this adaptation and the production I experienced in the Bay Area felt…inauthentic. I discovered the script had only a sprinkle of Spanish words that any one who took Spanish as a second language class in high school could understand, and concluded that when the play was first produced in 2008, perhaps the audience that Alfaro had in mind was the average american theater goer at the time: predominantly white middle class middle aged female identifying subscribers.
So fast forward to April 2024. I got invited to the production of Alfaro’s Electricidad at East Los Angeles College by professor, and director of the piece, Cristina Frias. I’ve been adjuncting with East Los Angeles College since February of this year for their Early College Program, and Cristina has been gracious enough to take me under her wing of sorts. I was hesitant to attend this production at first but ultimately my genuine curiosity and the gentle nudge by Cristina pushed me to purchase a ticket.
When I pulled into the new-ish ELAC parking structure on April 20th 2024, an older gentleman was randomly playing mariachi music on his trumpet. A speaker sat on the hood of his car, and he played along with the tunes, blaring his brass instrument throughout the parking structure spilling out all over to the street.
After a couple of minutes or so of listening, I headed inside the theatre and took my seat. I ran into an old friend Jayme Mayorquin from Casa 0101 and a new friend, the dramaturge for my KCACTF play South Hope St. I said hi to them both, took my seat, and noticed that a majority of the audience were probably southern Californian Mexican Americans. Chicano/Lowrider/Motown Oldie songs played on the speaker during the pre show, and an actor on stage would laugh menacingly between songs. The lights faded, and the show was underway. As the play progressed, it became evident to me that the cast, director, and the production took their time and care to honor not only the words in the script, but also the world in which this play takes place. Then, out of nowhere, an off-handed one liner of a joke about “waiting in the line of Food 4 Less” landed, and a majority of the house began to laugh.
The laughter in the audience for that one joke reverberated in my mind for days, like that old man who was playing trumpet in the parking structure. I wondered if this joke would have landed in the Bay Area? A quick google search will prove that there are actually no Food 4 Less grocery stores up there. The closest one is in Fairfield California, which opened in October 2023, I’m sure because there has been a growing population of Latinx folks in that city since 2012.
Why do I believe this is significant in my search to try and identify where that bad taste in my mouth came from when I watched the Magic Theatre production of Oedipus El Rey in 2019?
On the one hand, if an audience member from the Bay Area, or anywhere in the country for that matter, has never experienced walking into a Food 4 Less, and waiting in line, would they be capable of fully understanding the cultural context of the world of the play?
And if they are not capable of fully understanding the cultural context of the world of the play, would they be capable of empathizing with the characters and their circumstances?
On the other hand, I've never experienced being a sanitation worker in Pittsburgh in 1957, “I am not prince hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Yet why do I empathize with Troy Maxson and Hamlet? Do I think everyone in Pittsburgh is like the characters in Fences? No. Do I think everyone from Denmark is like the characters in Hamlet? Maybe, just kidding, No. So then what the hell am I trying to say?
I think what I am trying to say is that ultimately, not only is it important for “representation” to be on stage and backstage, but also that “representation” needs to be reflected in the audience too, because seeing a play at East Los Angeles College about East L.A. is a totally different experience than seeing a play about East L.A. at the Magic Theatre in the Marina/Pacific Heights neighborhood. Or perhaps what I’m really trying to say is that maybe folks just need to walk in to a Food 4 Less and order some carne asada. :)
I would love to know what you all think. Feel free to answer anyone of the questions down below in the comment section and let's talk about it.
Have you ever wrestled with stereotyping?
What is your definition of it?
Do you think the industrial regional theatre complex ruined community and culturally specific plays by promoting and pushing the same shows all over the country?
For example, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat?
Sweat on Broadway is, I'm sure, a vastly different experience than Sweat produced in Reading, Pennsylvania?
Am I tripping? Does any of this matter?
As always thank you for your continued support, interest, and encouragement. For some fun, I would love see the results of the poll below.
You've got to give it up for researching not only the locations of Food 4 Less in California, but WHEN they opened ha!
I think the question of stereotyping and regionally specific theater is an interesting problem to try to solve at the playwright level. With all of that heavy lifting trying to balance the experiences of characters, but also making them unique makes me picture the playwright trying to solve the problem by lifting a stack of heavy objects from the bottom. It's heavier and harder to try to make your play "safe" and "good-intentions proof" for a process months or years down the line. But that's often how I feel when editing.
I'd be really interested in reading a "best case scenario script". One with all of the jokes and references and candid stage directions and rough draft ideas and harsh character descriptions that you could give to a hypothetical best collaborator under the best circumstances vs the stand-alone polished script you feel no reasonable person could misunderstand and is lean and concise and can speak for itself. Especially in a play analysis class (like you what you had with seeing multiple productions' interpretations).
Also- I remember that play analysis class! Luis Alfaro's plays always seemed like such a perfect fit for that class and reading them in conversation with the ancient Greek play.
Hi Aaron. I often write about Jewish subjects and people, and I try to identify what is distinctive about them--about me. It isn't stereotyping, I think, but recognizing what and how our identities project to others, even unconsciously to ourselves. Obviously there is blatant stereotyping, intentional on the part of the writer, and maybe mistaken as authentic by well-meaning but uniformed audiences, as parodied pretty hilariously in "American Fiction." But those same audiences, I do think, come to plays like yours or Alfaro's to learn and broaden their own understandings. If we only write for our own tribe, we're preaching to the choir. Isn't part of the point of what we write, to reach those who aren't from our "world?"