 I love that the Fox News headline you mentioned, and we mean it this time because that sort of self-acknowledgement is also sort of a threat seems to be this sort of as an awareness that like, and because sometimes it's spoken in marketing terms, sometimes it's spoken in demographic terms, sometimes it's spoken in electoral terms, but this sort of insistence on Latinos matter because they're new, is an insidious way of forcing ritualizing the amnesia around Latino-enduring presence. I would say to answer the question about the theatrical roots, right, where have we come? This has been something we see all the time, and especially when we looked at, you know, the groundbreaking work of El Teatro Campesino, all of you know, trying to chart it back to European roots, which yes, there was influence, right, but that the work there was influenced by the Mexican garba and that there are roots in our root cultures that are theatrical, right, that we don't come from a purely European theatrical tradition. And I think that's part of the dynamic as well that ignoring this cultural amnesia to ignore our own performance traditions in terms of music, performance dance, you know, all of these theatrical roots, so I think that's another issue as well. And then the only thing I want to say about the time article is like, we mean it too. And I think it's an incredibly important question for us to absorb and be conscious of and push back against, because I know in our theater communities, 20 years ago, the conversation we would meet with large mainstream Lord theaters would be like, when are you going to produce us? When are you going to produce us? And now when you look around the country, you look at the Latino theater commons, howl around the National Latino Theater Alliance and the regional alliances that are focusing, we've stopped, we're pushing back on that question and we're not dwelling on what are you going to produce us because we now have a vibrancy longstanding tradition, it just hasn't always been acknowledged within the mainstream media. So I think it's a really important quote for us to absorb and have it forefront, but also to have us acknowledge what is happening in our communities with the work taking place that we're doing here and now. Yeah, and I think that it's really important I think as arts, art makers and art advocates in this room to sort of when we hear this rhetoric or perhaps we're encountering an institution, whether it be an academic or a cultural institution who's asking questions using the spring, you know, sort of saying we're interested like the numbers. We want to make sure we reach out is to approach it as a wedge, not a wave, right? Like don't try to ride the wave because the wave is going to crash and it's going to go and you're going to be left behind, but it can be the way in. It can be the way in, but I think it has to be, we have to use the rhetoric of that very carefully because it's not rhetoric that is designed for unduring presence. And so, but if it does create a wedge for us to be able to have the conversation, to make the claim for the speaker series or to make the claim for the cycle in the civic event in town, then by all means use it, but to understand it, to use it strategically and not, because I think part of the reason I began to think about it is my hopes had been dashed before. You know, I thought it was about to change and then it didn't, you know. And so this kind of be like there's something insidious about the language that we want to use very mindfully if we do use it. Absolutely, at the same time being aware of and being conscious of how we can interrupt the very cyclicality of, you know, I think at one point during our earlier conversation, you were mentioning specific headlines that you remember, you know, like from the 70s, from the 80s, like almost like a very precise pattern of like how many years between them. Yeah, I mean, there's a page in my book that sort of, it cost me a lot of money to get this page, so I'm going to use the time. Well, there's four time magazine covers. This one going from Hispanic Americans, soon the greatest majority in 1987, Magnifico, Latino culture breaking out of the barrio, 1999, Ricky Martin, pop, Latin music goes, you know, and then 2012, Latinos will decide the next president. You know, it's always in this anticipatory thing and it's always soon about to. They're about to be really important and all of those coincide with anxieties about like the amnesty moment in the mid 80s or the first concern that 2000 census was going to do the demographic shift 2012, right after that demographic confirmation. You know, these kind of moments of managing this uncertainty of what is the terrain. And the language is the same. And that's why I sort of see it as its own kind of popular performance itself, where it's, you know, it's like it happens. And it's like, okay, we're going to do it. And then what's great is initiatives get established, careers get made, I can't, I mean, if you go through the long arc of mainstream icons, you know, of Latino, like, and so there are, yeah, so, you know, and the question is, what do we as right now, what do we right now have as a, you know, what's going on that's different now? Because I do think there are certain things that are different now. But at the same time, I do think that there are ways in which we are doing something that is different now, that it's not driven by journalistic boilerplate, it's not driven by reactionary discourse. And so I think to be attentive to what we are doing as the Latino, this kind of gathering is important as well. Yeah, I just want to add in terms of, because Brian talked about every 10 years we see this happening, we also need to look at our own plays, our own works of art that address this, right? Time Magazine, Time Magazine, right? The decade of the Hispanic and then the year of the Latino. But I think about like La Víctima, from in Teatro de la Esperanza, who was looking at every 10 years or so, when there is a major economic crisis, then immigrants and particularly Mexican-Americans are deported or scapegoated against, right? And that this was a cycle, and that's a play from the 70s, that was already talking about that cycle from the 1930s. And we still see that cycle happening, it's just shorter and shorter. It's not the luxury of 10 years, it's like every year, you know. Exactly, exactly. So so far, we've been using terms like Latinos, we've been using terms like Hispanic, and even there within the community, there is pushback about the use of terms like that. So when we engage in a conversation about Latino theater, it seems like we should take a moment to parse out what the heck we mean by Latino theater, right? And I think for all of us who are engaged in season selection, for various institutions or as producing artists or as theater makers ourselves, that the only question of what makes a story a Latina-Latino story, right? Is it the identity of its creator, the identity of its writer? Is it its characters or its setting, its language or its dialect, the narrative conventions, its themes, its politics? What does Latina-Latino theater look like? What does it sound like? What does it taste like? Is there an identifiable Latina-Latino performance aesthetic? So when you think about Latina-Latino theater, what comes up for you? For me, it's all those things and then some. I mean, obviously I think about serving our students and nurturing the next generation of Latino theater artists, and so you can't be it if you can't see it. So it's crucial that the playwright themselves identify as Latino. I think about someone like Marie-Erene Fornez and her Hispanic Playwrights Lab, and really she herself would push back against that term, but she also recognized that you can't feed the lifeblood of American theater and the diversity of voices if you're not nurturing Latino theater artists. There has to be a space for the fostering of people who come from that cultural tradition. And I think as a play like Sweat, which many of us just came out of, illustrates the things that are very culturally specific. They speak to us about very universal themes and issues like work and labor. So I think nurturing Latino playwrights is part of nurturing Latino theater. It's how they identify. But when we look at the historical tradition, there are certain aesthetics that come out of it, going back to beyond Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, but looking at El Teatro Campesino and the tradition of Luis Valdez and the use of the act, I think about what we saw at the Carnival 2015 in Chicago. We saw Diane Rodriguez's Sweetheart feel and how within that play she's pressing very contemporary storytelling about a family story, but within it looking at the tradition of the act, and how that feeds the performers that are in this play. So there are, when you look at the histories, there's histories and aesthetics, but I think the building block is the writers themselves and how they're responding to the world and the shaping of their identities. I'm very, in my work, I'm really interested in how Latino theater artists write about issues of violence and trauma, because I don't feel anyone's humanity is fully witnessed until we acknowledge their pain and their stories of trauma and violence. And there's a very particular aesthetics there in the way that the conversations are being staged. So it's a combination of identity themes, but when you look at the history, there are very distinct aesthetics that you can imagine. I think the idea of what does the Latino theater look like? For me, I think that's a question where we can challenge ourselves, right? I think there's an idea of like, okay, brown bodies on stage, but Latinos are, you know, brown, Afro-Latino, Asian, indigenous, European, and that that gives us sort of such a hybridity, but that's not the representation that we see. And I think within our, what Tiffany said, we've been producing, we're sort of pushing against the mainstream, and I think it's a challenge for ourselves that when we produce work to make sure that we are thinking intersectionally and that we are finding ways to include those voices or else we replicate this model of exclusion. And then we only propagate sort of the same kind of look. And then also, I wonder about artists who are Latino, who are working on plays that are not necessarily Latino, but they bring those sensibilities to the piece. So I'm working with director Alejandra Cisneros, who's here. He's a fabulous director. He's working on a play by Madri Sheikhar at the LATC. It's a completely diverse cast. There's a whole monologue in Spanish and it's not translated at all. And so it's beautiful, this sort of cacophony. I think of Latino theater as this cacophony that's just beautiful and that a lot of people don't understand. And I think that that's part of the challenge for us, but also for audiences too, to sort of relinquish a little bit of control and that it's okay to be alienated or to not understand. Yeah, I would agree with everything that's being said. And I think sort of when I try to sort of open up this stuff for myself and my students and others I'm in conversation with, I try to sort of hold myself to the conversation about Latino theater as a tradition, not a genre. You know, this idea that Latino theater making is a complicated, complex, historically situated, culturally specific set of traditions that there's all kinds of conversations like any tradition. It evolves, it's complex. Whereas I think there's often a craving for seek sort of genre hallmarks, right? And at the same time I like to sort of say that like, I think Latino performance makers can introduce a ghost with a lot fewer problems than a lot of, you know, almost any other cultural tradition, any other cultural tradition of playmaking. You got to do a lot of work to set up the ghost. At this point, if it's a Latino world, a ghost or a spirit or a parallel reality, it's okay, we got it. And I do think that there are sort of, just like there is the gesture that I see as one of the hallmarks of the Latino theater tradition, which is the satiric anchored in the after, but other iterations as well, of commenting upon the world as it sees you and then answering back in a sort of a subtle shift like this. And so I think that, and I think that that is very much how Latinos inhabit the category of Latino. They say like, okay, yeah, I'm Latino, I'm also Mexican. Or I'm also like, there's this way of sort of saying, yeah, yeah, Latino, okay, I'm from New Mexico. These kinds of the simultaneity of saying, yeah, that's how you see me, this is who I am. This sort of reciprocal naming is something that I think is also a gesture that, I mean, we saw the knowledge to call out to that in the character of Oscar and sweat today, like the way he names, he sees how he's seen and he answers back in a way that isn't always expected often with the teams of humor or self-awareness. Like I'm telling you, I'm making a joke and I don't expect anybody else to laugh kind of humor, right? And I think that there is, that the fact that a playwright has sort of invested in listening to the works of other writers, that she could tune into that single gesture of Latino theater tradition and use that to anchor some of the cute little moments in her play. I think this is just really an example of how we do have a legible tradition. The problem is, is we're trying to modify us as long as, and that leads to the sort of the use and often unsophisticated delights on cliche. Yeah, so. Exactly. So it sounds like, you know, that simultaneous awareness of, right, like knowing the legacy from which we're drawing at the same time being conscious of how not to be entrapped by it, right? Not to be limited by it, right? At the same time, does that provide opportunities for us to play with that and have that be a platform for something else? Hearing people talk, I was thinking about how important it is to understand that the form of the storytelling, the aesthetics of the storytelling, the form and meaning, I think in any art form, they're always intertwined. I think about Mumia Bujumal when you read his essays, they're like, you know, paragraphs. Well, it's because of his conditions of incarceration and he literally has a few minutes and a phone call to tell his story and somebody on the end writing it. The form of the storytelling is part of the meaning and related to the system, the situation of one's identity. I think about Luis Alfaro's St. Jude and the way he's telling this story of the movement of his family history down the highway, the cities of California and how he marks it in really also signaling our health, our psychological health or our emotional health with the diabetes check, doing a pinprick and so marking this movement of family and memory and blood on a map. The form of the story, the metaphor of the story, the aesthetics of the story, it's really related to his identity but it's also related to Latino cultural identity, the way that we're a people who have had identities mapped on us in very historical ways but we also have a history of movement and migration. So aesthetics informed to me in reading Latino art in art generally and within our own culture they take on these very historically and culturally specific meanings that when you start thinking about the specificity of Latino culture I think it opens up the way that we can read the expression of the storytelling on stage through the artistry of metaphor and through the performer's use of body and what really brilliant directors do just even in like the Olga's stage that we saw of Delano earlier just the way that the creative artist is thinking about movement. Juliet Carillo is here and she's another person that every time I see her stage readings just her sense of the history of movement and how bodies occupy space it always takes the storytelling to the next level. So I think aesthetics and form and meaning they're embedded in our thinking about history and culture. One of the things as a performance studies person I'm really interested in what performance can do. So I'm really interested in how a lot of Latino theater is meant to be our version of history because our versions of history are not told in the dominant mainstream of books and literature and just information that's out there and so I think about plays that are trying to tell our stories from our perspective whatever this history that's been covered up so I think about culture clash as Chavez-Rivine for me is a huge piece that shows us from that perspective and it also sort of reimagined what Latino spaces look like and what lays beneath those grounds and so I think when we think about Latino theater I also really love to think what can it do to inform others but also ourselves of our own history. It's a form of history documentation and also history making in the present moment and so we saw a lot of that impulse at the plays in the Carnival as well and so it becomes a forum for us to document our own history. I'd like to stay on that thread of talking about form talking about the transformation of meaning and where theater engages with history of a community telling its own story from the multiplicity of points of view because there's been much talk about this moment of adaptation that seems to be surfacing in Latina Latino theater the breathless articles about Lin-Manuel Miranda's acclaimed musical Hamilton and about how he's using different tropes, different idioms uniquely Latino conventions to tell a uniquely American story. Taking that story and making it his own or our very own resident playwright with El Fado taking on the Greeks and simultaneously honoring that form and yet bringing it forward 2000 years to talk about what is happening now in our streets or what Tanya Saracho did with her adaptation of the Cherry Orchard to examine legacy in what happens when you can no longer go home, right, when the land has been lost to you. So I'd love to talk about what are Latino artists doing when they're engaging with the classical Western canon, right. What is driving this artistic impulse and how are we using these forms to what end to what purpose do you feel they're being used? Really good ones. Courses for good. You know really, but I think that part of it is one of the hallmarks of the Latino theater tradition is what in academics sometimes called code switching and I think it's often and also I think when you occupy a space like I know it's not always what you think of when we as theater enthusiasts and theater makers together it's a conservative tradition. It's a tradition that really like most art-making traditions have their bastions of conservatism but theater as a practice is one rooted in repertoire and it's rooted like where else do you say like well we are going to do it as best you know it's like and even this festival is sort of rooted with these callbacks to other historical moments and so the question is how do you name and claim a space for yourself within a tradition that is so emphatically Eurocentric, so emphatically conservative and I think that there's something very deaf that happens with that kind of using that capacity to speak in two voices or to speak in two languages simultaneously speaking two languages simultaneously so that they can communicate in a way that is bigger than either language on its own and because I do think that that is the power of what Spanglish does is it does something that draws upon the force of both and I think when I look at Miranda or Alvaro or any of the other many other approaches to sort of taking a canonical repertoire based practice and you know it is a way of claiming space but also claiming ownership but also naming something else and so I think there's something very sophisticated at work that I think every playwright is doing something a little bit different but I love that we're able to see this impulse and I think if we think of it in terms of thinking all the way back to the space and saying this is a way that Latino theater makers are saying I can have that conversation I can have this conversation at the same time look at where we go when we listen for me I think it's a lot about like reclaiming right I do see sort of a difference in Hamilton to sort of the so far as adaptation so you know just having seen Mojave and living in LA and a lot of people raving about it and telling me like I finally get the Greeks now it's an entry point right and it's true and people these are seasoned theater people like I really finally got it and then I had to revisit Medea for class and I just saw so much of what Luis masterfully did bubble up in the text and it was always there but then you know in my class we ended up talking about Syria right because we were talking about immigration and what it means to be a foreigner so to me it's an entry point and it's also reclaiming like as theater people okay the Greeks are like our forefathers but there's always this pushback of like but not really for Latinos or people of color but it's to say these are our descendants too theatrical descendants and then I think what Lin-Manuel is doing right he reads this book about Hamilton and in some interviews he's like you know I thought Hamilton was like kind of like a G like he's sort of like a badass and then he wants to layer that in with the sounds of where he grew up and the kind of music that he enjoys and so then it becomes also reclaiming an American history narrative like we're American we pledge allegiance to the flag and yet there are those who want to take that connection away from us to say so this is my history as well being here so I think there's like similar impulses but done in different ways in terms of creating the text and I think to build on that I think theater is a space of civic engagement it's our public town hall it's a space where we engage in historical reclamation we are theater makers are our creative historians and documentarians if we're not and it's correcting the record I think of the theater artists I follow who are writing about issues of violence and trauma somebody like McDalya Cruz and her play El Gringo del Bronx looking at Puerto Rican prisoner on death row for being a serial killer and a lot of people have criticized her work saying you know why are you writing about we need stronger Latino role models why are you putting us on stage that way and her responses well if you look at the daily news we're criminalized subjects who are evil villains and perpetrators and we have no complexity to our histories and I think about the tradition of prison writing it's in theater where we're beginning to tell the stories of how incarceration is impacting our communities it's not just a real scar of violence but also telling these stories so that our youth have a vocabulary to look at the school to prison pipeline and to be able to analyze how this is a form of cultural violence and if you look at the news our stories are really left out of those critical grappling but it's in the spaces of the theater of civic engagement that we're really rewriting history engaging with history showing that we're historically minded and we're documentarians but that we're also presenting counter histories and documenting our people and very much engaged in contemporary issues so for me theater is a civic space and thinking about our histories whether they're contemporary in the struggle to humanely portray the heart and the soul of the people who have come to this country through many different paths so how do you begin to tell those stories when those stories have been told for us from very narrow perspectives and so I'd love to ask about the unique challenges that are posed when we are taking on Latino and Latina performance aesthetics and when those intersect with questions of casting like casting, resources training as we receive it through conservatory programs or academic programs or even institutions and to ask what is the burden for artistic representation for Latina performers, theater makers creators and what are the questions that we're not really engaging with yet? I feel very strongly that one of the areas of cultural expertise that I think exists in the Latino theater making community that hasn't really been appreciated is how Latino theater artists have become really using their... most Mexican actors have been asked to play a Puerto Rican role vice versa. This experience of cross-cultural identification within the category of Latino is something that happens pretty routinely and there's something that opens up for I think, I don't know very many other places among Latino cultural workers where that kind of deep embodied sort of what it feels like to be in a culture that is both alike and dissimilar to yours and that having that sense of stakes of I want to do it right you know this kind of sense of responsibility of how to do that kind of migration and drawing upon one's skills, especially as an actor to sort of say like okay I'm used to playing people who are not me this person is simultaneously not me, not from my culture but I can also see this, feel this sense of burden and expectation and what it comes up is there's very often that work is expected to be done in the actor's spare time in their own and so I think when we deal with students you know Mexican American actors being cast to play a Puerto Rican character might not be offered the vocal training necessary to understand the technique involved and how technique is a tool that the actor can use in bridging that sense of cultural distance with integrity and with responsibility are educational institutions and conventionally there's not a degree of cultural competence on the part of decision makers to there's often the sense of oh well she's Latina that we're done you know we've cast the Latina the role we're done and so there's not a sense of cultural competence on their part to even hear the differences, staging productions and not hearing the idiomatic inflections that a family doesn't sound like they're from the same country, let alone the same house these kinds of gaps and how what, how technique and craft are in some ways those ways to solve these issues and there are champions in our midst who do this work in a yeoman's way and often find their calling as directors as dramaturgs as actors as voice teachers through this challenge and yet they are there's still a lack of conversation like almost any actor coming out of any serious training program will be able to do any number of regional dialects in the UK yet taking a tutorial in terms of idiosyncratic idiomatic distinctions of Latino dialects within Texas is incomprehensible let alone the United States and so I mean there is a meaningful gap that expertise has been cultivated by organic intellectuals on theater stages around the country and yet we haven't found a way even in hospitable institutions to value that as a resource that needs to be invested in and that every actor needs to be able to have their ears so they can hear the difference not just Latino actors. Yeah and I think that crosses over to like the you know soundscape of a play right you're in a Mexican household and then suddenly there's like salsa playing it's usually probably the other way around you're in like a Puerto Rican household and then you hear like bandha music or something and people who are culturally aware you're like it takes you out of the play it's a distraction and it frustrates me and we see just saying you know we had a big conversation yesterday about this dialect question because it's not only theater but we see it in film and TV and I just think it's lazy right it's sort of it's really frustrating because we're not we're not given the value just to do a little research like you know what I mean and then yeah that the burden is on the actor or maybe the stage manager who happens to be Latino or something and it's like oh yeah can you just tell us from your wellspring of knowledge of every Latino culture and that's really unfair right because then ultimately we are we not only represent our own you know personal Latino background but all Latinos everywhere and that's just a burden of responsibility that I think a lot of people of color share and I think about the happiest song plays less and and looking at the female lead who you know is like quarter Egyptian and her struggling with that identity a lot of people you know may may not even speak Spanish and then they're asked to train their their fellow actor how to speak you know and and so that's a it creates tension in the room and also a feeling of like that it's not worth the investment of time. One of the stories that inspired me to build a Latino theater ensemble for my students but to build it not on campus in the community was we did Josefina Lopez is detained in the desert on campus and it was the first Latino play that anybody could remember being done at my university which is a Hispanic serving institution it was the first Latino play anybody could remember having been done in decades nobody could even tell me what the Latino play that had been done before it was and a Chicana student was cast in the role of Sandy who's a Chicana kind of discovering her own sense of what it means to be a Chicana and thinking about immigration issues and the Chicana actor playing her part had started to really break down during rehearsal and the director said you know what's going on is it thinking about what this character is doing in a detainment situation and she said no you know I studied acting all through high school I got to play in Shakespeare I've played male characters I've done all kinds of things as an actor except play someone who looks like me and I don't know how to do it and here I am as a Chicana actor I don't even know how to find my sense of voice within a play that I've been hungry and waiting to be in all my life so you know in the ensemble that I've created the Segunauevas Latino play project ensemble in the community we do last year it was a monthly stage reading and I realized that was the only way that that worked is we had the wonderful producer Stephanie Castro who's now here at OSF running our project and this year we have Melanie Capons who's here with us this weekend but we're doing it as a quarterly project last year it was a monthly project it immediately became a standing room only event in the community people bringing youth in to see the plays it was free and open to the public but it was really exciting for the Latino students because they got to be in connection with their culture engage their storytelling tradition but they also got to engage these very difficult and potent questions about aesthetics and training and voice and identity and engage in the craft of art making and have questions put at them through this art that was meaningful to them and how they were sharing it with their community in a way that doesn't happen in these other situations where oh I have a Latino student they're cast in a Latino role that's end of story I don't need to do stretch work with them around craft and history and aesthetics so that was a big motivating factor for why I wanted to create a theater ensemble for Latino students on my college campus I think one of the other things just to say that we talk about these things and why we need to do them and sometimes people feel it's in-sealer oh that's just for Latino theater as a style or genre but there was recently an article that now there's going to be a multicultural or multi generational casting of 1776 the musical with a completely diverse cast and you see that influence of Hamilton and not only that it's being looked at artistically as brilliant it's selling tickets you know what I mean there is that we talked about sort of this commodification and how do we play with that but that Latino artistic choices really can propel the field in certain ways and that we have to value our input as in the new American theater like Luis Valdes says right that we do have an artistic value that can really push things forward in ways that it's just us doing the work we want to do exactly in our conversation yesterday there were a couple of phrases that came up talking about the idea of craft and the idea of how we engage with representation about the assumption that as soon as you put a brown body on stage they are automatically authentic and that we have the obligation to be native informants which I thought like for me I'm going to carry those two things with me and they are now on my radar so I love that and so I want to make sure that we make time and space for your questions because I'm sure by this point you are all bubbling I can feel you in the room and think oh my gosh all right so I'm going to do an Oprah and okay so the three of you stay up here I'm going to walk do we all get a free TV Lydia oh my god you get a car and you get a check under your seat one of you want a car Christopher that's okay right yeah exactly all right anybody have a burning question you want to launch us off with yes Tony I have too many questions because I've lived it you know I've lived a whole gamut of everything you're talking about from the theater to television to film and I may be ignorant because I'm kind of living in TV land and now I live in New York so let me just get to the point because I think it's an important question it's what I see and what I experience in terms of a disconnect between theater artists and theater audiences okay and then we're talking about and this is an example because you know today at Delano we had some Latin presence but it was not the dominant presence so what's happening is that a lot of our artists are produced in regional theaters and urban theaters throughout the country but very few Latinos see it, experience it Anglos or whatever are predominantly Anglos or non I would say non-ethnic because you know Anglos is like I don't know what that means but anyway and here's the deal I was as you know in Happiest Song Plays Last and they had a ton of money second stage to outreach to the Latino community they spent a lot of money on ads nobody came no Latinos came very few they had a couple of buses from Philly who came it was the best performance it was a party they were singing with us dancing in the aisles talking back to us we went wow and then a lot of times we would close that play at the end of the last scene and we would we wouldn't even get applause you had Anglos staring at us like what just happened like they were looking at a car accident so what I'm saying and then I think the same conundrum exists sometimes in terms of theater artists who live in kind of a solipsism of their own artistic ghetto bubble whatever you want to call it barrio bubble and they are performing for a very small audience of Latinos or maybe some Anglos who come in in LA I see a lot of Jews sometimes so how do we get out of that how do we make what our artists are doing mainstream and still attract the Latino community because what happening at second stage and I'm sorry for taking this along with the question but what happened in second stage is that the price point was too high 85 bucks for a Latino and let me tell you there's a lot of middle class lawyers and stuff like that and still you multiply by we come in groups where you come in packs so it was like 85 times 84 times 6 it's a shitload of money and so nobody came and it was the end of a trilogy I mean a significantly historical event and nobody came except a lot of Anglos who didn't quite conic with the play as far as I could tell they weren't involved in the themes or certainly the intellectuals or the artists the people who came who were part of the artistic community but a lot of times I feel that we are performing theater for our own artistic community only and that we're living again in this solipsism of artistry so I just want to have you could talk to that well I think that that's an enduring question and I do think that the question is is something if I could answer this question today a lot of people would be very happy to because they're paying a lot of consultants to answer this question a lot of money and if I could answer it for free I would because but I don't know that there is a I think probably there's two things that come to mind for me one is theater in this country generally does not invite people to to participate it expects people to participate it says we're doing this important thing you should come rather than creating an incentive this is why this is why it's meaningful and I think in the market depending on the price point is maneuverable Latinos spend a lot of money on entertainment all the studies say every three years there's a big study about how much Latino audiences spend on entertainment Latino but the thing is but they're spending in terms of chunk something that could go to it they would get them a really good theater experience but the thing is the practice of welcome of like it's an incredible investment time and logistics and sort of like for something you're not sure you're going to like you know and so I think techniques that Luis Alfaro talks about a lot of making sure that there's sort of a conversation with the outreach a conversation with marketing conversation with ticketing so that there's a sense to bridge those gaps to rivers and red bank is trying all sorts of different ways to try to bridge the gaps and I think that what is essential is to really listen for when we think we're offering an invitation but it's actually an expectation you know and to really ask when our marketing materials go out to say is this just saying this is valuable come worship at the altar of art and if that's what it's saying whatever idiom it's using whatever graphics it's using whatever I mean because I think that that's the mainstream stuff is you spend the money because you know you're going to have an experience that's worth having and I think in theater it's a risk you don't know if you're going to like play and you often have to go to a neighborhood you don't know you often have to park in a way that's very confusing there's a lot of obstacles there's a lot of obstacles and I think that that generally the American theater sees those as the problem of the audience member not the problem of the theater institution and so I think that this is a tricky thing and I think there's all kinds of really creative leadership because I don't think this is just a Latino problem but I think the Latino problem opens it up in very particular ways I don't know how many of you saw on your feed in Chicago when it tried out this summer which is the Gloria Estefan, Emilia Estefan musical that's headed to Broadway I have not been in an expensive theater with as many Latinos in that house and it's and so I think what we've got this moment in the commercial and the most expensive part of theater making in the world Broadway we've got two musicals that are hitting with Latino authors you know very different approaches both doing very conventional American stories and it'll be interesting I think we've already know that like there's not going to be a lot of Latinos in Hamilton watching Hamilton because the tickets are so expensive they've already sold out there's all these things they're the question of what impact the recording is going to have I think is open but I will be interested to see if they can transfer the success that they had in reaching Latino consumers not necessarily established theater audiences but you know they seem to have a pretty remarkable success in Chicago it was surprising to me and I checked around with other folks and it seemed like it was not a fluke it was still not the majority of the audience but it was a substantial subset of the audience and I think that's what we need to aim for but it's again going back to these bigger it's a bigger question but for us I think because we come out of community engaged in community based traditions it feels even the distance is so stark as a producer you know part of that for me and I think the accessibility question for me is about accessibility across class you know looking at class across ethnicity cultural background right that and also age like so we try to make tickets accessible so people who are young you know college students paying for things on their own but if you're in a certain class bracket that you can still access high quality theater in terms of the relationship of Latino audiences it's a long end game relationship building process and I see sort of the work that's happening at center theater group at the shop you know that people are going out into the community spending their Saturday mornings there working hands-on with a group of people involving them in a production long term there's a history of mistrust in terms of major theaters being like doing the sort of poaching right there's this concept of culture poaching where we have the one show you know in Hispanic Heritage Month and we need you to come because we have a grant for it and then we're going to have our education you know department do something around it's just sort of this thing and we have to break from that and I think communities are feeling tired of that and then it's new strategies of long term engagement and getting people young to the theater if you don't have a practice of going to the theater it's hard to start that you know when you have a full-time job and three kids you know we've been talking a lot about reading Latino theater as the new American theater we want our theater tradition to be read on on two registers one for its cultural specificity and its history and its aesthetic and its tradition that way but it's also part of the American theater I think the work being done here at OSF to really cultivate work reading this work as part of the new American theater work that's been done you know by so many of the artists in this room you know Luis Alfarro Diane Rodriguez, Juliet Carrillo, Jose Cruz Gonzalez I mean there's so many people in this room who've spent decades forging a space for our artists to really be empowered and have their work on American theater stages and now I think that that's happened the project is really thinking about new American theater audiences really how do we cultivate the next generation and have our youth be as excited to go to the theater as they are to go to a concert in a film and how do we also educate audiences to be excited and hungry and feel that Latino theater is part of the American theater to me the reading at Delano this morning was incredibly excited we were sitting at lunch today and non-Latino patrons at a table behind us they kept leaning over and at first we thought it was because we were being very loud and animated but they leaned over and said we just want to tell you how much we loved they actually said your play acknowledging we were like I thought ours but they were acknowledging that later it belonged they were acknowledging Luis Alfaro's play was you know part of our group that we were ambassadors for that work and they wanted to take the time to tell us how much they love the work and how excited they were by it and you could feel that in the room so for me that's the ideal moment is you're putting people in a room where we can come and have a conversation like this but you're also putting people in a room so that we can just be really excited about seeing incredible work together so I yes I agree we all have these stories that we're grappling with but this is an incredibly exciting moment for us to become really cognizant about not only our place in the American theater but how we're building the new American theater audiences it is definitely I think the way that we have to work against the one and done approach that we tried that once and it didn't work because it would be part of a long-term organizational strategy in terms of saying okay we're doing this show this year we're going to try these things we're going to move forward, we're going to grow as an institution because this is an institutional commitment to imagining our audience so on the one hand more Latinos come, on the other hand our core established audience isn't so gobsmacked they don't know to applaud what are these distances that this experience revealed in our organization and how can we take a forward move that is ideally I think the take away from moments like that unfortunately the last 30 years has shown us in universities and not-for-profits and commercial theaters it didn't work so we're not going to do it for another 10 years right I think it's at every tier and I think that the contrary leadership is to say well yes it didn't work but there are lessons to be learned what happens if we try this again next year that will develop more talent pool we can build on the connections we did build this it's a slight orientation but it really does resist against that we gave it a shot it didn't work the way we wanted to so no we're not doing that again it was too much work it didn't pay off and that is really going against at all levels whether you're making money or making a lot of money or making no money at all there still is that idea of was that worth the investment of time and energy and I think it is about what you were saying the long game we are talking about the the future of our practice not just you know what we're doing this season right I think I got the next question over here hi sorry my throat is kind of sore and I'm a bit nervous so forgive me um to preface this I had a very hard time deciding where I needed to be today and I emphasized where I needed to be because I have this feeling this week I don't know why that each one of us has a role in life and something to contribute and I was torn between a march for the mentally ill sponsored by NAMI today and being here in a Latino play project discussion I thought well in the scheme of things gee we're talking about legislation that could affect millions in this country versus theater I happened to be in Ashland it was a quarter two I already had a ticket okay time management here I'm here and I think I needed to be here because yes I'm not going to go into it but I have a lot of reason to be at that march especially today but in the scheme of things I think my voice may be louder here than it would be there I say that as a Latina theater practitioner I don't I use that term specific Spanglish is my mother tongue can I speak in Spanglish I am an actor I went to Cal Arts in fact I have a fellow alum here I would have liked to have said I finished but unfortunately for health reasons I wasn't able to for health reasons I ended up in Ashland I know several people at OSF here for health reasons I unfortunately have not been able to put as far a foot forward as I'd like to I hope that will change I also thought here I am not to denigrate in this bloody 20,000 population city when I'm used to thousands in the federal capital of Mexico in Nueva York in Cairo in Londres and Washington DC so in the scheme of things being a working theater practitioner I thought what the am I doing here that was a bleep sorry about that we don't have bleep so anyway under this umbrella I am an actor a writer a dramaturg etc etc I would like to know what happens as far as casting when you're not brown enough or you're too white where do you fall in the scheme of things when you're a Jewish American Bolivian Anglophile where do I fit in as far as casting is concerned where do I fit in as far as wanting to write plays that will be as you were saying Tiffany is that your name I don't want to put the leg and my memory is for an actor is really bleep so what do you do if you want to address these things you want to use theater as social change because damn it at the same time it is a form for social change but it's so bleep elitist what do you do I don't mean just in terms of audience members I'm talking about the themes well I really appreciate your comments especially just given my own investment in thinking about theater for social change and thinking about I think about theater as where we stage conversations that otherwise may not be taking place some work and I think there's many kinds of theaters I think we have to you know we think about the most visible theaters right these incredible spaces of visibility and resources but there's all kinds of theaters I think when you tap into really what's happening in the larger national and local community of Latino theater here in the U.S. it's such an incredible spectrum one group and I'd be happy to send you a pdf copy of the play but there's a play by Latina Brethren Fire Brethren Fire Latina Theater Ensemble out of Southern California Orange County and they have a play called Slip of the Tongue which is a trilogy looking at mental, spiritual and physical health issues the first play is about surviving date rape the second play is about a young child battling realizing her father is an addict and how that happens in the family and the third is about bipolar condition and really how do we address and deal with bipolar mental health issues in our community so playwrights are writing about all kinds of things and I think that's why forums like this are really important because we have a sharing about the work that's out there the different kinds of theater makers that are out there but we also within our community have to be careful of just seeing one kind of visible writer one kind of visible theater and engage in finding spaces where we can do our cultural homework like I'm looking at my colleague Almarosa Alvarez who teaches here locally and what an incredible resource she is thinking about the history of Latino literature and the role of theater within that we have key people out there that can help us expand our knowledge in our conversations and our resources we were talking about how historically this is a very important moment in that it's really been within the last five years that scholars have been part of these convenings and national conversations with theater makers because we realize that we need to do this knowledge sharing. So I appreciate the questions that you're putting out there and I don't know if I have any one answer other than to say there's all kinds of resources and hopefully this is an opening up to take you on the journey of grappling with the questions that you shared with us. I would just want to add to you that I think ensemble, like joining an ensemble or creating an ensemble in which then you can play all sorts of roles I think is crucial devised theater is a great forum to play. I'm thinking about the work of Alex Meda and Dattro Luna but this also brings up this issue of sort of criticism right, how your body is red and I bring up this show because there was a really sort of sexist and racist review I wouldn't even call it a real review but which you know the company is a pan Latina company but the cast was made up of Afro Latinas and Latinas who pass as white like I do you know that don't read as brown and the reviewer had the gall to say well this is a Latina company but I spotted two black actors and three white actors and that is something right way to go sir right so that was but that created a space of like it was devastating for us to think like a critic thinks that that's what they're reading and so I you know those are those moments that you're not alone right and that we have to move forward and create art that responds to this and also develop critics and scholars and practitioners people who can speak about this work intelligently absolutely absolutely great I think I have the next question already set up in reference to the article on the UCB that came out that the Upright Citizens Brigade has an issue with a lack of diversity I want to speak to comedy one of the things that I know from the Denver Regional Theaters is that where they make a good commitment to bringing Latino shows but very rarely is it they're like deep, heady emotional pieces and that's one of the things you see in Latino community theater what are some of the things that we can draw on in terms of comedy because I think that there's an immediacy about comedy and a cultural capital that comedy has right now that I think that we could use to get younger actors and to speak to a broader audience and of the ten biggest earning comedians globally three are Latino and this is talking like big money so I do think that that is I think that there are those kind of questions of what are the pleasures of theater going and the pleasures of theater going is laughing the pleasures of theater going is coming together with your family you know the pleasures of theater going is having a sense I would say that like it's like if we could figure out how to build relationships with theaters the way teams have them where like you can have a bad season and they'll still come back the next year you know it's just like if we could just figure that out you know it would be like how do we build that sense of community identity that sense of commitment the sense of like oh I don't like I didn't like those ten years that he was leading it but I was there every time you know like that sense of identification is I think something that Latinos really connect like there's a loyalty there's a commitment there's a passion there's a and I think his audience but I do think the question of pleasure and comedy and the awareness of what are the different registers of entertainment and this I think goes in some ways to the sort of the prize winning the sort of what are the tastes of the sort of the mainstream the sort of the general literary establishment what are they looking for and the way that theater makers are especially playwrights here thinking is primarily about playwrights they're negotiating a lot of different constituencies and and I do think that that is there's a playwright Liz Coronado Castillo presented a play called I Know at Teatro Vivo in Austin last year that I happened to see and it was really an extraordinary and crowd-pleasing and crowd-affirming work and I happened to recommend it to a small company in Albuquerque and Camino Real produced it and they had their biggest season ever and it was like they had people that had never walked into the National Hispanic Cultural Center who lived in Albuquerque they had never been in that building you know and so I think there are ways and this is I think the other thing too is independent producers what is what are the different different ways of producing institutional production is one way of making theater educational is another community based but also independent producing so I do think that it's worth us being having our ears open I think one of the things for me as a scholar of popular performance is I want to talk about what's going on on Broadway at the same time as I want to talk about what's going on in the storefront down the street and what's going on in the community based ensemble this is and I think our tradition sometimes we get really niche in not thinking across these divisions and yet I think that there are points where the crossover actors move between those divisions you know so so so how can we learn from what the actors have learned from that wisdom but we've got to sort of listen to the ways because Latino audiences and this is what all the everybody always wants to know we want to get the Latino audience we want to get them to buy tickets to our thing they are buying lots of tickets they're not always buying Latino tickets to Latino content and so what is the pleasure that is drawing them to spend their heart and money with their families to go in these experiences and I think that's where the lesson of comedy is really important but again it's a matter of like where is where is a culturally diverse improv like there are a couple in New York that I know they're really approaching sort of we are going to be not they're not saying this but they we they want to be like the Hamilton of improv comedy they want to be the one that like everything's in there and everything's up for gaps and not and resist the segregation within that genre but I do think that the those questions are key and the pleasures of theater going need to be our biggest carrot you know like it's fun to come absolutely well thank you I knew we were not going to have enough time for everything that we wanted to talk about you know we only have an hour and 15 minutes but first of all you know I want to thank all of you for gathering here with us today all of you out in the Latino sphere joining us watching this conversation I hope you're madly tweeting and Facebooking about what you've been hearing about today the conversation is by no means over although some of us will be heading to the bar I'm sure but I do want to okay Brian's going to say one more thing one thing we promised to say yesterday was this practice of having conversations is something that the Latino theater Commons has modeled of building the space for the perspectives brought by scholars bringing us in spaces with audiences and art makers and this is something that if your organization is not doing this ask them to ask them to stage events like this academics are remarkably cheap dates so it's not hard to do this and the network of the Latino theater Commons has activated this network and put us in conversation this is a space of collaboration and the presence of scholars and advocates is a really important thing that the Latino theater Commons has modeled and I really encourage you whatever your concerns are within the theater companies that is your team make sure that they're building these spaces for these conversations it's a practice we've fallen away from and it's something that can model artistic citizenship moving forward in ways I think is transformative so absolutely absolutely so please join me in thanking los meros meros profesores y y y y y y y y y y y y y y