 So as an archival official over here with your computer and savvy and just really curious to see like what people have to say a conversation about for me it's like how can I get into your people's I think that's great I think this is a really good event dinner with April last the conversation going on to the conversation going on question you know what is the state of Latino theater was the only time we took on for today's event and then you know within that what is Latino theater and how do we identify to show as Latino so there's a mix and it's an ever-evolving you know Latino is an ever-evolving word we as an example about from Chicano theater from the movement to now Latino theater and within that Latino identity and the big list comprises you know shows with big Latino casts well first we included the shows from the companies so the identified Latino companies in the community we first grabbed their seasons and then independent artists if they were creating and putting up a show for example we included and you know plays written by non Latinos motherfucker with a hat we also included we didn't include any international so work work that might be room for us to grow in that direction is Latin American theater we produced in Los Angeles I just wanted to jump into the historical context and they're looking at the place in that thank you so much for morning we're going to be discussing the place with chronological order in which they were produced in a season and in our we're going to be doing that three things major themes what we found was relevant about the work and how the word speaks to the evolving trajectory of the U.S. drama we're also going to work individually going to talk about plays that we saw but we're also going to have more in the conversation when we talk about collectively about three key works that we saw together and as we open discussion of each play we're going to ask for a show of hands of who saw how many people saw the play so we kind of have a living snapshot as we go along to give us that information about the audience and we'll be responding to questions via Twitter but also live so we ask you to just benchmark or write down your questions so that we can come to that at the end and in your purple packet of materials you'll find one sheet that we put together with all the titles of all the productions and the production information so that you can use that to follow along as we talk individually about each of the work so just to jump off of what I'm thinking you said in the list for our solar panel we're addressing 12th place so we only have an hour so we also have to recommend we as we said there were 20th place that we looked at over this certain period of time however obviously it's very difficult for everyone to see every single show so the whole co-host made a collective effort to see as much as they could so if there's shows that we're not addressing they might be addressing the artistic panel later in the day so there's going to be some population who wants to dress and if you work in a piece who's not being addressed we may have also seen it so we may take 12 spinners you know in a different panel you're welcome to raise questions like that but just to give you an idea if you don't see a particular show in this presentation we did limit it to 12 for time and also pieces that we thought we really needed to speak about and that we all had seen or come out of it had seen so just to give you that background. We're going to begin with the first play of season of Bait by Amida Fernandez and I think part one is who we have a show hands and how many people saw this show, thank you. Some of the themes of what I'm going to be talking about the themes that were presented in the show that you think are very significant in thinking about Ulyssetino drama which is things about family, history, Americanist, coming of age, different perspectives on war, I think the need for self-expression through prayer, song, home making, labor, all of those things of the form of self-expression, not just survival or gender, found gender roles and also significantly this is a play about the climate of war and how it shapes the generations of a family but in particular as represented in the show. Through the voices of women and I think that's something that's extremely powerful about the plays. It's looking at all of those themes through the voices of the women and the family. It's the first in Fernandez's trilogy about the impact of war on generations of family and looks at and one of the artistic things that is significant about the work is music as a central part of the play and not just as interludes but really as part of what drives the action in the work. And another key part of the play is watching the evolution of the women characters. We talked about the coming of age but you see the intergenerational relationships of the women's struggle and one of the things I found particularly significant in thinking about the evolution of the representation of women in our plays is yes, there's girlfriend, there's wives, there's some others, there's grandmothers but these characters aren't just static, satellite, male characters. They're actually very multi-valent, extremely complex and you see the ways that there is intergenerational conversations especially through the daughter and the grandmother and how all of those relationships play out in very complicated ways. And then if this is an American play, it's also situating itself as what it means to be not only Chicano but to be American through a Chicano perspective and that's particularly linked to each of the characters voicing their thoughts about how they feel about war and the stakes that they feel should and shouldn't be engaged in about war and watching the relationships between the women and the men and how they go off to war and who's at home and how war it is and isn't supported. Portpe brought up in our conversation that when Valdez situated as an American play at the time, he was very much resounding and criticized for that. So it's very interesting when we look at the evolution of the works in the season, a consistent theme of Chantel pointing this out in our conversation, there's a consistent theme of saying not only are we Latino but we also are part of the American cultural landscape of history. So those are some of the different themes that we saw in the play and some of the points that I thought were particularly significant around history, family, culture and the voices of women as carrying forward that conversation and that's also part of the trilogy. Just to jump off of the trilogy, so those babies who are not familiar with the rest of the trilogy, the other one's are folks and charities, the state folks and charities, but I love the story behind it and it really is how it's going up. So these are the three first photos and one was of FDR, both John Hall II or whoever the current folks was and Kennedy J.S.A. And so each play sort of takes that signature feature and that person at the launching point and so all of these are major moments in American history and we explore how this multi-generational Latino family, so it's an epic trilogy that really looks at the Mexican American experience in the U.S. and also created out of the anti-immigrant sentiment of what was happening in Arizona a few years ago that continues to be happening that situates as non-American and so this is sort of a theatrical intervention against that negative territory. And from now we're going to segue to our group conversation about the motherfucker with the hat. I see you can all be very curious. My pronunciation. Okay, so many of you saw the motherfucker with the hat. The audience has seen the plays we're talking about which is wonderful because it means that we are all supporting each other. This play is a very well-planned play focusing on Latinas and Latinas in one African American character for those of you who do not see it. It does this with humor and insight into addictions of all kinds. I felt that the characters were well-rounded although they could have developed into stereotypes in the wrong artist's collective hands. Betrayal in the major theme that the problems are all internal. In other words, there are no outside forces causing the disarray the characters have created their own predicaments. Perhaps the one exception is the gay cousin who relates how his childhood, in his monologue, how his childhood was marred by homophobic friends, boys in the neighborhood. This touching monologue saved his character from being yet another swishy Latino and brought another theme, an important theme, that of the LGBT community in addition to the play. The witnesses in the text kept the audience attentive, including all the gray hairs over the angles in the audience. All of us wondering what the next surprise was going to be. The idea of a hat at the center of attention as well as a sexual intrigue reminded me of a much earlier 19th century French farce, the Italian straw hat. But unlike the French farce, this play, there are socially conscious moments to consider such as the relationships gone sour, the betrayal of the main character by his sponsor. Do you have some notes? Yeah. To me, the central part of the play in reading it within the context of Latino drama is in the early 90s, the Chicago literary historian Francisco Loma B introduced a term called the Chicanés. And he used it to talk about work by non-Chicanese writers that really attempt to authentically portray a Chicanese experience. So for me, that is a term that I find really helpful to looking at this work. We have short eyes, it's a very important work of Latino theater. And I see this as part of the continuum and looking at how our communities have been shaped by the prison experience and looking at it through interpersonal relationships. And in a community where a man has gone off to prison, he comes out and we see how he struggles to make his role stay sober. But what's also significant to me taking through my own investments and representations of women on our stages is that we see how the women are made to go into prison with the men. By providing financial support, emotional support, but coming out in a really very heavy weight on how, what is their role going to be in making sure that their male partners don't, that they're able to re-enter, but that they don't re-offend. And what kind of burdens the characters have to shore around that. And also the intercultural relationship in the play around sponsorship and aid. So for me, thinking about just the crisis our communities are in around prison issues right now, prison and education being two pivotal issues. This play has been very, very significant for us to follow and think about in the story that it's telling. And I thought the production, I want to talk about the direction of it because I saw, I got to catch the recording of the Broadway cast. And I really felt John Michael Garces's direction and this casting of the Latina actors in the role was just brilliant because it was so true to the script, their voluptuousness. It's not just a part of their character asset. It really intrinsic part of looking at how women work through their issues, through their body and through food. And I really felt like a lot of the productions and cast of the women miss that as an organic part of the script. So with that I'm going to turn it to Sean Collin. So I sort of played the double bracket role in this conversation. I really agree with both of them. It's an excellent play, it's very well written and it's very funny and I really appreciated the performances. But one of my major concerns with that, I agree that these characters tend to very easily slip into stereotypes. And that's something that we struggle with in any of our productions. But my concern was given the visibility of this play at a major regional theater, under a large climate, acting the color, working at these roles, which is fantastic. But that they're still playing at it. And what was that say, particularly in Orange Town City, in which tonight that I went, I was probably one of the darkest people in the audience and I'm not very there. But that's a great concern and not to say that the play, it's not anything against the play, but it's just something that I thought was important to talk about. And how, even in our own work that's talking about Short Eyes, which is written by Puerto Rico, how do we sort of grapple with the harsh reality in our community? But what happens when we put that on a major regional stage and how our audience is reacting to that? And that might be beyond our control, but it's about perhaps in the discussion this might be something that other folks might want to chime in about. But that was sort of the wrestling concern I had as much as I enjoyed the piece. I was sort of left thinking about these characters and what does it mean that this is sort of a major representation of our communities out there. And further, those of you who studied the history of Latina Latina Theater as Tiffany points out, Short Eyes was the first play written by a new region. With a company, an intercultural company, including Latinos, African Americans, that was directed by a Mexican for a reason from New York. And it was a very successful play on Broadway in a prison and the next successful play on Broadway by a Latino, a zoosuit, which also takes place in prison. And then there was Cape Man, which is, you know, so it seems that the dominant society wants to only represent us as prisoners. So the next one, the next one I get to start off, this is another group discussion, so you'll see us conversing here. This was, I don't have to show you, I'm thinking bad as gay. The theme of misrepresentation for a complete absence of Latina Latinas has always been, has always pervaded the media in English in this country. From Broadway, as I said, from Hollywood to regional theaters, television, and beyond. This play shows its relevance to today's Hollywood stereotype and focusing, as it does, on Bunny and Connie Pia, the king and queen of the Hollywood experts. They have made a good living as background, non-speaking maids, gardeners, and other invisible Mexicans. All Connie wants is a voice, a speaking part, but if she gets the part that she's up to, she will be playing a madam in some unnamed Central American Banana Republic. Historically, this was the first Chicano play centered on middle class Mexicans and Chicans. Living the American dream, the setting calls for the amenities of a middle class home and a luxury park where we sit today, including working appliances in the kitchen. A microwave that proves tea. And yet we wonder if they exist in a sitcom. Sonny, their son, has dropped out of Harvard. Who knew? And he challenges the status quo as young people are supposed to do. He asks the existential question, is it real or is it Memorized? And I don't know if the young people in the audience know what Memorized is. I myself have never heard of it. And you look at these plays because I call this a classic play by one of our most important Spanish playwrights. So if you look for those pieces, those aspects of the play, that will not resonate today. And that may be the only one. I mean, what else can we not relate to? Can we relate to stereotyping in Hollywood? Ever heard of genius maids? Okay, so in addition to the play, it shows how it was at the vanguard of the exploration of intercultural relationships between the son and his Japanese-American lover or traveling partner. And it's employment of aesthetics of Brechtian influences, scene breaks, and the final gesture towards science section. In the closing scene, where the Chicano characters, who we know on stage in the cultural moment, were most likely derogatorily referred to as illegal aliens, exits aboard a UFO. All these students who accompanied me to the... This is you, I'm not even kidding. Oh, I ran out of my notes, I left up with memory. Okay, so, let's switch it over to each other. So, what he read was, thoughts are always merchant together, son. I'm happy about that. To me, what was really significant was seeing one of our classic plays staged in the season, as I told you I mentioned. This season, CTG staged two classics. So the African-American Theater, Joe Turner and Raising the Sun. Those audiences were full, they riveted, they're powerful to see those classics. And to see them situated as classics of African-American Theater. I feel like we need to see that on our stages too. So to me, that was what was extremely powerful about this production. I think the other thing that was powerful was I took with me several students that I teach to see the production, and they were riveted by it. It took them back and allowed them to put things together about thinking about issues of representation. But they were also thinking that it brought them closer to understanding their Chicano parents and the struggles they went through. But they also artistically loved it, how it was doing something different artistically on the stage, with playing with wrecking themes and the gestures to science fiction and other things. And then I think the final thing for the students that I spoke with after the show, that they were very inspired by learning that there are classics that are the backbone of our theater tradition. So those are the key things that were very important to me about that play in addition to just what it explores and did about, but just the work of seeing the traditional and classic works in our theater production. So just to piggyback off of that, I agree with really that being the media representation as well as generational differences, and a young Chicano identity crisis that are so really relevant today, particularly in the advanced degree setting. We have Sunny going into Harvard and having been a Latina in advanced degree, there is a sense of cultural alienation that I think the play really does capture very well. One of the other elements that I really love about this play is that Valdez doesn't shy away from showing us that Latinos have their own prejudice as well. Buddies comment about how Japanese-American, Asian-Americans are plumping them all together, talking about ducks, and all these things. We see how we have our own internal prejudices outside of the brown-white binary, that it's not just about Latinos against dominant white culture or anything like that, amongst ourselves we have issues with other cultures or their misunderstandings with other cultures. And so I really appreciated that, and also we get a glimpse of a little bit of homophobia in this play in which buddies think they're concerned that Sunny's coming out soon, and that that's even worse than what I was going to say, that it's the worst thing to happen when Sunny's coming out of the gate. And so it's a really comedic moment, but at the same time really spoke to me about generational differences and viewpoints within the LGBTQ community and the Chicano community. In terms of gender representation, I struggle a bit with this play. I appreciate Asian-Americans love interest, and I think she's there to sort of represent a multicultural America, but at times she sort of, for me, doesn't have the same complexity that Sunny does. But nevertheless, all of her struggles really reinforced this generational issue. She's struggling with Japanese cultural gender norm in her family, and also the fact that she was in a relationship with an African-American male that was looked down upon from her family. But the last thing I'd like to point out, going back to what is the topic of the invisible Mexican, I find it problematic that this is the first play that I know of in which we have a Latina character who's an advanced degree, Sunny's sister, the doctor, she's gone through school successfully, but she's invisible. We never see her in the play. She's outside, and she's depicted as fat and mean and horrible. And it's very comedic, and she serves a comedic purpose, but that, for me, shows where we come from. And some of the later plays we're dealing with, deal with the feminine in a more maybe sophisticated manner. Which is ironic that Mr. Bades, who at the time, he was beginning to do La Bamba, which would be making La Bamba when this play was first produced. One, remember that it was first produced in the mid-80s, and the homophobia that existed then was far greater than what we still have. I don't know about your parents or your grandparents, how happy they would be if you came out of the so-called closet. The other interesting thing about the play is that it investigates that whole, the invisibility, you know, and that's something that we, that pervaded so many of our plays. We want a voice, as I said a little earlier, and that's why we're here. The next one, the next play, and that's the voice. Okay, so, so again, we're up here. Okay, you are gonna have a voice. We're gonna proceed a little more quickly. The next play is one that I saw in Azalea the Thodermans at the bilingual foundation of the art. How many of you saw Azalea the Thodermans? This is interesting, the further we go, the fewer hands. Okay, so you missed out on a very important moment, because this is, I saw it in Spanish with a huge cast, and super titles in English, the audience was overflowing. Bus loaders in Houston, everybody was right there with it. It's a classic, but Azalea the Thodermans was written in 1554, and it was written anonymously because of the themes. The thematics are just as important today as they were back then. This is an original adaptation by Lina Mithaiko and the director, Margarita Agba, in which we are exposed to the corruptions in the Roman Catholic Church. Who knew? We're exposed to a number of issues, the settling of indulgences, you know, to save your soul. La la la, we just read about the new Sanctus from the Vatican, political intrigues, machismo, and finally, the main character, Lazario, is the original pedado, which becomes the pedado in the evolution of Mexican culture, and the Vatican culture became the most successful of the pedados. There are a lot of others performing cacos, this goes to the Diablo Campesino and their representations of the pedados. So he lives from day to day, hand to mouth in Lazario, just like the farmers who were protesting and performing in the field in 1965 and onward. So it has a lot of relevance to today's audiences and the Spanish classic, and the important thing here is that we have denied our Spanish heritage, and so many of our voices, you know. Here we were speaking Spanish, trying to speak Spanish, denying English being as bilingual as we could, but we never recognized that Spanish came from Spain, and we need more of our authors, I think, to investigate those Spanish, Moorish, Jewish groups that we have. So we're going to move now to our last group conversation, and then the rest of the presentation will be individual discussions about the place, but this piece is, we're going to move to Melancholia by the Latino Theater Lab, produced by the Latino Theater Company. I'd like to mention that this piece involves almost all of the bulk ensemble, which is a group that does divides work at the Los Angeles Theater Center. So this was a collaboration, and it was originally done in 2007. In 2007, I went to Edinburgh Fridge Festival and we brought it back to the LATC in this season, because we felt that had been so much happening, that we had to get PTSD, and culture suicide, veteran suicide, and particularly through a Latino lens. Yeah, so it has the historian here of Chicanotheer, the theme of Chicanos and war that has been a subject for Chicanotheer, and playwrights since the beginning of war. But since the beginning of the Chicanotheer movement with the Diablo Campesino, it's very, very classic and still performed, or should be performed, Vietnam Campesino and Soldado Rasso, performed in 1970 and 1971. So this theme, so those were octaves. They were street theater, they could be performed anywhere. The interesting thing about this piece, Madame Collier, which is also collectively written, the actress did a lot of ethnographic theater with the subject of PTSD, which has not been identified in the 70s as PTSD. When I was going up after World War II, it was called... Shell Shock, you know, and it's efforts. And it deals with something that is very... even that has not been discussed, and this is super important and a terrible issue of the military veterans and in the military community suicide. So the issues have been with us, and this play adds to that in a very, very distinct way. For me, this was a really incredibly powerful work for all of those reasons, but also statistically, the way that they were using the staging, the costuming, the makeup to very much underscore the critical engagement that they were making with PTSD and having the audience really viscerally discern the crisis points around trauma that are so unspoken. So for me, I was thinking about Grand Brunel, but also just zombies. They're coming out in their white makeup and making us see how they don't talk about these issues or we become inculcated with no critical thought about the issues of trauma and the war that were like zombies culturally. And the people with trauma who can't articulate and work through PTSD, that they do, they feel like they're walking in a half mile. So I felt like, artistically, the staging of the work was incredibly powerful and just the conversation about trauma, that it wasn't just an individual call to look at an individual story about trauma, but really looking at how as a culture and a community and as a family, we all need to be educated and aware of helping to intercede and heal our members and to talk about this. We just don't have enough public conversation about it. So this is an incredibly wrenching work from the important, artistically as well as systematically. Thank you. So just a couple more topics. Again, I think this piece really resonates in a piece that tries to situate the Latino experience as an American experience, particularly when we have soldiers dying for this country and then coming back and not sort of being supported by the community, by the larger government, and so really situating back through a Latino lens. And I think it was really interesting to use three actors as the one central character of Maria. We see not only his sort of fractured psyche, but also that this is anyone, this is all of our soldiers we have in an ensemble cast, a multicultural in this cast, but we don't have just Latino actors, which I think is really important and exciting. And we see female soldiers represented, and we also see glimpses into the family and how the family has to deal with not knowing who this person is, that it's come back for more, sort of this shift in identity is really important. And I think similar to Sotaro Rato, stylistically we have sort of that, the more of the makeup that we see, but it's done universally through all of the characters. The character of La Muerte is also coming from our theatrical tradition, but it's sort of elevated in this piece. There's elements of opera and really important and interesting dialectic choices. But I think what I found really most important is sort of how it's still looked at how the notion of Machismo and about humanity proving manhood is crucial to Mario's decision to go into war. And the family sort of after what he was going to do and dealing with all these pressures, that compounded with the military stylized sort of recruitment tactics. And we in the play done stylistically through Song and Dan sort of theatrics to bring in recruit. And particularly speaking to the fact that they're often recruiting in lower class, you know, working class communities and looking for minorities to kind of be at the front of the line. So I think it really spoke to that and it's a really big disease of the military industrial conflict. Okay, we've got to move on. The next one is a Smash Cut at Zeprida Kahlo. How many of you call it a Smash Cut? Excellent, excellent. This collage of brief scenes explored the young actors' lives. It was written and directed by the then Godships in consultation with the young people in his workshop, his acting workshop. The first monologue is performed by a young man who rolls on in his motorized wheelchair. Wonderful, wonderful opening monologue. He asks, why do I need legs when I have wings to fly? And fly he does. Taking us on a rollercoaster ride through his young life in his final dipty. Final dipty. Final dipty. I can't even find that in the dictionary. He does not ask for pity nor do any of the other members of this wonderful, youthful, creative, talented ensemble which also includes a blind, an African-American blind actor, singer. In two acts in several scenes, these young people demonstrated their aesthetic and political awareness recalling Earth of Chicano Theater, Arcus, condemning the wars as quote, just and underlined politicians and other topical references. A standout scene, I thought, consisted of two cholos dissecting Reagan's strickled-down theory. Absolutely delightful. Totally destroying any stereotypes about cholos being uneducated and hate-political. The program also included singing and dancing and a wonderful discourse on the joys of repeat tagging. So we're going to move along to the next production we're looking at is the Anatomy of Fizel by Janice Leigh Schoenberg. This is one of the things with how many people about the show. So this is one of the things in which we sort of discuss, okay, is it Latino Theater and it's not produced by the Latino Theater organization, and of course we have a Latino author and Adele is a whole cast of seven Latino women, and so we thought, of course we have to sort of speak about the fact that these slaves are being done by non-Latino entities that are working and our issues are important to improve the theater that aren't ethnically specific for things. The playwright's agreement dedicated to L.A. authors and to that father relationship with Janice Leigh Schoenberg came about. And so Kudela follows the pregnant suicidal teenager Alec as she escapes her abusive, meth-addicted mother and embarked on a journey in search of her grandmother, a woman she believes to be a powerful shaman. Two spirit guys that you see with her join her on this quest and they take the shape of very feisty rifters. On the eve of a great storm, Alec pulled up a halfway house for young ex-con women. So again, you see women who've been in a juvenile prison have done time. In this case, we see it from the female perspective. But again, the issue of sort of prison is coming up to be slayed. She goes to a halfway house because we've run by an evangelical minister who turned out to be her grandmother. That's sort of the major class at the end. But I think this way really deals with several issues that seem to be important and that we have a half of all women all looking at characters exploring this path. At the place, we have one foot in magical, sort of magical religion, one foot in the magic and one foot in reality. Although the two sort of never intertwine. We sort of see these two worlds remain separate. And I think that this speaks to sort of this nature of women sort of doing time in prison or awaiting their commitment in other prisons. Some of the characters have relationships with people in prison and they're sort of sitting doing time on their own. For me, one of the most pointy and pointy themes was the tension between a spirituality based in mythical and sort of indigenous at odds with this evangelical ideology. And it seems to sort of be there is movement of evangelical sort of churches and in Latin America that they're popping up. They continue to pop up and it becomes for Selena talking about how the evangelical short-meters have become a base for immunity particularly for immigrants and so then these women sort of find home in that case. Okay, the next play is one that that I saw Tamales de Pueblo in Casa de Oaxaca. How do you know about Tamales de Pueblo? Very good. Okay. I believe this is, as the producer say, the first performed in Spanish, English and ASL American Sign Language. Some of the actors are actually deaf or hearing impaired others are not. The Supertitles are very effectively presented in both English and Spanish. When the deaf actors were signing without an interpreter the Supertitles told us what they were saying. It's a very complicated plot, a bit melodramatic that didn't know what he's done. When the main character finds out that her son is deaf and her son is profoundly deaf the husband refuses to acknowledge and she has to leave and be an abuser and et cetera. So it's all about deafness and this is what the playwright is trying to bring to the fore. The audience was S.R.O. very multicultural. It was obviously a mixture of hearing and non-hearing audience members. She falls in love she's left the husband she falls in love with a street singer. She's a better woman than Da-Ma-la the Que-Fon and many friends with the wonderful Elot the Vendrits that he got to kill him. Yeah. Hi. We are going to have many Elotas out there for the rest of our time. I see you La La La La. The life of her presentation, a complicated plot to summing up because we don't have a lot of time. The plot and the story ends and the husband comes back and he has gone away and disappears and he starts to beat her killing me. The two of them, the two street vendors determined that they should cook his body and make tamales out of it, and this is what they do. And the last seeing in his name on the street sounds, Sork Tamales, which is soy pork, culturally relevant, and Tamales de Cuerco, the dead husband being the Cuerco that they are. And the audience loved it. When the actor playing the Cuerco came on stage for a curtain call, they all booed, that's how successful a villain he was. It is a thin plot, I'm looking at the thematics here, but I'm also looking at the structure, and yet, and yet it will have a light, it does need more work, it needs to be cut, but it is a very, very important statement. One of the first, if I say I don't know of any other place in our community, Chicano here, he's dealing with debt members of the family. That's a wonderful segue in talking about issues that we really were trying to press to the forefront that are at the first. I'm going to talk about Elizabeth's separations when song leaders go back. It's actually, one woman's show is part of a larger trilogy of work called Slip of the Tongue, by Wetham Fiery and Meter on the Soul, with Christina Nava and Sara Guerrero. And the collaborative work that all uses humor to look at a strong use of violence and abuse, and gender oppression, including rape, drug addiction, the impact on family and children, and then with Secrets' piece, the emotional financial struggles that accompany the arduous journey of working, of the working core to diagnose and treat bipolar disorder. And the play portrays a woman's experience of bipolar illness from its undiagnosed emergence during her adolescence to the struggle for treatment during adulthood. She performs the piece dressed in a cheerleader's costume and the song leader illustrates the frenetic scale of mania as she, you know, charges her tears with energy that dramatically slides from the shrill heights of triumph to the dark blows of defeat as she tells the story of her attempts at self-medication, her engagement with alcohol abuse, and just her ongoing quest to get fine diagnosis and treatment. And through her character, through this song leader character, she really, with the crazy energy and presence that she brings to the stage, she's really trying to make us understand what somebody who lives and suffers with bipolar disorder goes through with this constant sliding energy. It's grueling, it's exhausting to watch it, and she wants it to do that way so that we understand what she's gone through. It also talks about alcoholism and really how intertwined that is with bipolar conditions. And during the play, she has a white paper that she's consistently sharing statistics with the audience about bipolar condition and its relationship to a drug and alcohol abuse. And then I think the play also asked us to consider some very stark questions, which is how do we diagnose it, how do we treat it, but also how do we obtain ongoing medical treatment for it? And the separation is very frank in talking about the expense, but the struggle to maintain her medical treatment. So it's a great piece. It's getting a lot of show facing, it's touring to universities and colleges a lot to start the conversation, and it was recently spotlighted as part of the Medical Managers Conference. So again, it's an example of how our theater can be used to make social interventions through work that's very artistically well considered and well worth it. And just, I don't know if we did, how many people did these double time leaders go back? Great. And we're going to move on to three more quick plays to cover. The next is While the Witch Talk by Zina Gayeva from the Body of the Witch Talk. How many people show a hand from a while ago? Great. If you did not see While the Witch Talk coming to Los Angeles Theater Center this fall, I don't start playing in October, so. Can I ask how many do you saw? La Pura. La Pura and the Witch Talk with the bilingual. You saw in Spanish, and then the others saw while the Witch Talk. So I'll be discussing the English play, but it's really about the play thematic, so not so much about the different casting or the production. The While the Witch Talk is really a charming comedy that explores many themes relative to the Latino theater, because the Latino community, MBR, went to aging Latino, Carmela and Joaquin find themselves as the only Spanish secret in the nursing home in Wichita, Kansas. The Sparks, Wyandormans, Blossom. Zina Gayeva's play explores love in the golden years, while also highlighting the diversity between Latinos. We see a lot of difference between the Puerto Rican woman and his Mexican and American men debating the differences in their speech, accent patterns, the food, dancing and music. And so very sort of charming exploration of how we have our differences, what we find in commonality, and some of the ways they find commonality is in their shared language. The spoken Spanish language is what they find in Kansas as their fight of community. And the feeling of being away from home in this case, their home is not necessarily Puerto Rico or Mexico, but rather Brooklyn and Texas. And so again, the happy characters that are a U.S. Latino, but that their home and their culture is rooted in the U.S. sort of generational differences again between them and their children. The reason why they're there is because their children have very hectic professional lives and they can't sort of give them the care that they need. And so again, we see this issue of how our generations are dealing with elderly care and how can our community sort of deal with that situation. And again, we see the theme of mental health arising, which surprisingly really came up in almost all of the shows that we're looking at issues of mental health, which is a predominantly taboo subject in the Latino community and other communities. But it's starting, and I think theater artists are starting to use, you know, this is a platform and we see primarily long-term anxiety and depression threatens to keep the two apart after fucking uppers hurt in fact, but they are able to sort of reconnect. But really looking sort of at mental health is another major thing for the play. Also important to note that in this case too, she's a teacher, she's a retired grammar school teacher and he had his own hardware store, small business in Texas until being a home vehicle weekend. Thank you. Another way to show how the middle class is part of our ongoing theme. I'm going to, the last way I'm going to be discussing is Adelina Anthony and D Lo's The Beast of Time. So many people have really thought of this in the show. So D Lo contributed one monologue and the play is mostly by Adelina Anthony. And Anthony wrote the play in response to a series of newspaper articles that she read about the crisis of attract dolphin and the issues it raised for community. And she was struck by the way the news articles kept using the fraud length with Jews with Latinos and immigration like anchor baby and border crossers and she was married, I called for this. The play is set in a world post, the latest world crisis, which she said it's today, and focuses on the journey of cat and dog as they come into political consciousness as the pets of a lesbian couple of friends. I've driven my humor and comedy to explore matters of identity politics through sketches featuring various animals whose comments on how human intervention has compromised their quality of life. Pollution for sterilization, colonization, these are clearly positioned as alloys that serve as modern-day bagels. The production has a minimalist approach in style. The set, for example, the set is comprised of an old trunk with a giant stuffed dog on top of it. There's different items that are preset on the stage, including a huge dog bowl and a giant coffee, I mean massive coffee. I'm sharing your office as Rich called my bag. The actors are dressed in coveralls and their animal characterizations come about through physical interpretation and small costume pieces with their testimonial monologues consistently breaking the fourth wall. In this way, there's a work that clearly stands in conversation with the traditions of Chicano acto and at a prop theater. There's a real important politics to display, which is all the box office proceeds went to the support of queer and transgender homeless youth. So it was very, very powerful to go into that audience and to see this work and know where the box office proceeds were going. And I was incredibly struck by the diversity of the audiences, but I had the privilege of being there on the closing night when there was a huge section of the audience that worked with youth like presuming involved in this program and it was very, very powerful to see their response to this work and how it was clearly inspiring them to think about the own stories that they might have to tell. There's a lot of, you can see from the productions film, it's hysterical. It's constantly riffing on hip-hop and popular culture. It's very funny. The last thing I want to mention about this is it's the swan song of both artists in the iPod, it's the top of their artistic work and they both declared to me that this was their, that they were leaving the theater the focus full-time on film making in the middle of the campaign to raise money to make the film version of the Adam and the Anthony's Closing for Vessels. So I think that raises another question about just the work that's involved in being theater artists and about the tension between the recognition of film and just this kind of industry. So the final thing that we're going to talk about is Hungry Woman in Mexico. How many people have been the actors here, like Jorge Dominguez, the actress Pedro Mocero Uno. It's adapted from Lopez's novel Hungry Woman in Paris and it follows the journey of Cadela, a Mexican-American journalist who after using her to look for the moon as a suicide, ends her engagement and slides to move to Paris. This clearly focuses on her journey to self-discovery in cooking school while she struggles with her family's approval and these sort of gender norms that are being placed on her by her family. And some of the major themes that work in this play, again we see the issue of suicide, depression, and mental health. We have an interesting perspective on immigration, things that we have in the US, Latina, then becomes undocumented in France. We have a really important issue in sexual freedom, women's sexual freedom and how to play I think this major risk, especially being in in Boyle Heights with the audience, a community, an audience that comes to these shows to see a really sort of risk taking in the portrayal of anti-accommodation of sexual freedom for a female Latina which is really inspiring to see. And also resisting sort of heteronormativity. We see Cadela break up her engagement twice and ultimately at the end of the play, she does not ask for the partners, she's not married, she's a single woman and that's okay and that she doesn't have to sort of be partnered up. And this sort of comes about through a really interesting sort of brief dynamic from others about the play, it's constantly pressuring her to get married, to go back, but it's only through her becoming blind does she then see that her daughter must not be in this regard. And the mother is really in this great comedic way and then she becomes blind through complications of her diabetes and then she suddenly sort of realizes that her daughter isn't happy and gives her sort of the green light to break up the engagement with a very successful Latino. So that was a really interesting dynamic for me. Again, we see the character of La Galata or La Muerta playing a significant role in this piece that part of it back to our Tibetan theater roots. And with so many plays working for the Latino experience in America and I think it's really interesting we come to the U.S. Latina who leaves the U.S. in the Bush era trying to escape and not able to sort of deal with what was going on here and during the Bush administration and so she sort of is in a privileged position to leave the country and she realizes this privilege I think when she meets two other immigrants in France she meets a Colombian woman who's really struggling trying to stay in France as well as a Turkish Muslim woman who's trying to escape a harsh merit that she's in and she sort of really comes to understand her perspective and even says, you know, maybe I don't have it so bad in the U.S. and that at least I'm treated as a certain degree of a certain degree. So she understands sort of this issue in relation to other immigrant women's issues and lastly, again, we have another play that deals in the tribal area with we have English, Spanish and French so it's a really sort of refreshing piece. So I want to check on time because I know we're over in traffic for Q&A but we have a few minutes. It's 11.15. I remember in 11.15 we lived with the eight. So we have here you want to do like five minutes of Q&A if you guys I'm not, you started? Yeah, you did. You did it correctly. So we want to know, I mean we're hoping that we've inspired some questions and comments so we'll take it away. Okay, let me hear it. Yes. Why do you want to try these books? Is that something true to say? Is it like really like, I just love that I know from your Hollywood tradition of like an Anondua sort of outline of like if she actually embraces the borderlands and all these things are really like embracing that territory, making them honest. What was a great example because she, you know, she really wants to learn this language as just a very interdisciplinary topic and I think all these things do that because they're all our own sort of language and that's really inspiring and we can see that like we can help each other for a while and no one else I think can really put that on the computer. So I'm going to leave it there. And you had a hold on that, Diane? What, to talk about what happened? What happened? What happened? I actually wish that Michael John was here, that Michael John's asses was here because I would love to talk to him about my feelings about the portrayal of women in his production. You have to remember that the Broadway production was directed by a woman, Anna Shapiro, and I felt that as a director she protected the women much more than Michael did and I would love to actually have that kind of conversation in our future meetings in a very emotional way but just talk about this, that talk about these gender issues because I think they're very important and how men perceive women even as very conscientious and socially-marked directors. And I should say I didn't get to see the Broadway production. I was going on what I saw on the recording so I really appreciate you bringing that because I would have liked to have seen that. I'm thinking just about his casting of the Luscious Actual. So that was where I was coming from but I really appreciate, now I want to really get more about the different. Thank you. I wanted to just riffing a little bit on some of the motherhood questions. You said earlier about how it felt like it was an all-white audience sort of watching these people on stage and I feel that that happens a lot especially in our townie where any kind of ethnicity, you feel a little bit like you're sort of a pet project and put up every couple of years of rotation. You know, the Asian play, the Hispanic play, the Black play, that's a different thing now for some of you. And I really felt that with this piece somehow it was very pulled out and it was a, oh, look at that, you know, it didn't seem to really resonate with the audience except that they, oh, how interesting they are. Oh, they're so interesting. You know what I mean? I didn't know what that was about but the audience has been engaged in a way that I thought was true. Thank you. Any other comments? I just want to quickly add on that, if you looked at this year's self-constructs season and it also had a jinglet by the end of the month, and there was some looking at playing the scramble that you seriously think that's the art and... Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. Woo! Thank you very much. Thank you, man. Well, that leads me to basically what you're saying is that when it was out of this 12 years in America, I think, which indeed it is, and we're still not considered Americans. We're just not. That's the bottom line. We're still tough and foreign. We're still exotic and which is why we have to do things like this because we're still not part of it but at the same time then we continue to generalize ourselves. That's the same problem for 162,000 years and I don't know how that could solve. I don't know how we can deal with that but we're just not. Good many years ago, I did an evening of music in Paris and the greatest thing is that it was part of a three-day festival of American music. I was like, oh my God, we are Americans outside here but how do we change that perception? How do we deal with that? I said, we just, they're in my head. I must say that all these processes that we started a year ago and now it's about these questions. How to change the narrative of the American theater and in order to do that we have to know what the landscape is and how we as people in the community or people who have access to the mainstream can start moving forward so we can change it. And I think it's a different conversation that it was at the Gartina 20 years ago or 25 years ago. I hope this conversation will focus and hopefully in the artistic work and the aesthetic work and how we can move it to become part of the narrative of the American theater. Amazing, Diane. And Archie gets angry. And it was a releasing comment. And we are documenting all of this. You keep that in mind. It will be posted eventually. It's interesting to me that much of these plays were in English. I think only Nassarino was in Spanish. All the rest were in English. And we decided to do that. Oh, then what's the topic? Yeah. Yeah. And I just want to comment on that. How much of it is in English? I search for plays. I'm always looking for plays. And we find a lot in Spanish. And it's just a quick comment. I'm going to give a good surprise and discovery that most of the plays are being produced in English. Is that the question? Okay. And we come across a lot of people calling the theater company and say, well, is it on a Spanish? Or are you really happy to comment? I think that's the misconception as well. The evolution of U.S. latino dramaturgy or playwriting in the 1980s, there was a lot of money being pushed into the growth, the fourth foundation of growth and the development of latino in theater. And they also gave millions to the mainstream theaters. Some of the projects, the Spanish Playwrights Project was very important in the development of many of our most noted latino playwrights as well as programs of the entire New York and etc. What happened is our playwrights, if they wanted to get produced by a mainstream theater company, they could have very little code switching. But when you see community-based theater, which is what we've been talking about in every one of these, our community-based theaters, we really do capture the spirit of our communities, whether it's the Puerto Rican argument that Chicano speaks better Spanish than we don't know how to speak Spanish. Every production that I've been to, I've noticed audience members and even the one at the South Post Rep, the motherfucker, even there was a lot, there were a lot of, it was intertextually bilingual in many ways and there were a lot of responses to the Spanish. So there aren't people in the audience that even in plays like The Tapered Fears, that's Tapered in the regional theater, where we are not just farmers anymore. One last question for you too, sometimes. So I had a comment and then I had a question. In terms of when we see plays where the Latinos are represented just as prisoners or inmates, excuse me, not prisoners, inmates or maids or gang members, I think sometimes for me, I think about our social responsibility and how theater can influence social change. And when the play's done well to illuminate some of the negative parts of ourselves and feel that it has that kind of responsibility to be able to help that social change and continue raising us up so that we know how to handle those problems. And then my question I guess would be what theme is not represented yet in Latino theater? That's up to the audience. That's another questionnaire. What themes do you want our playwrights to be writing about or our collective theater companies to be writing about? It's up to you. In 1970, there was nothing about the LGBT community. It broke open in 1980. There was nothing, you know, until the women started to write about the lesbian experience and how they had plays about that issue, those issues in those communities within our community. So the question, I would just go back to you and to other people that you're responding. Do we have nobody asking questions online? There's one Twitter question. We've been through. The question is from Cynthia DeKerre. Are we still... Awesome. Are we still considered invisible or have we played our plays in our theater? We are not invisible in any of the theaters that I have been to. The audiences have been. That's the community. And so we are invisible to the dominant society. Very invisible. Last night, Bill Martin went out. Nobody's coming from Mexico anymore. And now they're going to put 20,000 more border guards into the building fence. We're here. She stayed up. Awesome. 23 Motown musicians. Two pumps. And he's to get a deal. Wants Marvin Gaye. Like their name. Not changing our name, they say. I'm Davis. He's a big time producer. Right? He thinks they're amazing. He wants to sign me. You know? You need to change your name. What? We're not changing our name. It's part of the vision of the group. It's the name and the content of the song says Dave, older brother and visionary. So death, the band, keeps the name death. And their vision intact a couple of years ago and a young white record collector pressed back in the day. It's like the best rock and roll he's ever heard. Collector say the best unknown black dude from Detroit. In fact, it sells on eBay for 800, it's a phenomenon. A discovery, a treasure. It goes viral. So one of the young guys calls up a friend a young black kid who's a musician and says, hey, want to listen to some music? You want to listen to this? And he listens and he says, oh my god, it's the best rock and roll I've ever heard. My dad and my band called death. Rodriguez, 60s, Indio looking dark, beautiful man with a beautiful talent and deep and resonant voice releases a couple of albums from major producers inspired. He's like James Taylor and Bob Dylan Rowland took one with a little dash of Jose Feliciano. A real discovery, much excitement. Well, the albums go nowhere. All those anticipated royalties never appear. Sisto for all intents and purposes says, oh well, I tried and he ends up working and supporting the family by doing demolition work. He basically, he's basically a laborer and loves it. So somehow his records end up in South Africa. He's in South Africa and over 40 years he gains a fan base. Not just any fan base. In South Africa, he's bigger than Elvis. Really, this is true back in Detroit. And he continues to live in the same humble house he has lived in and he does hard labor. Across the world, he's got a cult following if he's dead or alive. He's got a mission to find him and he does. They make a documentary and Sisto Rodriguez, humble dude that he is, is taken to South Africa various times to perform to wild crowds of Africaners who wrote about freedom and justice is there before their eyes. And Sisto gets on that stage and he performs like he never left. Like his life in Detroit with a fraud because this is who he really is. Sisto Rodriguez, superstar. In Detroit, demolishing buildings and walking through the brown stone like an apocalyptic process. Eight years ago, this horde culturist named Randy McDonald goes to Echo Park with his girlfriend. He's really admiring the lily pads. Back then, they were in good condition. It'd be nice to have a cutting. That would be illegal. What the hell? He goes to his car, gets on a hacksaw blade. Then he happened to be carrying around for moments such as these. He takes it back to Recita where he has a nursery and he starts growing it to sell. Flourishes. Meanwhile, in Echo Park, the lilies and the park aren't doing so well. In fact, the lilies died. Clothes for renovation two years ago. And the city is desperate. All the lilies have died in such an iconic symbol of the park. What to do? So Randy McDonald to the rescue. He connects with the city, tells him that he has a bunch of plants. The progeny of the original Echo Park lilies. Well, how did you get them? Mining detail. Story one, the hacking brothers. When do you give a little so that you can take a lot? Note, I'm not talking about compromise or selling out. I am not talking about cheating or stealing. I am talking about strategic give and not giving in. I'm talking about having a little give in order to achieve your goal. Too many of us don't want to compromise our vision. And what I am doing here is acknowledging that all of you in this room today have vision and you wouldn't be here if you didn't. Contemporary Latino theater would not exist for 50 years without your vision. But so many of us hold on stubbornly to the fact, to the first draft. And I use that metaphorically. The hacking brothers were brilliant, obviously. And I would think that their goal was to have their music heard. Couldn't these smart guys who had vision come up with another name that would have been equal or more brilliant than death to satisfy themselves and the record companies while achieving their greater goal? I'm an ideas person. Everyone that has worked with me knows that. I get it from my dad, Jake Rodriguez, who is always calling me and saying, I have an idea. And I was like, oh, my God, my God. Idea about circumventing my mother and trying to get her to do something she didn't want it to. Pitching ideas. If you don't like my ideas, because I have another one. And with the ideas and to just let them flow. And the two other brothers is that they didn't trust that they would have a better idea. Give a little. We all know playwriting is about rewriting. If you don't know that, or if you are a playwright who refuses to rewrite your career is reflective of that. And I am so sorry. Find people who you trust, whose work you admire, and who is admired by others and seek their opinion. And I'm not talking about buncha down the street. I talked to the buncha and she really liked my play. Usually they want me to change something. And usually they are right. It will make my work better. So you are in control of your vision and believe that if you change your work with the goal of improving it, you will retain it. See, story two. Now the most talented artists, the most brilliant, the most natural need drive, ambition, and a business sense. Now, you don't have to be the most talented, the most beautiful, the best poet, the richest organization, have the best building, the most people working for you, but you do need drive and ambition. Don't be embarrassed by that or deny it. You have to be competitive. And being competitive is about excellence. Now, excellence is a tough word for me. Determines who's excellent or not. When I was in the theater, I had to act next to Soprano Galdes. To this day, one of the two best actresses I have ever worked with. She, she was an inspiration. She was excellent. She could act like a man, better than a man, do a backflip, and then let out a sorrowful wail that would chill your back. Brilliant. But she burned out early, not interested in pursuing an artistic life. And me, the one with the tiny voice to balance the not-so-tiny body who wasn't very deep, who mugged and overactive, had the career. I wasn't excellent, but I had drive. And I could sense that I had presence. So in order to raise the bar for myself, I had to change. And I did that by listening to people I trusted because I wanted a life in the theater so badly. Seastone, his tape. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't. If the door is closed, I'll just go on the opposite direction and do something else. That was fine for him. But for me, and many of you, if the door is closed, you go around and you look for another door. And if you cannot find a door that is open, then you open one yourself and keep it open for others to go through. Now, I've spent 18 years not for profit organization. I can't even get it out. Instead of embracing the status quo, though, I have worked at a various hardcore establishment. Subversion. And I would, and it would no longer be private if I share them with you. You can see that I cut all this section. Well-respected. Oh my God, that's my niece. A theater. And to CTG's credit, they have made room for my subversion. As an outsider, then I sit at the table as a rebel who can politic that my job is to challenge, to tell the truth. I choose because I can, and when I can, what meetings I have to attend to and those I don't. If I feel my soul will be crushed or my heart broken, I will not go. If I feel like my spirit will be dulled or my hope dashed, you will not see me at the table. I sit at the table because I am hopeful, hopeful for change, but I never let myself get too comfortable. That's in general. And that is how. Discomfort makes me move, change, grow, activate, do. So three stories, three observations, three mantras, have been while competing and breaking rules. Last year at the TCG conference in Boston, I sat at an intergenerational leaders of color meeting and I sat next to Herbert Seguenza of culture class and next to Herbie was Benan Valdez. The high name is Olga Sanchez from the Miracle, across from us is Evelina Marcel-Louise. And Benan began the conversation by saying Diablo is reaching 50 years and he wondered if they had fulfilled their mission. Interesting question. And even more interesting was that they had been around for 50 years. Then Herbie says culture class was over 25 years and Olga chimed in and said Miracle was 30 and then so was Evelina. Yeah, we're almost 30. Well, we were stunned. It was an epiphany. This was an intergenerational meeting where, and a color where there were black companies, Asian, and we had the most experience, the most longevity. And it was the moment I believed we arrived. We arrived at the realization that we have longevity and through struggle we had survived. At that moment, we felt our power. I share an office with Melvin K. Darrell, a young black man who's my associate and I sent him the LA Times article that recently came out about this meeting today and it made him sad. He wondered what had happened to the black theater movement. Well, in many ways, black playwrights, not enough of course, but so many of them have been absorbed at the larger theaters. And this is not true of the Latino playwriting community. Yes, we have had two food surprise winners in the last 10 years who have been Latino, but that existence nationally has been elusive. Now, I observe that what we have turned around and we have made that a positive. We have supported a plethora of small Latino companies throughout the country who produced the work of Latinos for Latinos. And we have done this ourselves and not waited around for someone to do this for us. This is our power. At the TCG conference in Dallas and a colleague of mine who runs a similar black theater company lamented the fact that more large mainstream institutions were producing works of color, particularly black plays. Now, wait a minute. Did I hear that right? You have a problem with large theaters producing more works of color? Isn't that one we always wanted? Well, in her mind it was a threat. What was going to happen to her smaller company now that the community was going to go to the larger theaters? And this is, I am sure this is a real threat to her. She directed the threat of not being produced and we made it work for us. Now, this is a value we lead in and we must share this notion of redirection. Now, my advice to my colleague would be to redirect her mission, produce work that larger theaters would never produce, edgier work, intimate plays, more plays by women, by older artists. Redirection, you can only lead if you know your value and organize. We're here today doing so that the chaos of art making flourishes. I've been on the TCG board for four years. I was vice president last year and now I'm president of the board. I used to sit at the opposite end of where I would be sitting now, which would be at the head of the table. I used to sit at the other end, and I'm going to name names, with Sean San Jose from Composonville, Clyde Valenteen from the New York hip-hop festival, and Marc Valdez was not far away. And, you know, we had fun at the other end of the table with our little side comments. And my friends, you know, continue to hear cool as the renegade area. You know, so I decided to make them sit with me at the other end of the table and take their rightful place. You know, it's like real estate and in the words of my good friend, Dan Guerrero, it's location, location, location. We are beginning to do that. We must be visible, viable, to arrive. We must see you and hear you. I'm nervous about being president, and all I hear is it's so much work. Oh, it's so much work, it's worth it. Community like this comes up, and you have to do it. You do do it for yourself, but you do it for your community. And I'm like all of you. You know, I go to the movies, and Jay Dan and I, we wait for the credits, and then we count all the Spanish swimming. And the numbers are not the raising money, taking classes, traveling the secret work so that you can compare yourself to what in the field is supporting, but you have to apply for these national opportunities. For you, yes, but for our community. Otherwise, we can't blame anybody for our lack of presence in the national dialogue. We have to be leaders, organize. And yes, it's so much easier sitting at the other end of the table making snide comments and being critical, but we've got to get at the other end and take our place. Positioning is everything. And we can do this in our own way. Marcy McMahon recently sent me her book titled Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in U.S. Mahikana, and she got a literature and aren't. She outlines two concepts, one called redirection, which any other, disidentification. And I mentioned how you can redirect a negative into a positive earlier when I mentioned theaters taking on the banner of producing Latino plays when larger theaters were not. Disidentification is interesting in that someone identifies you in a way and you reject that identification and identify yourself in a new and different way. You take back your power. Now, I've been a theater artist for many years since I was a teenager. I started with a theater in my late teens. We were an activist company performing at rallies on picket lines of dirt in community centers living in... I actually lived next to a bar in Gilroy called El Torero. You know, we traveled all over Europe. We saw international theater. We worked with world-class artists. And this was our life. Now, I did my first movie when I was in the theater and it was a Richard Pryor movie called Which Ways Up and I played a farm girl, a cappuccino. I'm throughout the whole movie but I have no lines, okay? I'm a principal, not an extra. Beginning of my playing principal roles with no lines, with no voice as someone mentioned earlier. No voice. So, JD, my husband and I, we meet in the theater and we marry. We come to LA in the mid-80s and I began doing, you know, I began working in films and TV and I continue to do principles with no voice. You know, I'm a Determinator 2 La Bamba. I play, you know, the usual. I play prostitutes. I play gang moms. I play a couple of nuts with lines and Ghost Dad in Psycho 3 and I get cut out of both of those movies. The only thing in Psycho 3 is a snake pit, is in a snake pit in an insane asylum and all you can hear is my voice helping. When I turned 40, oh, I started playing with women who spoke Spanish and were sufridas. I mean, I don't know. She's a black woman, she played, she's on the beer scene. Fran, Franca, a judge on the same series and we share a dressing room or they put it in the green room or something and Fran was dressed in her judge, she's a black woman, an older black woman. She plays a judge and she comes in the dressing room or a green room with her robe of a judge and I walk in with my maids costume. And she was so kind. Oh my God. And I felt probably one of the worst moments of my acting life. So, I get a call from my then partner in Latin synonymous Lois de la Chine. She sees me in that role and she says, I saw you on the screen, and she says Diane, you know, shouldn't be doing that role. And I knew she was right. Not because she and I were judging other actresses playing maids but because she knew how devastating it was for me. How bad I felt. She also knew I had other means of making a living, much more meaningful ways. Now in Latin synonymous we were skewing and sterilizing the very roles where we were having to play. And I was living a double life and it didn't feel good. So I quit doing those kinds of roles and I redirected my career to give myself voice. I took back my power by dis-identifying with the image Hollywood gave me. I re-identified myself in the image of my own making. This is within our power to remake, to redirect ourselves and our organizations. I recently wrote an email to many of the L.A. members of the Alliance about the Apolina. Now, they produced my play Living Large in a Mini Kind of Way two years ago in Chicago and they did a great job producing it but they lacked the marketing resources to get an audience there. And we talked a lot about why that was but in a nutshell they overextended. Now they had lost their charismatic founders and they were struggling to move forward and they've made a lot of mistakes along the way and as we all do when we're young and inexperienced but they have dried and they want to be recognized as a viable group. And I've seen three of their shows and in each one of them they have a spirit and energy that is infectious and I think they have something and when they breeze through a town and they performed in L.A. I was taken by the three actresses who I felt were highly capable. The writing was switch to solid and yeah I needed better buttons but it was overall very strong and I was impressed by the audience participation can see which uses social media. Now the show was not visually stunning in any way it was very loosely directed but that wasn't the point. What struck me was the content that they were saying about either seriously either with seriousness or with humor about our lives here in the United States. I imagine that if they planted themselves in a venue for a longer run the production values of the show would be more polished and would elevate the show. But by going on the road they were taking their career in their own hands and making it happen the way they wanted it to happen and I applaud them for that. This is an example of redirection. So what I'm saying is we have the power to redirect our narrative to take our place at the table and give voice to ourselves and our community. We deserve that. The Afro-Luna had content and they deliver the content with clarity. I'm tired of giving money on panels to national groups or artists who do beautiful poise work but have no content who have nothing to say this work that we heard today. From the birth of the Afro-Papasino Chicano theater has been about content that the Naz festivals that are not standing from the other national the Aslan encourage discourse regarding themes and aesthetics and this made us better conscious of the choices we were making. This notion of content is what we have to offer US theater. Our narrative needs to be heard and it is our responsibility to plug into the world. If you don't we remain under the radar. We don't deserve to be underfunded and unrecognized. However, much work needs to be done. The bar needs to be raised in terms of quality of the work and I'm speaking on all levels play, writing, producing marketing, acting, design. I've seen some very good work and then like everything inconsistent and we must join national networks like national performance network national network ensemble theaters new new play network theater communications group we must supply for grants creative capital New England foundation of the arts national endowment the map the NEA the Irvine the melon no you may say you know what those foundations are completely out of my reach we'll get them in your reach you say you've applied for them and you never get them we'll get panel notes and address the notes listen to what people are saying about you as hard as that may seem listen between the lines maybe people sense you are under crisis management maybe the work is uncompetitive but the more you apply the more people you know will know about your company or you as an artist and eventually you will be rewarded and I'm gonna edit myself here I just saw yawn in the bath in luck that's something and the and the concept which money's sold in I mentioned today the concept of the way this meal for young you know okay so you know there's this there's this symbol we all know this which is this notion of activism they combine the one line is self and one is community and they combine to create the space in the middle where I live I live I am in my community and my community is me and we have a responsibility to hold doors open to be organized to be the best to lead and leading is about generosity not self it's about giving to others we have to lead all of you in this room have to lead we need you movements need leaders we are all working toward a common goal and we don't need one leader we need many and the best leaders are also very good followers my first full time here in San Juan Bautista was with with the year Peter Brooke came to town with his company and Peter one of us of course you know one of the most revered theater directors in the 20th century he rolls out the carpet and we all began an exploration to see how two very different groups can come together to find a common humanity and it was obviously very quickly that we had a lot in common and there was a heat spell that summer and I remember it very specifically and I was very fresh out of school wearing very short minis and I ran around with this English chick who was you know in her late 20s who everyone lost it after Helen Mirren and she and she you know taught me a few things about life and acting and she was the second best actress I'd ever worked with and Socorro was very competitive when they were one very light and one very dark and I really after all these years regret that Socorro did not continue her career but because like me and many other ones of us others of us she was tired not having a voice Peter would have both companies participate in a morning exercise and they were improvisations and he would say when you go on to the carpet the empty space if you will die let yourself die kill your ego when you roam into that space and see what you encounter frightening but something we all have to do the ego stops us it stops us from really being good it makes us say no as well and he was having a say yes to every improvisational encounter let go and give be generous on the carpet and he would make us all stand in a line looking forward barely touching the hairs on each other's arms and we stood there for however long it took until someone started to move and we couldn't look at each other but the point was that when Peter was watching he didn't want to see who was leading so you would stand there and you'd be there forever and then suddenly somebody starts you know moving their arm up and you're like who's doing that and but you're just following a person next to you suddenly the line was moving like a like a Ouija board forward and backwards and no one was leading it it moved by itself this entity this tribe this movement so many leaders make up a movement and though you may not seeing your impact you are leading be leaders in the field listen to those who you trust so that your work can have the highest quality possible leave the security of our communities and have national impact share and be generous with our discoveries about sustainability and community open your doors and be intergenerational and interracial we have never been at this point in our history take the banner and fold it high we have arrived and the march begins let's do it the actor is the actor he's so hot oh yeah I have a new phone number oh okay I'm harming him for three months it took me to get that new phone oh right okay okay you think water? coffee? yeah okay I'm going to get up right now and I'm going to get up right now yep I'm going to get up right now yeah I'm going to get up right now being so connected if you hear of anyone who's coming in no I don't know yeah I'm gonna come in the near later you are in the near I'm the victim of water the police the police hey hey where'd you hear of her where where'd I hear of her where'd you hear where'd you hear of her that