Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

260 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
Denzel Washington plays Troy Maxson, a retired Negro League
baseball star, and Viola Davis plays Rose, his wife, in one of the happier
moments during August Wilson’s most famous play, Fences. Kenny
Leon directed this 2010 Broadway revival. © Joan Marcus
Latino theatre, often distinguished by its language as
well as its ethnic roots, has also blossomed in today’s
open environment. Spanish-speaking theatre is hardly
a recent innovation in North America— the first play
staged on this continent was Los Moros y Los Cristianos
(The Moors and the Christians) at the San Juan Pueblo
near Santa Fe in the sixteenth century. But the 1965
founding of El Teatro Campesino by Mexican American
Luis Valdez became the impetus to create a truly
national movement of homegrown Latino theatre in the
United States. Created in conjunction with the United
Farm Workers union in rural California, Valdez’s Teatro
and its powerful creative and political thrusts electrified
California audiences and won national acclaim,
particularly for its groundbreaking Zoot Suit (1978),
written by Valdez about riots in the Los Angeles barrio
that pitted Mexican American migrants against the
Los Angeles police and politicians in the early 1940s.
In this work, Valdez employed Brechtian techniques to
raise social, political, and economic questions, while
retaining a distinctly Latino voice. The play went on
to Broadway and was eventually adapted into a feature
film. “In a Mexican way,” wrote Valdez in 1966, “we
have discovered what Brecht is all about. If you want
unbourgeois theatre, find unbourgeois people to do
it.” El Teatro Campesino continues to perform, at least
intermittently, at its permanent home in San Juan Bautista,
California.
Today, the works of dozens of Latina and Latino dramatists
can be seen around the country. Cuban-born Nilo
Cruz received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his enchanting
Anna in the Tropics, portraying Cuban émigré workers
in a Florida cigar factory. His rapturous adaptation of
Calderón’s classic Life Is a Dream successfully premiered
in California in 2007. Octavio Solis, born of Mexican
immigrant parents in El Paso, Texas, was nominated for
a 2009 Pulitzer for his intense Lydia. This realistic yet
often mystical drama of a family not unlike Solis’s own
had earned extravagant praise in its initial productions in
Denver and Los Angeles; his “dream play,” Se Llama
Cristina, enjoyed a “rolling world premiere” at the
Kitchen Dog Theatre in Dallas, the Boston Court Theatre
in Los Angeles, and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco
in the winter of 2014–2015. Puerto Rican–born José
Rivera’s Marisol (1992), a fantasy about a woman and
her guardian angel in the tradition of magic realism, has
been produced throughout the country; his Sermon of the
Senses (2014) was the closing work of an epic 50-play,
54-actor, six-hour performance entitled The Mysteries at
New York’s Flea Theatre. And Chicana author Josefina
López is known for, among other works, her Real Women
Have Curves (1990), which after its stage success became
an award-winning entry at the Sundance Film Festival.
She has since written twenty plays; her latest project to
date is TV’s “The Fabulous Fernandez Sisters” on ABC,
beginning in 2015.
Asian American theatre has claimed its share of
the American theatrical scene as well; its watershed
moment was the success of David Henry Hwang’s M.
Butterfly, which received both a Tony Award and a Pulitzer
Prize during its 1988 Broadway premiere. Hwang’s
play boldly reinterprets the story of Giacomo Puccini’s
opera Madama Butterfly, with careful attention to its
political and sexual prejudices, while incorporating
both Western and Beijing opera (xiqu) techniques into
a contemporary, highly postmodern play that explodes
“Orientalist” stereotypes about Asians as viewed by
Westerners. Hwang’s career continues to flourish (see
the chapter titled “The Playwright”) with his Golden