Political Puerto Rican Play

[Ecuajey]

Inspired By A `Haunted' Bed | Puerto Rican Statehood Issue Spawns Rivera's `Adoration'

Jennifer de Poyen

September 22, 2002
Copyright © 2002 The San Diego Union-Tribune.
All rights reserved.

When Jose Rivera was a boy, he loved to sit at his mother's knee and listen to stories of his Puerto Rican ancestors. There were chronicles of inflamed passions and family betrayals, of lovers crossed and disasters scarcely averted. And then there was his grandfather's tale of a conquistador in full armor, astride a white horse, bursting out of the trunk of a tree that the old man climbed as a boy.

"The stories were just outrageous, and they were told totally deadpan. This was my life as a little boy," Rivera recalled recently. "Most people would separate the two: There's reality here, there's the supernatural there; there's the waking life here, there's dreams over there.

"In the world of my youth, there wasn't that division. There were elements of the fantastical, of the dream, and these things become interchangeable."

Fortunately for the theater-going public, Rivera has never felt the need to choose between the real world and the realm of dreams and nightmares, fantasy and folklore. Instead, he's taken the tall tales that buzz in his brain and transformed them into stories for the stage. His journey from his first realist, Chekhov-inspired play to his current perch as one of America's foremost Latino playwrights has been one of honoring the "mad realism" he experienced as a child, and of trusting his ear for how people speak.

"There weren't any books in the house except for a Bible. And my parents on my mother's side were illiterate -- they could only sign their names with an `X,' " said Rivera, who lives in Los Angeles. "Because I grew up without books, I was always listening, so my ear is really good.

"There were incredible storytellers in my family. Especially my mother -- she's dazzling. She can sit down and tell stories for hours without taking a breath. So when I did write, even when I attempted a novel, it was always about what people were saying, not `It was a dark and stormy night.' "

Rivera has returned to La Jolla Playhouse -- which has commissioned three of his scripts, debuted four of his plays and shepherded some of the best productions of his work -- with his latest play, "Adoration of the Old Woman."

If Rivera's work has consistently found a home in La Jolla, says Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff, it's because the theater's "job is to create opportunities for writers to do their dream projects here."

That, and McAnuff recognizes Rivera's gifts.

"Jose brings a unique voice to the theater," he says. "He consistently creates complex characters. He's brilliant with language, and he has an amazing grasp of magical realism. That term has become a cliche, but the way that Jose's work lives on the stage on so many levels is very rare."

The Playhouse premiere, which opens tonight at Rivera's beloved Mandell Weiss Forum, is directed by Jo Bonney. Best known for her work with Eric Bogosian, she also staged the New York production of Rivera's "References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot" after its debut at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa.

From family to fruition

"Adoration" began to germinate seven years ago, when Rivera returned to Puerto Rico to bury his father. After the funeral, Rivera remained for a time on the island of his birth, bunking with his mother's family in a little barrio called Las Arenas. It was there he met his great-aunt, and discovered the central conceit for the play.

"She was a very old, very wacky woman who was incredibly upset because she couldn't find anyone to deal with her bed problem, which was that it was haunted by the dead mistress of her dead husband," Rivera said. "She couldn't sleep, she was crying all the time, and I was just dumbfounded. I thought I was the luckiest writer who ever lived."

As it happened, Rivera was going through a turbulent time of his own. At 40, his father was dead; his marriage to Heather Dundas, which had produced two children, was falling apart; and after a disappointing spell in television, he was trying to write feature films. Not ready to embark on a major writing project, he put the story in his back pocket and let it grow, knowing that one day it would bear fruit.

Always mindful of the advice of his mentor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rivera knew that he could use the old woman's haunted bed to tell the larger, and largely untold, story of the Puerto Rican struggle for self-determination.

"In my experience, an audience will give you one thing: I'll believe that, and then you have to prove the rest. It's like the `Wizard of Oz': OK, I'll believe that a tornado took you to this other world, and then we'll see what happens next," said the 47- year-old Rivera, who is shuttling between La Jolla and Argentina, where Walter Salles ("Central Station") is directing Rivera's first feature film screenplay, "Motorcycle Diaries," about Che Guevara's travels in South America.

"It's like when you sit at your grandparent's knee, or around the campfire. You want to go there, you want to believe."

Once his life settled down, and the Playhouse's artistic staff began asking after the play that had been commissioned years before, there was only one missing piece of the puzzle: a Latina actress who had the range and experience to embody the complex character he envisioned. Then, two years ago, at the Playhouse to see Federico Garcia Lorca's classic tragedy "Blood Wedding," he discovered Ivonne Coll, whose cante jondo, or deep song, and striking portrayal of Lorca's matriarchal figure formed one of the most memorable theatrical events of the last few seasons.

"Seeing `Blood Wedding' convinced me to write the play," Rivera said. "When I saw Ivonne, I knew I could write a really expansive role for her."

Coll, for her part, is thrilled to be playing a tailor-made role that also "embodies my country, the soul of my people, the struggle for the freedom we have never had." Speaking by phone prior to the play's first preview performance, the former Miss Puerto Rico spoke volubly about her debut as the centenarian Dona Belen.

"I love her wit, her intelligence, her strength, her folk wisdom," said Coll, who spent her first 27 years on the island before moving to what Puerto Ricans call "the mainland," where she has lived another 27 years. "She's 105 and going for 110. She was born in the year of the gringo invasion -- that's what she calls the American takeover -- and she still has a lot to figure out."

The daughter of a jibaro -- a Puerto Rican expression for people who come from the countryside and who have "the earth in their soul" -- Coll is drawing on three influential women in shaping her role.

"Every Sunday when I was a child, my mother would take me to the country to visit these old women, and this was the only life they knew, their campo, their farm," Coll said fondly. "They weren't sophisticated or rich, but they were rich in the land, they possessed the land, and it possessed them, too. So now I am channeling Dona Juanita, Dona Panchita and my mother to portray this beautiful jibaro spirit."

Poetic and, for Rivera, unusually realistic, "Adoration" is also an overtly political play, dealing in direct terms with the internecine struggle to determine Puerto Rico 's future. Although mainlanders, and particularly faraway West Coasters, are largely unaware of Puerto Rican politics beyond the controversial U.S. Navy bombing drills on the outlying island of Vieques , the debate among proponents of various constitutional models -- independence, statehood and commonwealth -- is fierce, and often defines people's relationships to each other.

"Adoration" is perhaps the most prominent American play to take on Puerto Rican politics of any era. There is a Rene Solivan play in development, "Miss Lebron and Her Escorts," about a Puerto Rican woman who, to draw attention to the plight of the island's independence, fired shots in the air in the U.S. Congress in the '50s. (In a recent staged reading, Coll tackled the part of Lolita Lebron.) But there's a collective sense of excitement at the Playhouse about Rivera's take on contemporary Puerto Rican politics.

"I think this play," McAnuff said, "has the potential to make a significant contribution to the American theater."

In "Adoration," the debate between independence and statehood is embodied by Cheo, a fiery idealist portrayed by John Ortiz, a notable interpreter of Rivera's work ("Cloud Tectonics," "Sueno," "The Street of the Sun") and by Ismael, a complacent, suave businessman played by Gary Perez, who appeared in Berkeley Repertory Theatre's 1997 production of "Cloud Tectonics," a Playhouse commission.

Of his own politics, Rivera says he sides with the more charismatic independista Cheo, though he acknowledges that he doesn't "have to live with the consequences of independence, whatever they may be."

"When they asked Socrates why health is important, his answer was, `It's obvious why health is important; you don't have to ask the question.' For me, independence is like that. Puerto Rico is one of the last remaining places in the world that isn't its own country," said Rivera, pointing to Palestinians and Irish Catholics as two other peoples who have sought self-determination.

Coll, who remains a prominent figure in the land of her birth, which is still home to all her family, believes that freedom from U.S. rule is Puerto Rico 's divine right.

"I believe we have a God-given right to possess this island, to determine its future," Coll said, sounding much like America's Founding Fathers. "Whatever else you might believe, you have to love the country for what it represents -- the soul of the people."

Rivera's goal for his play in La Jolla is to make "some kind of contribution to the debate. Maybe here it will have the effect of raising some consciousness about it.

But if it ever gets done in Puerto Rico , he says with a laugh, "I'd like nothing more than to see a riot on opening night."

Opens 8 tonight. Continues 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays and 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through Oct. 20

La Jolla Playhouse, UCSD, La Jolla

$39 to $49 (858) 550-1010 or www.lajollaplayhouse.com