Visions From The Past

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Aristocratic Cuban exiles puzzle over the unfamiliar foods given to them as charity by some Dallas Presbyterians. A Southwest farm worker becomes obsessed with breeding the perfect fighting cock. A Manhattan drug dealer demands that his son stay off drugs -- or, if he must get high, that he do it in his father's company, at home. A Chicano woman struggles to bring to justice the Texas police chief who murdered her common-law husband.

These emotionally vibrant, and frequently violent, images come from an emerging cadre of playwrights who are perhaps the most eagerly cultivated new voices in the American theater. Like blacks a generation ago, Hispanics have become the ethnic group of the moment, both off-Broadway and at many of the nation's foremost regional theaters. From Manhattan's Public Theater through the Milwaukee Repertory Theater to the Los Angeles Theater Center, they are using their new ascendancy to reach main stages and middle-class white audiences.

The new generation takes its inspiration from the pioneering Hispanic playwrights Maria Irene Fornes (Fefu and Her Friends), Luis Valdez (Zoot Suit, I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges) and the late Miguel Pinero (Short Eyes). Four younger writers particularly stand out. They happen to reflect the major ethnic subdivisions within the Hispanic community -- Cuban exile, Chicano, Puerto Rican and Latin American emigre -- and to embrace literary styles ranging from political invective to lyrical recollection. What distinguishes them, however, is not such representative qualities but a memorable personal vision.

Perhaps the most gifted is Eduardo Machado, 35, a Cuban expatriate who arrived in the U.S. at age eight, speaking no English, when his family fled Castro's Cuba. Brought up in Los Angeles, he now divides his time between a house in suburban Pasadena, Calif., and an apartment in Manhattan. A would-be actor, he began writing plays when a therapist suggested he compose an imaginary letter of forgiveness to his mother. Among his best works: The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, an evocation of the complex caste system in Cuba six decades ago, and Once Removed, which captures the bafflement and determination of a family uprooted by the Castro revolution and exiled in the U.S. "I was the first Hispanic playwright in America to write about upper- class people," says Machado. As a result, he believes, "I don't get performed much by Hispanic theaters. I find that odd -- they still believe in the stereotype."

At the other end of the political spectrum is Carlos Morton, 40, a didactic, polemical, yet often fiercely funny Texan. Born in Chicago, Morton spoke only Spanish until age five, then adopted English. Frequently uprooted to such places as Panama and Ecuador because his father was a career military man, he now teaches at Laredo Junior College, a few blocks from the Mexican border.

Morton's The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales is seemingly calculated to rouse the audience from their seats directly into a protest rally. The framing story is the trial of a brutal, ignorant police chief in rural Texas for the killing of a young Chicano suspected of burglary. Morton's other plays mingle reality and daffy fantasy, human characters and cartoonish stereotypes in order to teach -- or preach -- the Hispanic history of the Americas. Says he: "I've seen the glaring difference between the First World and the Third World, and it weighs heavy on my soul."

Reinaldo Povod's first full-length play, Cuba and His Teddy Bear, included a street-poet character who was widely seen as a tribute to Miguel Pinero. And like Pinero's. Short Eyes and Valdez's Zoot Suit, Povod's explosive play made the move to Broadway. The script was helped by the casting of Robert De Niro in his first New York stage role in 16 years. Its central character, like the author, was a bright and literate kid who turned to drugs just because they were so pervasive in his environment. Povod, 28, admits that he was addicted for six years.

As with most playwrights who score a success the first time out, Povod was hammered by reviewers for his next effort, La Puta Vida, a trio of one-acts depicting sexual depravity and family murder. "Those guys have no contact with people like us, so how can they judge you fairly?" says Povod of his critics.

Milcha Sanchez-Scott, 33, was born in Bali of an Indonesian mother and a Colombian-Mexican father, and lived as a child in Mexico, South America and Britain before her family settled near San Diego when she was 14. Although her father was a middle-class gardener, she identified with those who had not yet fit into the economic system. She became a sometime actress who also worked as a maid and at a temp agency.

Of these four playwrights, Sanchez-Scott is closest to the Latin American tradition of "magic realism," in which visionary or hallucinatory elements coexist with a gritty naturalism much as they do in the fiction of Borges and Garcia Marquez. In the play on which her reputation rests, Roosters, what seems a straightforward depiction of the life of farmhands gives way to mysterious visitations, symbolic cockfights enacted by dancers, virginal girls wearing wings, archetypal confrontations between father and son.

The leading Hispanic writers are joined by a diversity of other developing talents, including Jose Rivera (The Promise), Lynne Alvarez (The Wonderful Tower of Humbert Lavoignet), Reuben Gonzalez (The Boiler Room) and Romolo Arellano (Tito). Like the black writers of a generation ago, the Hispanics seem to be moving beyond an initial preoccupation with anger, self-pity and reductionist politics toward a stage literature that communicates rather than confronts, that reaches for universality and yet portrays people individually. Enriching the American dramatic vocabulary with Latin techniques and traditions, these new playwrights also emulate their U.S. forebears: as in the heritage stretching from O'Neill and Tennessee Williams to Sam Shepard and August Wilson, the overwhelming concern is the family, and the perpetual battleground is the hearth. The nominal topic of debate may be a fighting cock rather than a football game, but the passions of these playwrights are genuine Americana.

With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago, with other bureaus