dreams destroyed by hate
by Douglas Messerli
Luis Valdez (writer and director),
music by Lalo Guerrero Zoot Suit /
Los Angeles, the Mark Taper Forum, the performance Howard Fox and I saw was on
March 11, 2017
At another moment, after being released
from more than a year in prison for a crime that none of them committed, one of
the so-called Chicano 38th Street gang, Ishmael “Smiley” Torres
(Raul Cardona), reports that there is no place for him any longer in Los
Angeles and that he intends to move to Arizona; the audience laughed and
hooted, clearly referencing their knowledge of the bigoted actions of former
Arizona sheriff Joseph Michael "Joe" Arpaio, and the continued
conservative immigration attitudes of that
The mostly younger cast, headed by the
trickster figure, El Pachuco (Demian Bichir), played their roles well and
danced with enthusiasm. The lead character, Henry Reyna (Matias Ponce), his
gang-member partners, the already mentioned “Smiley,” Tommy Roberts (Caleb
Foote), and Joey Castro (Oscar Camacho), and the women in Henry’s life, Della
Barrios (Jeanine Mason) and Alice Bloomfield (Tiffany Dupont) are all charming
performers, and help to make this work riveting.
And then, there are all those wonderful
Lalo Guerrero songs: “Zoot Suite Boogie,” “Chucos Suaves,” “Vamos a Bailar,”
and “Marijuana Boogie”; my only wish was that there had been more.*
The original play opened at the Mark
Taper Forum in 1978, with a cast that included Edward James Olmos, Daniel
Valdez, Tyne Daly, Lupe Ontiveros, Tony Plana, Robert Beltran, and many other
noted actors, not only ran in sold out performances at the Taper, but was so
successful that it continued throughout the year at the Aquarius Theater. New
York, however, did not quite take to the work, and on Broadway it ran for only
41 performances.
As the author, himself, notes, “Zoot Suit is a quintessential Los
Angeles play. It represents the fabric of the city, the internal strife, the
Sturm und Drang of Los Angeles, what forced it to be the city it is today.”
The central focus of Valdez’ work is the notorious Sleepy Lagoon Murder
of August 2, 1942, where 21 innocent, mostly Chicano, zoot-suit-wearing young
men were arrested and convicted in a sham trial—as the play presents it, the
young men were forced to remain in their elaborate suits throughout the trial,
and were forced to stand with every mention of their name, while simultaneously
being kept apart from their defense lawyer, George Shearer (Brian Abraham)—and were
sentenced to
But the real point here is not so much
guilt or innocence, but the entire notion of what it means to be an outsider in
a world in which you live. To the LA press and prosecutors, the very fact that
these young men dressed differently from others and represented a different
cultural perspective, proved their unworthiness. The Japanese had already been
shuffled off to internment camps (see my pieces in My Year 2007 and My Year 2015),
and it only followed, as it does in all times when people feel threatened by
what they do not know, that the young Chicano men should also feel the
country’s wrath. Throughout the US, but particularly in Los Angeles, soldiers
and sailors, after the arrestment of the zoot suiters, randomly attacked young
men wearing what they saw as peacock-like costumes, virtually, if not
literally, raping them, stripping their clothes from their backs. Later in the
play, we see the sad consequences of this, as Henry’s younger brother, Rudy
(Andres Ortiz), now a Marine uniform, recounts how he was so attacked. He
resents his brother simply not being there to protect him.
The zoot suits represented many things: the possibility of wealth, the
differentness of identity, and, yes, a
preening of the male ego. But here, we realize that it had become almost a sign
of meaningful dress as important to the young Chicanos as the Marine, Navel,
and Army uniforms were to the others. The sad, so very sad fact was that Henry
Reyna, the charismatic leader who had already been wrongly arrested several times,
had dreamed and hoped for a life of normalcy, and was planning a few days after
from the Sleepy Lagoon events to join the navy. What might his life have been
if he had given that simple opportunity?
As it was, even though hundreds of
well-meaning Los Angeles citizens, including celebrities, fought for his
freedom, his year-long prison stay would inevitably change his life forever,
and, as we are told in a kind of prelude to the ending, he eventually was
arrested again for burglary, killing a fellow prisoner, and finally dying in
the 1970s, a broken man.
But the narrator El Pachuco “revisits” that ending, describing the brief
life stories of others involved and transforming the criminal facts to the
explanation of his involvement within his community, as husband and father to
children. Yet, by this time we know El Pachuco is a far from reliable narrator.
In his attempts to repeat the worst of the facts of racial hatred and its
terrible results, he mocks and challenges any of the young Henry’s dreams for a
better life, and it is only when Henry fights back from that viewpoint of
desperation that he has the possibility to change it. The trickster is just
that, a man who helps keep his own kind down by daily
Despite my deep respect and admiration
of this work, however, I left the theater feeling that the whole had not quite
been integrated. Basically, it is a series of dramatic events
Coming out of the United Farm Workers, El Teatro Campesino performances,
moreover, Valdez was never quite able to link the various tableaux of his tale
in a truly integral way. Even as we are moved by its many parts, the parts
still seem not to be quite woven into a whole. Finally, I’m not sure the
gravely-voiced Birchir was quite strong to play host to the work’s many
disparate parts.
Still, I wouldn’t have missed this revival for anything in the world. We
all need to be reminded again and again of the horrible histories that have
transpired in Los Angeles—as well as so many other American cities—throughout
the years. What happened to these 21 boys happened elsewhere to Emmet Till,
what happened to Emmet Till happened to the
entire West Coast Japanese community, and what happened to the Japanese
happened again to Rodney King, all of which is threatening to happen all over
again. And one cannot say enough about the bravery of figures like Gordon
Davidson, the original founder of this very theater, who died late last year,
and offered up his stage in 1978 to this play’s Luis Valdez.
Certainly, the audience at the performance I saw—so very different from
the elderly graying-haired audiences of so many of my theater events—clearly
enjoyed this exploration of cultural history, raucously applauding even the
minor figures, such as Reyna’s mother and father (Rose Portillo and Daniel
Valdez), as much for their titular roles, as the major actors.
Los Angeles, March 12, 2017
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance
*In the past few years, through
Howard’s work on a show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of the artist
Carlos Almaraz—who, incidentally, created a mural for the original production
of this play—we have become friends with Daniel Guerrero, himself an outsized
theatrical figure, the son of the US National Heritage treasure, composer and
musician Lalo Guerrero.
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