HE DOORS OF THE RAND THEATER OPEN onto a mild roar of animated conversation. From the crowd in the brightly lit lobby, it's immediately obvious that the power to draw young audiences is possessed by the performance artists staging their work, this Saturday night in October, as part of the twentieth anniversary celebration of UMass's New WORLD Theater.
Over the tinted and elf-locked heads of the younger set and the less picturesque pates of older types, ushers keep announcing that the house doors are being kept closed until the show starts at 9:00 p.m. Audience members are asked to enter and find seats at the same time. A "boundary-blurring" tactic, perhaps, by the creators of Borderscape 2000: Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the first Chicano artist to receive a MacArthur genius grant; Roberto Sifuentes; and Sara Shelton-Mann.
When we finally surge into the auditorium, mist is billowing and a rap soundtrack is pummeling against the glorious waves of a Puccini aria being sung by a soprano in a frothy red boa. Behind her, a screen silently flashes B-movie jungle scenes. Rubber chickens dangle from the ceiling. On one side of the stage writhes a green alien with an oversized head. Center stage is held by two cyber-soldiers called CyberVato and Mexterminator, the latter in superannuated arm-braces, tattoos, and black leather pants. From his wheelchair, he announces that the nation-state has collapsed as a result of the second U.S.-Mexican War and we should "prepare for the brownhouse effect."
In this "high-tech Aztec Spanglish lounge operetta," as they describe it, Gómez-Peña and his collaborators leave no Chicano stereotype unsubverted in their effort to put the teeth back into the discussion of multiculturalism. A transgender mariachi is crucified, a hermaphrodite boxer dances around in black high heels, a gang member clubs a rubber chicken used by some as a symbol for migrant workers to the tune of "Hotel California." In a response session the next morning, Gómez-Peña explained that he believes "a Benetton/Disney/cutesy multiculturalism" has set in. "We wanted to bring back the political discourse that people had gotten sick of and use political, race, gender, and religious issues that would raise the temperature of the audience's blood," he said. Borderscape 2000 is "what would happen if the Benetton models got angry and seized control of the cameras."
You were expecting a little Shakespeare or O'Neill, maybe? You can get scintillating Shakespeare from the Department of Theater; you can even get the bard on TV nowadays. But not from New WORLD Theater, which held this conference "New Works for a New WORLD: An Intersection of Performance, Practice, and Ideas" to celebrate two decades of producing plays not typically seen in commercial and academic theaters and a long way off from primetime TV.
"These are not pieces that mainstream theaters are going to put in a subscription series with A Christmas Carol," says Roberta Uno '94G, artistic director of NWT and an associate professor of theater at UMass. UMass is "the only university doing this," she believes, and NWT, a theater in residence at the Fine Arts Center, has been at it for so long that it's welcoming a second generation. Stationed at the conference registration table in Memorial Hall was Tavar Davis `02, son of Derek Davis `82, one of the three work-study students with whom Uno founded NWT in 1979.
Coin is as important as continuity in the business of inching marginalized works toward an unwelcoming middle ground, and the list of financial backers Uno has enlisted makes one wonder whether she gets any sleep at all. "Early on, it was difficult to get funding," she says. "We were seen as a precious academic experiment. Even now it's difficult. But there are some funders who understand the value of a place that can cross the boundaries and bring together academia, activism, and community."
The theater has been awarded two $100,000 grants from the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Leadership in the Arts Program, and a number of other heavyweight philanthropical institutions have weighed in with support. Uno cites Sam Miller, head of the New England Foundation for the Arts, as taking an especially active role in connecting NWT with artists and organizations, and it was funding from the foundation that allowed NWT to commission the three works that were shown during the conference weekend and, before that, workshopped in NWT's "New Works for a New WORLD" play lab. (In addition to Gómez-Peña's Borderscape 2000, the plays were the bodies between us by là thi diem thuy and Quinceañera by Alberto Antonio Araiza, Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, and Danny Bolero Zaldivar.)
To see these works performed and join in response sessions; to present case studies of their own projects; to participate in panel discussions on topics such as whether the play lab is a birthing room or an artistic ghetto for artists of color; to hear Ellen Stewart, founder of LaMaMa E.T.C. and the mother of world theater, give her blessing to the conference, and to murmur fervently in agreement when she introduces herself as " a person of the world, not any race, not anything; I've been this all my life and I'm not going to change"; to simply mix with fellow professionals doing and discussing non-mainstream theater at UMass, and thereby set foot in the iota of an ideal cultural world that Uno has actualized at UMass to do these things, conference participants traveled from as far away as Los Angeles, Singapore, Wales, Korea, Mexico. "One attendee, an African American playwright, told me she was pouring out her change jar to get here," says Uno. She puts emphasis on "playwright," conveying her chagrin that a working artist still has to count out nickels and dimes.
"Artists recognize when they come here that this is a special place," says Uno. "A lot of people have said to me, marveling about the conference, `God, how did this happen?' Audiences here don't get, for example, just one `black play' a year." Thanks to the plays NWT has presented over the years, says Uno, "These are audiences who've had many options. And this year's conference, the play labs, and many productions are the result of NWT's collaboration with UMass's Department of Theater, which Uno emphasizes is pivotal to her organization's success.
"This faculty and staff and chair, Richard Trousdell, are to be commended," Uno says. "Other departments would never take such risks to produce new, controversial work and collaborate with artists working across boundaries. This department has shown courage with new production practices."
She pauses. "Twenty years ago, I thought things would've been different by now, that the mainstream would've changed and these plays would be going on in all kinds of schools."
-Deborah Klenotic
