BY LUCIA MAURO
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Jose
Rivera
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As I raced home from another interview that ran overtime to telephone playwright José Rivera, bizarre obstacles were strewn in my path. I felt like supernatural forces challenged me to arrive on time to make my call. I soon realized that a José Rivera play was crackling across this frenetic little Lakeview universe. And in all the stressful absurdity, time seemed to stand still. I somehow floated back to my apartment–only five minutes behind schedule–and called Rivera at his Los Angeles home. Then time began to bend again.
After only 45 minutes, I had scribbled close to 15 pages of detailed notes and believed I could write a novella on him. Then I wondered if the past hour had been a mirage. After all, it encompassed a near-fatal bus crash which I witnessed and an enlightening interview with Rivera–proof that, as the playwright would explain, "within the broad realm of realism, it is possible to create magic."
The Puerto Rico-born playwright, who studied with magical-realist novelist Garbriel García Marquéz at the Sundance Institute, learned from his mentor that "nothing is symbolic; nothing is pure imagination. Everything comes from life itself."
Rivera, who grew up on Long Island, has created an abundance of non-linear tragicomedies that transform the bizarre into the familiar, and where ordinary occurrences journey across fantastical landscapes of the mind. In her Introduction to "Marisol and Other Plays," director Tina Landau describes Rivera’s works as "investigations into the notion of Time on stage."
She writes, "Each Day Dies with Sleep compresses it [time], proceeding at a frantic pace with scenes popping in and out of each other. Marisol elongates it, as the first act’s episodes dissolve into a seamless second act, which seems to take place in eternal limbo."
Rivera will be in Chicago in conjunction with greasy joan & company’s production of Marisol–his 1993 apocalyptic New York City-set play centered on the possibility of an angelic rebellion against a senile God–running through April 6 at The Viaduct. On March 13, Rivera will participate in a post-show discussion with Goodman artistic associate Henry Godinez at The Viaduct, 3111 N. Western Ave. On March 14 at 3 p.m., Rivera will discuss his writing process and how he joins art and politics at the University of Chicago’s Reynolds Club, 5706 S. University Ave. The event is moderated by Steppenwolf’s literary manager Ed Sobel.
Rivera’s plays are produced regularly across the country and have been translated into several languages. They include: The House of Ramon Iglesia, The Promise, Each Day Dies with Sleep, Cloud Tectonics, The Street of the Sun, Sonnets for an Old Century, Sueño, Giants Have Us in Their Books, References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot and Adoration of the Old Woman. His work has been seen at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Circle Rep, Playwrights Horizons and the Public Theatre in New York; Los Angeles Theatre Center, Berkeley Rep, La Jolla Playhouse and the Mark Taper Forum in California; the Humana Festival, Hartford Stage Company, Goodman Theatre and on the PBS series "American House," among others.
Honors include two Obie Awards for playwriting (including one for Marisol) and a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Grant. Other awards are a Fulbright Arts Fellowship in playwriting, the Whiting Foundation Writing Award and a McKnight Fellowship. He was a writer-in-residence at London’s Royal Court Theatre and co-created/produced the NBC-TV series, "Eerie, Indiana." Currently, Rivera is working on a musical version of Federica Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding for Broadway, School of the Americas (commissioned by South Coast Rep) and Six Billion Devils for New York’s LABYrinth Theatre Company.
Right now, Blood Wedding is the furthest along, and Rivera talks about some of the earlier challenges of doing an adaptation.
"There’s an internal tension you go though," says Rivera, 47. "You want to honor the original, and you want to make it immediate for contemporary audiences. You also want to be careful not to re-invent the wheel. The ideas of revenge, jealousy and possession resonate so powerfully in the original. My goal has been to strike a balance between maintaining the original language and having it speak in a contemporary voice."
The most prominent changes take place in the last act, when the lovers hide in a forest and are betrayed by the allegorical figure of the Moon. In Rivera’s version, the forest becomes the South Bronx and "Luna," or the Moon is the super of the building where the lovers hide. Luna betrays them, as does an old woman who runs a "botanica," or shop that sells love potions and magical herbs. "The mystery of the forest becomes urban confusion," says the playwright.
Also wishing to maintain the work’s intimacy, Rivera has scaled down the musical elements. The play opens with a man sitting alone with his acoustic guitar on the beach.
Rivera’s other two plays are in their earlier stages. School of the Americas grew out of a film version of Che Guevera’s "The Motorcycle Diaries" on which the playwright worked. It centers on the last two days of the revolutionary’s life when he was captured in a schoolhouse. A topical and politicized play, it consists of a dialogue between Che and a schoolteacher.
"Now is the time to look at what American foreign policy is doing and question why there is so much hatred directed at the United States," notes Rivera in relation to this play. "I ask, how culpable are we? And are we ever innocent?"
The writer calls Six Billion Devils a play "about fear." More metaphoric than School of the Americas, it has to do with a strange force stalking and terrifying the characters. They kill this invisible menace off stage but, later, it comes back to life.
"That something is like AIDS or the environment," Rivera expounds. "We don’t conquer. We only forget–until it comes back again."
When describing how he writes, Rivera calls it "both fast and slow." He may be struck by an image–like a woman hitchhiking in LA or his brother returning from the Persian Gulf War, both impetuses for Cloud Tectonics. Then those images "gestate or cook" in his mind for a couple of years.
"Before the writing begins," shares Rivera, "I’m collecting ideas and images. Then these images begin to gel and take a shape. When I feel like I have a play here, rather than a bunch of ideas, I write. I must have a burning reason to write."
The ending comes first for the playwright. He insists that those final moments must be clear, "so that I know where the play is going." Then he pens the first draft in long-hand in chronological fashion. The point, he adds, is to just get to the end. He will write for several hours a day without stopping: "The first draft is a rush–an explosion."
During the re-writes, Rivera can dwell on the details. He remains conscious of sustaining a work that must resonate on stage and concentrates on its strongest dramatic qualities. Once he completes two or three drafts, Rivera types up his hand-written copy.
"Then I’ll have a living room reading with artists and friends," he says in a congenial tone. "We sit around the table casually and talk about the play. I cook for the cast."
The next phase–the workshop–involves close contact with the director and becomes a matter of solving practical problems.
"I listen closely to how the words sound when they come out of the actors’ mouths," Rivera continues. "Is it boring? Is it lively? Is it communicating? During the workshop, I have to adapt the audience’s role. Before, it was just one-on-one: the playwright and the work."
When asked how he determines if he is ready to let a play go, Rivera admits, "Often times, you never really finish. You just stop because you have to open the show. It’s typically after it opens when I can re-examine the play.
"At the workshops and rehearsals, you’re making quick decisions to solve mundane problems. It’s not an ideal situation. Sometimes you’re putting a Band-Aid on something when it’s hemorrhaging somewhere else. I think, though, when the play is published, that’s kind of it."
Rivera, however, has more than one published version of Marisol, with and without a certain character.
But the playwright is the first to acknowledge the ever-evolving nature of life. Marisol, for instance, was a play prompted by the new millennium and imagines New York City smoldering. Now its bold apocalyptic nature takes on frightening new meaning after 9/11. That fact alone attests to the extreme realism which magical realism can engender. García Marquéz had been Rivera’s literary hero. To work directly with the groundbreaking novelist inspired Rivera on a personal level.
"There were ten of us in his workshop, and García Marquéz de-mystified himself," relates the playwright. "He wanted us to feel like peers. He told us how he would walk through cemeteries to get names for his characters, and how he would be forced to finish a book just so he could get paid quickly and be able to buy food for his family. As writers, we could relate to this."
Rivera, who attended public schools, says how his education was steeped in the Anglo-Euro culture. He read Shakespeare, Ibsen and Moliére and was not exposed to Latin American writers. Then, after college, he read García Marquéz’s epic novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and had an epiphany.
"I felt so cheated, so deprived," he shares. "This book opened up a new world of literary possibilities. I didn’t know a book could do that. This novel was completely living in its own logic. It made me realize that, as the creator of a world, you set your own rules. García Marquéz was connecting a literary tradition to an oral tradition. He turned that quaintness into great literature."
The playwright also discovered he and his mentor were kindred spirits. Rivera’s earliest memories are of his family relaying stories verbally: "I grew up in a household with no books–except copies of the Bible–but where everyone told stories. What I learned about writing, I learned from hearing my parents talk."
The playwright also acknowledges that he was influenced by television, specifically "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits"–"dark, fantastical" shows. He gravitated toward the theatre precisely at the age of 12 when a traveling company performed Rumpelstiltskin at his school: "It was so new to me that we could all cry or gasp or laugh at the same time. Unlike television, theatre wasn’t a lonely experience. It was communal and collective and shared."
As he got older and began to write in different genres, Rivera subconsciously found himself composing in a theatrical vein. He recalls with a quiet laugh, "My short stories were 99 percent dialogue, and my poetry sounded like monologues. Playwriting was a next natural step."
For Rivera, theatre is also a place where time takes different shapes and forms. It’s where stinging realism joins hands with obvious contrivance to reveal the magic inherent to our own realities.