11-7-08
Tanya Saracho Makes Plays Beyond the Borders
There are loads of charming people in the Chicago theatre world. But though her near-ubiquitous presence in the current season (three of her plays are getting produced, with another in the wings for Steppenwolf’s Young Adults program next fall) may suggest that she’s had herself cloned, there really is only one Tanya Saracho. Even though I’d only met her a couple of times before sitting down to a lunch interview, I came away feeling like I’d just spent a couple of hours talking to one of my oldest friends—a reaction familiar to anyone who has seen her work, both as a writer and actor. In fact, she even convinced me that it would be a good idea to have a total stranger read cards for me. But that’s getting ahead a bit.
Saracho, 32, co-founded the Latina theatre company Teatro Luna eight years ago with Coya Paz, and much of her subsequent writing has been staged with the group, including the original version of her somewhat-autobiographical Kita y Fernanda, which just closed at 16th Street Theatre in Berwyn, where Saracho has been a playwright-in-residence this year. Originally written as a 15-minute sketch for Teatro Luna’s Dejame Contarte (Let Me Tell You A Story), a collection of company-created sketches and monologues that traveled to a 2001 festival at New York’s Intar 53 Hispanic American Arts Center, Kita got a boost from then-New York Times critic Margo Jefferson, who collared Saracho in the lobby and insisted that she had to make a full-length play out of the material. (Jefferson also praised Saracho the actor as “just a delicious all-around performer: a comic with a rubbery face and spot-on timing; a character actress who [is] all truth and no gimmicks.”) The newest incarnation takes the 2006 immigration march in Chicago as its framing device.
The inspiration and the subject matter for Kita come from her own childhood. Born in Los Mochis in the northern Mexican state of Sinoloa, Saracho was “la primogenita,” or the much-adored first-born grandchild and niece on both sides of her family.
“For a full year, I had everybody to myself, so they would put me on tables and have me dance,” she says.
Her father was head of customs and the top man in Sinoloa’s conservative Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). His work took the family to ports all over Mexico—by the time she was nine, Saracho had lived in nine different cities. “We kept ending up on the frontier,” she says.
Finally, they ended up just over the border from McAllen, Texas, the town where most of Kita takes place. “One day, we just did the hop,” Saracho says of the family’s decision to relocate in McAllen. “We would always hop over to buy clothes or whatever. We always had passports. In those days, passports were a class thing. I realize now that I never had to worry about that.”
Saracho is still a Mexican citizen; her official U.S. status is “resident alien”—a classification that, despite its off-putting sound, does capture something about the truths she digs up in her writing. Her characters tend to hover around the edges of great changes, and they deal with a host of intertwined issues related to class, race, gender, sexuality, body type, and spirituality. Fernanda, the spoiled immigrant daughter, laments her mother’s inability to learn English, but also resents the prejudices of her Anglo classmates and the sneering disregard her comfortable economic status draws from less-fortunate Mexican-Americans.
Kita is the restless daughter of the family maid, and Saracho says, “We had a maid when I was 12 who was also 12.” When Saracho left for college, the young woman she grew up with simply left. “She lived with us and never went home. Her mom brought her. Her mother looked like her grandmother, but she and my mom were the same age. Hard life, you know.” Saracho says she now wonders how the young woman learned about things most girls learn from their mothers, such as menstruation.
“I remember her mother looking at me and saying, ‘She’s so fat!,’ and my mother saying [of the other girl], ‘She’s so skinny!’” Saracho, who has spoken freely of her struggles with weight, says, “I got so fat when I came to this country. We came in the late ’80s, and we didn’t have a lot of the processed foods in Mexico that Americans had. My mom was like, ‘Well, that’s what Americans eat, so we’ll eat that.’” Saracho now seems at peace with her size. “That’s the Americana in me. I can’t get rid of it. I’ve had surgeries to cut it out of me and I can’t get rid of it.”
Thanks to her father’s good income and generosity, Saracho enjoyed a lot of perks not readily available to all Mexican immigrants in America. He bought her a house in Sinoloa (which she sold to help raise money for Teatro Luna in the early days). At 14, she had a car and a Mexican driver’s license—it was legal to drive at that age across the border. Her parents are now divorced, and her mother still lives in McAllen.
“She has a very American kind of life. She shops at Wal-Mart. She doesn’t have to work because my dad supports her. My dad would not let my mother work. My dad gave me an allowance until I was 26 so I could do my little theatre thing. That’s not the story of a lot of immigrants. But it is the story of a percentage, and I want to cover that in my writing. There are lots of ways to be an immigrant.”
Saracho got into theatre in high school when she wandered into a speech and debate meeting, thinking that it was a group that would help her speak English more clearly, and got roped into performing Roald Dahl’s poem “Cinderella.” She became a star on the speech team, and eventually ended up in Boston University’s theatre program, where she studied acting in the conservatory program and also took playwriting classes with Derek Walcott, winning the university’s prestigious Kahn Award for the most promising artist. “I didn’t know how lucky I was at the time,” says Saracho. “I just never thought I couldn’t do it because they didn’t make me think I couldn’t do it.” Nor did her weight hold her back. “I think I was so big that they were like, ‘You’ll find your way somehow.’”
She chose Chicago because of Steppenwolf—more specifically, the book of photos of Steppenwolf ensemble members that Victor Skrebneski did for the company’s 25th anniversary in 2000.
“It was so silly, because I didn’t know anyone. I just moved out here. The apartment I found that week is the same place I’m living in now.” Saracho soon figured out that she would have to be even more proactive than non-Latina recent theatre grads. “I couldn’t find Latinas to do a reading of my work. It was 40 percent bilingual. I couldn’t find the actors, and I was like, ‘What is this bullshit? A quarter of the population is Latino? No.’”
When she met Paz at an audition, she was convinced she’d found a kindred spirit with whom she could form a Latina-focused company. But Paz took a little bit of convincing—according to Saracho, she pursued Paz for four months just to get her to sit down for coffee and discuss the possibility. “We met for coffee, it turned to breakfast, it turned to more coffee, it turned to lunch, and Teatro Luna was born.”
For her part, Paz says, “I did not wish to start a theatre company at all, and yet I walked out of that meeting thinking of starting a theatre company. I loved the idea of it, but not the act of it, and we continue to curse those [administrative] aspects.”
The company ran its own space in Pilsen for a few years, but left for a variety of reasons both mundane (the stress of being landlords got in the way of creating work) and unusual (the space, now occupied by Dream Theatre, had a ghost, according to Saracho, and the ghost made it clear that the living artists were not welcome).
Soon, despite the fact that Paz and Saracho thought they’d be doing things like a pre-Castro take on The Cherry Orchard, Teatro Luna was churning out a wide array of original pieces, some scripted by Saracho, including her solo Quita Mitos, and much of it built by the ensemble out of interviews with other people and the ensemble members’ personal experiences, including S-E-X-Oh! and Machos. The latter won the company a non-Equity Jeff Award this year for best new work (Paz was credited as the writer, but the piece drew from interviews with many different men), and best ensemble (for the cast of Latinas who took on male drag for their parts). The company tours a lot of the work now to colleges around the country, which, while it provides needed income, also makes it harder to find actors for projects on the home front.
Saracho continues to be frustrated by the lack of bilingual actors in the Chicago talent pool. But though she is an accomplished director, she also trusted non-Spanish speaker Ann Filmer, artistic director of 16th Street, with the remount of Kita. Says Filmer, “There is racism involved in Spanish speakers and in people who think they’re speaking Spanish to spite us when they’re expressing their culture. If they know two languages, then good for them. But I don’t often see us putting it in the theatre without dumbing it down.”
Filmer also says, “At a certain point, Tanya and I decided that she needed to go away [from the rehearsals] because I was using her as my crutch and not trusting my instincts.” She praises Saracho’s writing as nearly Chekhovian. “There is so much joy, but underneath the story is so deeply sad. The characters are lost and isolated and there are all these issues of class.”
Saracho admits that she tends to like exploring the darker side, but at the request of her sisters in Teatro Luna, she’s taking a stab at romantic comedy in the company’s newest show, Jarred: A Hoodoo Comedy, about a heartbroken young woman who turns to folk magic to win back her errant lover. Saracho describes it as “light urban comedy,” not unlike the work of Tyler Perry, “who is a genius and not just anybody can do that.”
Saracho is a firm believer in many aspects of folk magic, and invited me along to her “senora,” the woman she visits weekly for spiritual alignment. So that’s how I ended up sitting at the kitchen table having my cards read, while Saracho translated for us. And by the end of the session, during which many painful recent events and some startlingly funny insights into my family came up, I was wiping away tears. “It’s okay to cry here,” Saracho said softly. And that’s also one of the best things about her plays—she makes it okay for us to let down our guard and really see the people in front of us as they are.
Says Paz, “She seems really unafraid to get to the heart of things, which is the beauty of her work. I often think she takes on a role that people are afraid to take on. She takes a deep breath and dives in and says, ‘I’m just gonna say this because no one is saying it.’”
In addition to Jarred, Saracho also premieres Our Lady of the Underpass this winter with Teatro Vista, which is based on the appearance of the Virgin Mary (or at least what many claimed was the Blessed Mother) on the wall of the Fullerton Avenue underpass. The piece was originally developed through a commission with the Goodman, which also gave Saracho the 2005 Ofner Prize. And then next fall, Saracho’s adaptation of Sandra Cisneros’ beloved The House on Mango Street goes up with Steppenwolf, in time for the novel’s 25th anniversary.
But despite all her writing, directing, and performing credits (she pays the bills with voice-over and industrial work), Saracho remains committed to helping other artists find their voices. She wants to start a Latino Theatre Workshop, modeled after the work Maria Irene Fornes did in the 1980s, to help writers create pieces free of the pressures of production. “Right now, I’m one of the only Latino playwrights in the city,” says Saracho. “For it to be a movement, I think it has to come from Chicago. There are different urban Hispanics. Miami is very Cuban, L.A. is very Chicano—Mexican and Central American. Chicago is everything. It’s pan-Latino, and I think that’s where it’s going to come from.”
While she waits for her own plays to get wider reception outside Chicago, Saracho also continues to partner with non-Latino companies. She and P.J. Paparelli of American Theatre Company are joining forces for an interview-based show about “the border and the Mafia.” Saracho notes with wry humor that she probably won’t be inviting her customs-agent father to that one. She’s also working on 27, for which she is interviewing one woman in Chicago from each of the 27 nations of the Latin Diaspora. And yes, she would love to write screenplays “because I turn on the TV and I don’t see Latinas.”
In about five years, Saracho estimates that Teatro Luna will be in a place where she can walk away from it if she wants to. “Teatro Luna is the most important thing I’ve ever done, but it’s not all my own, because of how we built it. I’m still in the honeymoon phase.” This season, Chicago theatregoers get to have a long honeymoon with one of the most vital and engaging writers produced here in recent years, and if the cards are right, it’s going to be a great ride.