The Miracle of Theater

www.milagro.org

If you want ethnic authenticity, turn off the radio. Instead, go to the theater and you'll see in-depth yet entertaining discussions of the complicated American ethnic landscape in plays like Enrique Urueta's Learn to Be Latina.

Currently playing at Milagro Teatro under the direction of Antonio Sonera and starring Olga Sanchez and Nicole Accuardi, Learn to Be Latina is a satirical take on the pop music industry's treatment of ethnicity as part and parcel of their corporate package. It's a good example of how, in the family of entertainment genres, theater's the only place you can get this kind of authenticity.

Hanan (Accuardi) is a Lebanese-American singer with dreams of stardom interviewing for a trio of robotic auditors (Orion Bradshaw, Kelly Godell and Matthew Kerrigan). They love her voice, and they love her body, but she's just a little too ethnic in a - how do they put it? - "shawarma-eating, suicide-bomber kind of way." Hanan's about to walk out the door in righteous indignation when the auditors' boss, the Irish-accented Mary O'Malley (Sanchez) makes her an offer she can't refuse: learn to be "Latiner" and you can be a star. Hanan's Faustian bargain just gets worse and worse as her sense of identity becomes fragmented by the parts she has to play. She's Lebanese-American, but she's pretending to be from Buenos Aires. She's discovering that she's gay, but she "needs to be impaled on star cock by Saturday" if she's going to retain her credibility as a Latina pop star. After all, "Good Latinas don't eat cunt."

Those lines are meant to be rude and unappealing. Urueta alienates us from the characters representing the recording industry by putting abhorrent language in their mouths. Sonera accentuates this effect by giving them cartoonish physicality, most notably the auditors' mechanical movement in the opening scene. The satire demonstrates the ways in which popular music harms us by oversimplifying our ethnic identities. The truth is more nuanced than you hear about on the radio.

Learn to Be Latina is not alone in discussing the complicated reality of ethnicity in America, but theater might be. Playwrights today are writing about their ethnicity in ways that defy stereotypes. And they're getting noticed: Quiara Alegría Hudes won a Pulitzer for Water by the Spoonful. Eliza Bent published a five-page interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in the latest issue of American Theatre about his plays like N(E)IG(H)G(BO)ERS. Stories with recognition in the theater community like these are not being told by theater's rich siblings, cinema/TV and pop music. Those media are notorious for their heavy-handed use of stereotypes. Hipster headdresses at Coachella and George Lucas' anti-Semitic aliens make theater a refreshing venue where we can talk honestly and within a supportive environment about race and ethnicity in America.

So if you struggle with issues of ethnicity, or are simply curious about them, turn off the radio and get to the theater. In spite of the Urueta's auditor's quip that "Whites aren't anything, except for Italians, because Italians are wops and wops aren't white," we're all of us something. And all of those somethings are living in closer proximity than perhaps any other time in America's history. If we want to have any kind of chance living well together, then we need stories like Learn to Be Latina.