Role Player : Cutting-Edge Latino Playwright Is Wooing Anglo Audiences While Trying to Put to Rest Timeworn Ethnic Stereotypes

Jose Cruz Gonzalez comes across as soft-spoken, gentle and polite, the kind of man who would hole up in the back halls of academe.

But don’t let the scholarly, introspective aura fool you. Gonzalez is a front-line activist, a man who seeks sweeping changes in the American theater, a man who directs plays that step hard on people’s egos, pretenses and myths.

The 32-year-old Huntington Beach resident--who also teaches theater arts at Cal State Los Angeles and runs South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project--is part of the growing movement to bring more Latino works onto America’s mainstream stages.

He has enlisted in a cause that parallels both the growing political clout of Latinos and the current vogue in crossover Latino films, music and star performers.

He and other activists are taking advantage of the trendy mainstream status now given some elements of Latino arts--from “La Bamba” and Edward James Olmos to salsa, Los Lobos and the Mexican-roots songs of Linda Ronstadt.

Gonzalez is among the young “cutting-edge” Latinos who are trying to woo and enlighten Anglo theater audiences. And first on the agenda is the old matter of ethnic stereotypes.

“We have to keep it meaningful to Anglos; we have to deal with attitudes that they can relate to,” he explained.

But at the same time, “we don’t want to lose the ethnic edge; we’re not trying to soften reality or dilute our cultural uniqueness,” he added. “Playing on the mainstream stages doesn’t mean we have to make it comfortable for people.”

While Latino plays for these general audiences may be less raging and combative, he said, they can be jarring and abrasive experiences, especially when dealing with stereotypes.

“We have to get beyond those images that people still seem to have of Latinos--that our cultures mean nothing but tacos and ‘West Side Story.’ ”

Consider the production Gonzalez is now co-directing (with Miguel Delgado) at the Los Angeles Theatre Center--the wildly lampooning revue, “Latins Anonymous.”

It is entertaining but also quite audacious. The young, four-actor ensemble raises, mocks, then demolishes some of the most commonly held images of Latinos--from machismo posturings to barrio street denizens.

One sketch spoofs the stereotypically menial roles--such as maids, gardeners, bandits and drug peddlers--in which Latino actors are forever cast by the mainstream entertainment industry.

To make its point, the sketch uses another stereotype, a “West Side Story”-like gang battle over turf. Only this time, the two gangs are all underemployed Latino actors fighting over the meager job spoils offered by Hollywood and the mainstream stage.

The show’s overall goal, Gonzalez explained, is to underscore the ludicrousness of these cultural cliches. “These exist and flourish; we all know that,” he said. “Our aim is to take them, within the comical format, to their most ridiculous lengths.”

This satirical approach is applied to the trauma of identity crises. The show opens on the ensemble as an Alcoholics Anonymous-like support group for “recovering Latins”--those who have long suppressed their ethnic identity, even changed their names, to become full-time, practicing Anglos.

The evening’s centerpiece is about the collapse of a woman going through the throes of “Latin denial.” She is resuscitated by paramedics from the “Mayan Defense League,” who apply every known form of treatment, including “tortilla therapy” and a Mayan dance number.

“We want to make people laugh. But we want to prod them, make them think, as well,” Gonzalez said. “We don’t believe the show is offensive. But then, really, these images are not a funny matter. They can be painful and sad when you realize that people still have to live them every day.”

Businessman Fernando Niebla, former chairman of the advisory committee to South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project, found “Latins Anonymous” a “very enjoyable and very funny show. It conveyed a lot of important ideas about ethnic misconceptions. I don’t think Anglos will be offended.”

“And I don’t think older Latinos would be either,” he added. “Some of the street language may bother them, but not the concepts and the meanings behind the sketches.”

But not all Latinos may be so open to this kind of show, some observers argued.

“You have some middle-class Hispanics who have seen it but who have major reservations about the show,” said George Herrera, a theater arts lecturer in Cal State Fullerton’s Chicano studies department. “They don’t see the ridicule and humor behind the show. To them, it only promotes the old negative stereotypes.”

Gonzalez knows such stereotypes by heart. He grew up in a Northern California family of Mexican-American field workers.

He did not, he said, experience the kinds of blatantly direct discrimination that his parents and grandparents and their generations encountered.

“I remember working in the fields with them as a kid, and the way the Anglo foremen would treat them like dirt and call them those names--you know the ones I mean,” he said.

And Gonzalez became aware of other biases, such as the standard American histories which minimized the pioneering roles of Latinos. “It was another case of Anglo brainwashing,” Gonzalez remembered. “Historically, as well as culturally, they said we didn’t exist.”

All this had its effect: Like many others in the younger generations, he had his own moments of Latin denial.

“My grandfather went to school with me once, to help me carry a cart we built for a class project. I didn’t want him to come with me. I was so embarrassed. I didn’t want the other kids to see him with me--because he was such an obvious Mexicano,” he said.

“It was an awful thing for me to do to my grandfather. But that is what growing up with (discrimination) did to my generation--it was subtler, maybe, but it had its accumulating, shameful effects.”

Still, he found a cultural refuge--and expanding sense of identity--in their home. “We were taught never to forget our culture,” said Gonzalez, who was 5 when his family moved from Calexico to Watsonville after the death of his father.

“My grandfather, especially, told us wonderful stories about Mexico and our family. He taught us that we had a past, a heritage,” he added. “Over time, I began to understand the pride and dignity--the individuality--that my grandfather had. I began to realize that it was OK to be Mexican-American. “

When he entered college in the late 1970s, Gonzalez found himself naturally gravitating to Latino projects, first as an undergraduate major in history and Chicano studies at UC San Diego, where he also took his first acting classes.

Up to then, he recalled, “the dramatic literature had been the O’Neills and Millers. Now I was being exposed to other people closer to us, writers like (Federico) Garcia Lorca.”

While at Arizona State University, earning a master’s degree in theater, he toured migrant-worker centers with a student troupe that performed stage works by Luis Valdez and other contemporary Latino writers.

And one summer, while a graduate student in UC Irvine’s stage-directing program, Gonzalez returned to Northern California as a research intern at Valdez’s famed El Teatro Campesino, founded in the 1960s as a sociopolitical theater for field-worker audiences.

In 1986 Gonzalez made his most important mainstream connection. He was named to head South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project, one of the few such mainstream theater programs in the country.

(By this time, Gonzalez was raising his own bilingual family. He and his wife, Cory, who is Anglo, have two sons.)

Under the SCR project, six playwrights are brought each summer to the Costa Mesa complex for workshops and readings on their submitted new plays. The plays are critiqued by veteran theater artists, including key figures in the Latino stage movement.

To Gonzalez, the plays in the SCR project--which have been written by those also representing Cuban, Puerto Rican, Colombian and other Latino heritages--are typical of current plays by Latinos for mainstream stages.

“There’s less of the political statements and overt social anger,” he said. “It is broader and more lyrical in themes, more universal in settings, yet still highly distinctive in particular cultural views. And you are made more aware of the immense diversity in Latino experiences.”

Ethnic identity remains the prime issue with many ethnic-minority works, and certainly with those productions that personally involve Gonzalez.

“If there’s a message that I want to put across, it’s the sense that we so-called hyphenated Americans are still struggling with dual identities, still trying to find out just where we belong,” said Gonzalez, whose productions in that vein include plays by Orange County’s Roy Conboy at Rancho Santiago College.

“But this exploration--this discovery of ourselves--should also be taking place on the mainstream stages, not just confined to our (ethnic) communities. Our experiences are as much a part of America as those of any other groups.”

It would seem the timing for Latino mainstreaming has never been better. In addition to the current vogue for Latino entertainment stars, mainstream theaters have launched widely heralded programs to nurture such young Latino playwrights as Eduardo Machado, Reuben Gonzalez and Jose Rivera.

Still, Latino activists like Gonzalez hope this dramatic entry into the mainstream isn’t just a passing fad. But then, Gonzalez suggested, Latino theater artists may have little or no choice when it comes to expanding their mainstream visibility.

At the very least, he pointed out, it is a matter of being pragmatic. “We have to become a part of more Anglo-run institutions. It’s where the action is, where the game is really being played.

But the arrangement works both ways. “Without our voices, our views and diversity,” Gonzalez said, “mainstream theater is incomplete. It isn’t a true mirror of America. There would still be this enormous void.”

It would be, perhaps, another case of Latin denial.