Giving Freshness to the Weary

Hispanic playwrights are only the most prominent part of a fast-growing Latin presence in the U.S. theater. Actor Raul Julia, whose career expanded from low-budget off-Broadway shows into films, regularly returns to the New York stage to play such classics as The Tempest and Arms and the Man. Tony Plana and Nestor Serrano have given some of the most noteworthy off-Broadway and regional performances of recent years. And Choreographer Graciela Daniele, a Tony nominee for The Pirates of Penzance and Drood, turned to directing Borges-inspired musical theater in the off-Broadway hit Tango Apasionado.

Several major regional houses have formed their own Hispanic theater workshops to nurture writers, performers and audiences. Among them are such troupes as San Diego's conservative, Shakespeare-oriented Old Globe Theater and the South Coast Repertory, which plays to a seemingly staid suburban audience in Southern California's Orange County.

Further evidence of the Hispanic influence can be seen in works by Anglo artists who find inspiration in the Hispanic tradition or who see it as a way of giving freshness to what could otherwise seem wearily familiar. Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse deftly used a pan-Hispanic ambience and interpolated / Spanish phrases to distinguish its production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves from the Tony-winning Broadway version, seen nationally on PBS.

Hispanic elements can also bring contemporary relevance to distant, avant- garde work. For the La Jolla Playhouse's stunning production of Odon von Horvath's Figaro Gets a Divorce, a satire of dictatorship written at the height of the Nazi era, the action was shifted to a mythical region populated by figures reminiscent of Imelda Marcos, Anastasio Somoza and Fidel Castro. Harvard's American Repertory Theater relocated Jean Genet's The Balcony, a transvestite dream of sexual corruption in high places, to an unspecified Latin city gripped by revolution. Says JoAnne Akalaitis, who staged The Balcony: the Latin flavor imports "a much more visceral energy" and leads to "an art that family history, romance, politics and the history of a nation all fit into."