by Chay Yew
AS A CHILD, José Rivera loved to sit at his mother’s side and listen to stories of his Puerto Rican ancestors. Sagas of inflamed forbidden passions and family betrayals, yarns of star-crossed lovers and disasters staved off. There was also his grandfather’s tale of a conquistador in full regalia, astride a white stallion, rupturing out of the trunk of a tree that the old man climbed as a boy.
“The stories were just outrageous, and they were told totally deadpan. This was my life as a little boy,” José recalled. “Most people would separate the two: There’s reality here, there’s the supernatural there; there’s the waking life here, there’s dreams over there. In the world of my youth, there wasn’t that division. There were elements of the fantastical, of the dream, and these things become interchangeable.
“There were incredible storytellers in my family. Especially my mother—she’s dazzling. She can sit down and tell stories for hours without taking a breath. So when I did write, it was always about what people were saying.”1
José’s family still continues to inspire his characters or plays. And these plays vividly capture a significant period in José’s personal life.
In this superb collection, José continues to tell dazzling stories for the American theatre. Compared to his oeuvre of magic-realism plays, such as Marisol, Cloud Tectonics and References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot (all required reading and the perfect companion to this anthology), these plays mark a detour in stylistic form, braving new aesthetical explorations from one of the most revered American theatre artists. All this attests to José’s appetite and courage to always experiment artistically. An original, he’s never content to write the familiar in the familiar.
If there is any commonality among the plays in this volume, it is José’s investigation of love, marriage and home. All four plays brim with these ideas, and each play eloquently explores them with precision and passion, and in a voice that belongs only to José.
Boleros for the Disenchanted is José’s fine tribute to his mother and her long marriage. The first act of the play is set in Miraflores, Puerto Rico, in 1953, where we follow the blossoming romance between Flora and Eusebio. In Act Two, we leap forty years into the future where we find our now married lovers in a small town in Alabama, where an elderly Flora takes care of a bedridden Eusebio suffering from diabetes.
José said, “The idea of Boleros is to examine a long-term relationship and how the love you feel for somebody is severely tested when life throws obstacles and tragedies in your way. I literally thought about this play for ten years, wondered about it, and daydreamed about it. Almost all of my work is inspired by something deeply personal, coupled with the larger social and political forces around me. Writing about Puerto Rico was liberating because I was born in Puerto Rico but I left the island when I was four years old.”2
Perhaps the speech that best captures this heart-wrenching, haunting portrait of love and marriage is when elderly Eusebio counsels a young couple: “This woman, this industrious, indestructible woman stays with me, bathes me and wipes my shit every day without a break.” And, “If you can’t imagine yourself doing this for someone else, if you can’t get your hands dirty, if you can’t stand the smell or the pity or the pain in the other person’s face, if you’d rather be anywhere else, then you’re not ready to be married, my young friends. Call it off. Because it’s this or it’s nothing.”
A play about unconditional love and marriage, Boleros is the most naturalistic play in this volume. But it is also a brutal study of transplantation and immigration. In escaping the poverty of the “island of tears,” as José has described Puerto Rico, the couple leaves their family and home to make a new life in the United States. There they face a more grueling life as second-class citizens. Yet, as José shows, it is always love that overcomes the loneliness, struggles and disappointments of this new country.
Adoration of the Old Woman is a beautiful and powerful play that deals poignantly with identity. It is also a searing political debate (it is the most political play in this anthology) on the complex history, colonialism and issues of statehood for Puerto Rico. It takes place in a small village in the near future of Puerto Rico, where yet another vote on whether to seek independence or statehood is about to take place. Vanessa, a young Puerto Rican woman from New Jersey, has been sent to stay with her great-grandmother (who is somewhere “between a hundred and a hundred and fifty years old”), Doña Belén, as punishment by her parents.
Once there, Vanessa is courted both sexually and politically by two local men—one representing the pro-independence movement, the other pro-statehood, while Doña Belén engages in hot and scabrous arguments with Adoración, the ghost of her long-dead husband’s lover, who is haunting her bed.
When asked why José was interested in writing a play about Puerto Rico, he replied, “When they asked Socrates why health is important, his answer was, ‘It’s obvious why health is important; you don’t have to ask the question.’ For me, independence is like that. Puerto Rico is one of the last remaining places in the world that isn’t its own country.”3
In the exquisite short play, Pablo and Andrew at the Altar of Words, a Latino/Caucasian gay couple exchange their written wedding vows in front of their family and friends, to, “Say a lot about the kind of love we want to express to each other.” And to, “Say the things we never really say in this hugely titantic struggle it can sometimes be just to survive, day to day.” In our present age when the right to gay marriage is bitterly fought about, Pablo and Andrew is a wise play, the perfect antidote. It celebrates and serves as a testament to the importance of marriage vows that anyone—gay or straight—would value. As Andrew says, “If marriage is about love, why would we want to reduce the amount of love in the world?”
Surreal and terrifyingly potent, Brainpeople takes place in a posh apartment in a postapocalyptic, dystopian, militant Los Angeles, under martial law. It centers on Mayannah, a lonely heiress, who, with the promise of money, has invited two desperately poor women to dine on freshly slaughtered tiger flesh. As the evening wears on, we see how deeply disconnected all three women are. Trapped and frightened, one of them utters, “Nothing on this earth is as frightening as another human being.” Throughout this mysterious dinner, the facades of the psychologically damaged women are painfully peeled away to reveal their inner truths; every one of them desires something and, in true Rivera style, whatever they want (no matter how destructive) gets fulfilled.
When asked to describe Brainpeople, José said, “It is a play that tries to examine mental states and a society in dysfunction. Ultimately, it is about love, death and poverty, and how they contribute to madness. At the same time, I wanted to explore the needs of these women and the world that they create.”4 The result is a sinister, deeply sensuous allegory that exposes the desperation of three women as they cope with isolation and violence in an apocalyptic future.
This collection of José Rivera’s plays is a treasure and a vital addition to the canon of the American theatre. A unique and poetical voice, he is a fearless playwright who writes unflinchingly of the beauty and brutality of the human condition, in richly imagined worlds but, also, in worlds in which we live and breathe. He documents us. He warns us. He knows us. He celebrates us. A true poet of the theatre, José Rivera makes us his stories.
Chicago
April 2012
1. Jennifer de Poyen, San Diego Union-Tribune, September 22, 2002.
2. Kenneth Jones, Playbill.com, April 7, 2009.
3. de Poyen.
4. Ernio Hernandez, Playbill.com, January 30, 2008.
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Chay Yew is a playwright and director. He is Artistic Director of Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.