By Kassidy Arena, Nebraska Public Media News
Monica Mora-Handlos arrived early on opening night to see the very first all-Latino play at the Omaha Community Playhouse. She’s dressed to the nines in colorful floral to reflect themes in the show – called American Mariachi. She sits with her husband and daughter.
“We brought my daughter with us tonight, and one of her friends is going to be in it, too. So she’s super excited to see her friend as well,” she said. “So for her to see people that look like us here on the stage is really exciting.”
Before the show, the Playhouse hosted high school mariachi bands and student dance groups to perform.
American Mariachi is not a musical; it’s a “play with music,” according to stage director Alex Rodriguez. It’s about a young Mexican-American woman who wants to start an all-female mariachi band in the United States in the 1970s.
Rodriguez, originally from Cuba, also acted as the vocal director of the play and is the co-artistic director at the Playhouse. He said he felt validated putting on a show that tells the story of people like him, in the Latino family.
Rodriguez got into theater at a later age. He said he never saw himself in roles for his college shows, but eventually got the chance to play a role specifically for a Latino person. That opened up the path for a career in theater and led him to believe how important this work is.
“This must be what other people feel that have roles written for them all the time,” he said.
Not only is American Mariachi creating local history, it’s creating national history as well. The Friday, May 2 performance was the first time the story had been put on at a community theater. Playwright José Cruz Gonzalez, who wrote it in 2015, flew in from California to watch the momentous occasion.
“There’s something really special, because I always felt that that’s where this play would live in communities. Because oftentimes, you know, they don’t have major cities to go to where all these communities, they’re smaller, perhaps the theaters,” Gonzalez said on opening night. “Communities are hungry to hear stories that you know, talk about them.”
The bilingual play is written in a way, said Rodriguez and Gonzalez, that both English speakers and Spanish speakers can understand it.
“And we’re hopeful that it also invites a community that has never felt represented here before,” Rodriguez said.
Gonzalez said he is happy to see his work come to fruition at a place like the Omaha Community Playhouse.
“Coming here has been a great discovery, because I didn’t know about this institution and its history,” he added. “[To see] new voices coming in, that makes it more inclusive, makes it more broader, invites more people to come and to be a part of something that has had tradition, but also can change and evolve and find new stories to tell and share.”
The Omaha Community Playhouse has the largest staff of any community theater in the country, said Director of Social Impact DeAnna Williams. She said, as a Black woman, stories from historically marginalized communities need to be told.
“I know that because diversity matters, representation matters. Personally, I have been so influenced as a child being able to see people who look like me on stage, and it made me want to get into theater, and it let me know that it was possible,” she said.
Williams and the other employees were excited to support Rodriguez in putting on this show, but at the beginning Rodriguez wasn’t sure if they could pull it off. All actors needed to be Latino, which could have been hard to find, especially since the actors are all doing so on a volunteer basis. They also needed to be able to play instruments, since that was one of the main plots of the story.
Four of the five all female mariachi roles didn’t know how to play the instruments their characters played. They started lessons in January to make sure they could play by opening night in May.
The first showing went off without a hitch, with almost every chair in the audience filled. Rodriguez, the first Latino artistic director at the playhouse, said even though he will be leaving the position to be with family in the Northeast, he doesn’t want this sort of work to end. He said he looks forward to coming back as a guest director, including the first play of next season which is The River Bride.
“We are in a time where, particularly in Omaha, the Hispanic population is booming, and it will continue to boom. And so I hope that the work we’ve done the past two years will continue moving forward,” he said. “There is still work to do.”
It took 100 years of putting on plays before an all-Latino cast could make a theatrical representation of one of their own stories. And Rodriguez said he doesn’t want this to be the last.
Williams said she doesn’t plan for it to be. The Playhouse wants to bring in more playwrights and actors of color as well as more shows written by women.
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