September 18, 2000
Rodrigo Duarte Clarke
Artistic Director/Writer/Director, El Teatro de la Esperanza
October 11: Rosita's Day of the Dead
The San Francisco--based El Teatro de la Esperanza was born in 1970 out of the political sensibilities of a group of UC Santa Barbara students, interested in seeing their culture represented on the stage. The company performs original plays (many written by artistic director Clarke) about the human condition, but informed by the sensibilities of Chicano/Latino culture.
"My sense of the purpose of theater has probably changed over the years.
El Teatro de la Esperanza comes out of the Chicano theater movement and, in the beginning
stages, we were highly politicized students. As we have matured, I like to think
that we're not so conscious of making our work so starkly political. Because they
are coming from our cultural sensibility, our plays organically transfer a sense
of that culture; but the emphasis is on the art, and we let the politics fall into
place.
But, for all theater, no matter what other purpose it has, I would side with Brecht,
who felt that entertainment was an important aspect of theater. Of course, he used
that term in a very different way from how it is used today: To him, entertainment
meant pleasing the audience but, also, engaging them intellectually with questions
that pertained to their lives.
Ultimately, theater should engage audiences on specific questions, and, in our case,
within a Chicano context. I think theater is only successful if you can find in it
the humanity that we all share. Rosita's Day of the Dead, hopefully, has meaning
for everyone, Chicano or not. It's about reconciliation and death--very universal
issues about dying and how we arrive at peace with each other."
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