From New York to Chicago to San Diego, Laura Garza searches far and wide to find Texas-tinged plays to bring back home to the Teatro Audaz San Antonio stage.
The company’s founding executive artistic director has programmed four plays by notable playwrights for the 2023 summer season, which she has titled “Reclaiming Our Roots” to acknowledge the Mexican American, Latinx and immigrant subjects and characters that each play highlights.
Garza noted that people’s identities are based on much more than where they’re from, where they live, their last name or their skin color, making the concept of roots for immigrant families complex and difficult to describe.
“Each production has its individual story to tell,” she said of the plays she selected for the upcoming season.
The season opens June 1 with Luchadora! by Chicago playwright Alvaro Saar Rios, about Wisconsin grandmother Nana Lupita who grew up in 1960s Texas with a champion luchador father and later takes to the ring in an effort to help him combat the effects of aging.
Garza said a Zoom videoconference call between director Abe Ramirez and Rios teased out the playwright’s Texas background. Rios recalled childhood visits to New Braunfels, which explained why characters in the play have Germanic names, such as Leisl and Leopold, and sing a German lullaby.
Rios will visit San Antonio for public pláticas with the audience following the June 8-9 performances.
The Ghosts of Lote Bravo opening July 13 strikes a darker tone, focused on the murdered women of Ciudad Juárez.
Playwright Hillary Bettis originally wrote the play during a fellowship at The Juilliard School in New York. She has called the plight of undocumented migrants “the human rights issue of this generation” and said she wanted to write a story that would persuade American audiences to root for someone to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally by the end of the play.
The season lightens up August 31 with Somewhere Over The Border, a cumbia hip-hop musical by New York playwright Brian Quijada. The takeoff of The Wizard of Oz features a main character Quijada describes as “a brown, Central American Dorothy.”
And for the holiday season, It’s a Wonderful Vida opening December 7 offers another immigrant take on a Christmas classic.
The satirical play by California playwright Herbert Siguenza is set in Corpus Christi and follows an immigrant family reaching for an elusive American dream that might be as real as Santa Claus.
Teatro Audaz is in residence at The Cellar Theater underneath the Public Theater of San Antonio and will perform The Ghosts of Lote Bravo there during its July run. The company also enjoys resident status with the fine arts department at San Antonio College and will perform Luchadora! and It’s a Wonderful Vida at the McCreless Theater. Somewhere Over The Border will be performed at the college’s McAllister Theater.
Tickets are now on sale for Luchadora! through the Teatro Audaz website.
