NEWS
Lorena Diaz, Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel and Wendy Mateo/Photo: Joe Mazza | brave lux
Players 50 2024: The Rising Stars and Storefront Stalwarts
By Newcity | January 9, 2024
Lorena Diaz, Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel and Wendy Mateo (Executive Artistic Director, Managing Director and Producing Artistic Director, Teatro Vista)
Founded in 1991 to build a place for Latine artists in American theater, Teatro Vista has had a fantastic year. Its silent-movie romance “The Dream King” won eight Equity Jeff Awards, second only to the Goodman’s “Tommy.” Vista’s most recent production, “¡Bernarda!” has also won acclaim. Producing artistic director Wendy Mateo says that while critical favor helps the company’s visibility, Teatro Vista’s success comes from a commitment to treating and collaborating with its artists with care, empathy and shared accountability. “We believe the artists who walk through our door are inherently genius, and when you treat your artists with that respect, they produce extraordinary work,” Mateo says. “Audiences have responded in a really positive way, engaging with us both online and in person.” Mateo says the company likes to take big risks in terms of how it chooses to express its art, whether on stage, through film, or audio content. Teatro has grown its operational team in the past year and continues to expand its board. “We’ve been here for thirty-four years and hope to be here for another thirty-four,” Mateo says. (Mary Wisniewski)
DOES THEATER HAVE TO BE ON A STAGE? TEATRO VISTA’S NEW CO-LEADERS CHALLENGE THEMSELVES AND THE COMPANNY TO THINK DIFFERENT
By Jerald Pierce | December 2nd, 2021
In many ways, Teatro Vista, entering its first season guided by co-artistic directors Lorena Diaz and Wendy Mateo, has its eye on the future — the future of the company, sure, but also the future of how theater itself operates.
In an effort to reflect that vision, Diaz and Mateo are using the unifying theme of “Futurology,” or “the study of current trends that forecast future developments” for the company’s 31st season. In the months between Diaz and Mateo joining the company over the summer and the season announcement earlier this month, the duo spent time studying Teatro Vista as a company and as individual artists, having one-on-one meetings with ensemble members, to figure out how the theater will venture into the future.
Though some of this season’s productions were in the works before Diaz and Mateo joined the company, the season’s offerings still give audiences a glimpse of their vision.
The four-production season bucks the traditional brick-and-mortar season by featuring works in a variety of mediums, ranging from a serial audio play to start the season, to an animated graphic novel, to an ensemble-devised digital experience. And there’s still a world premiere musical from New York-based actor, composer and writer Brian Quijada in the mix.
Diaz and Mateo said that it is important to them to fund and fuel the projects their ensemble members are excited about and do whatever they can to facilitate the artistic growth of those ensemble members, and that includes pushing them to experiment with different styles.
“That’s a part of what drew the ensemble to our work,” said Mateo. “We have this long history of content creation. We always wanted to offer a digital piece. We wanted to continue to learn filmmaking. We wanted to put the ensemble in positions of director, of producer, of writer, and start influencing the representation behind the camera and behind the table.”
While some companies strive for a brick-and-mortar, in-person space, Teatro Vista’s new leaders are thinking more fluidly about how they can provide their art to their audience. They’re pushing their artists to think beyond their initial ideas, prompting them to explore how a story can live beyond the stage.
Ensemble member Gabriel Ruiz admitted that he used to be a theater purist, thinking that plays should be kept on the stage. The pandemic and its restrictions and opportunities have changed that for him and led him to thinking that theaters really have to be multimedia companies of a sort these days.
Ruiz and ensemble member Marvin Quijada had been working on this season’s production of “Detective Q” for a while before Diaz and Mateo joined the company. When prompted to see where this story may live besides on the stage, they started to explore what it would be like as a graphic novel. Now the production is set to be released on the company’s YouTube and social media pages in a style that combines film noir and mime.
While Ruiz said that it was difficult to have their initial idea challenged, he found it freeing to experiment with something new to him.
“Wendy and I always say that joy is currency,” said Diaz, “and we want to infect our ensemble with that thinking so that when they create their ideas, they’re more like intellectual property that can grow into many different forms.”
Ruiz said that the ensemble’s response to this mindset from the leadership duo has been extremely positive, not least because it comes from a place of them wanting to support the ensemble’s work and ideas as artists.
“They have this wonderful energy that leads with courage, that is supremely unafraid of risk,” said Ruiz.
Risk is encapsulated in Ruiz’s season-opening serial audio play “The Fifth World,” which Ruiz had started working on with the company’s previous leadership. When he mentioned the project during his one-on-one with Mateo and Diaz, Ruiz recalled the duo being immediately enthusiastic about hearing more and supporting the project.
This has led to a series of new experiences for Ruiz, who just so happens to be making his Broadway debut in “MJ the Musical” in December. Ruiz noted that “The Fifth World” is one of his first works produced, one of the first works he’s produced himself, and one of the first works where he’s gotten his hands dirty with sound design (under the watchful eye of Mikhail Fiksal and alongside Giselle Castro).
“This is a duo that takes whatever ideas you bring to them and amplifies them,” said Ruiz. “They don’t give you the option of dreaming small. That is a reflex that makes me very excited about this upcoming season and the next couple of years as they make decisions about what this company is going to look like moving forward.”
After seeing the work Teatro Vista’s ensemble members have been doing elsewhere, Diaz said it was a goal of her and Mateo to bring their work home and offer them a space where they could feel safe and supported around fellow artists who understand their voices in an authentic way. So the idea is not to simply produce their work on stage and let that be the end of it. The desire is to help each artist’s idea continue to grow and evolve by giving their ensemble the tools (and nudge) to develop their ideas beyond that original concept.
In doing this, they also have the opportunity to bring those productions to audiences outside of an in-person theater space. Though it’s an audio play, Teatro Vista intends to combine “The Fifth World” with a visual component that can be taken to breweries and wineries and other locations around the city where they can invite audiences to listen to the play and watch a companion film at the same time.
As Mateo noted, this opens the door to better accessibility to the art and connects directly with their audiences while hopefully avoiding that all too common feeling of wishing more people could have seen the work.
“When you think about being a kid and wanting to connect with this type of work, now we have platforms that really can reach them,” Mateo said. “So how do we continue using our platforms to reach those audiences that have historically not been able to afford to go to the theater?”
Mateo said that audiences can expect the company to feature an American Latinx perspective featuring a mixture of ethnicities and cultures that lie within that perspective. But Mateo and Diaz also said they look forward to collaborating with other artists of color around the city.
They noted that artistic leaders like Victory Gardens’ Ken-Matt Martin, UrbanTheater Company’s Miranda González and Lookingglass Theatre Company’s Heidi Stillman have reached out to them in support since they’ve taken these positions with Teatro Vista. Diaz and Mateo hope they can extend a similar helping hand to other artists in the city, providing artists and communities of color, who so often are undersupported, find funding and a home within a company that supports them and their ideas.
“The prevailing thought now is so much about how can we share resources and opportunity,” said Ruiz. “It’s time to start doing things together. One of the things that entered our vernacular, they keep saying it over and over: ‘Forward together. Forward together. Forward together.’ We are making moves and we’re not doing it alone. Everyone’s coming with.”
The 2021-22 season at Teatro Vista includes:
“The Fifth World” (fall 2021): A serial audio play by Gabriel Ruiz, directed by Ruiz and Lorena Diaz. “The Fifth World” is a six-episode audio play that follows Sebastian Reyes who arrives in the small desert town of Palomas, Ariz., to make his name producing a true crime story about a missing child in the desert, but finds himself in a whole other world.
“Detective Q” (early 2022): A moving graphic novel by Marvin Quijada and Gabriel Ruiz. This animated work that film noir and mime and uses interactive elements and immersive experiences captured in different spots around the city.
“Somewhere Over the Border” (spring 2022): A world premiere musical by Brian Quijada. Inspired by his mother’s journey from El Salvador to the United States, the musical follows Reina who travels north to the Mexican border, gathering friends, facing down dangers and holding tight to the memory of the little boy she left behind.
“La Vuelta” (summer 2022): A digital experience written by Isaac Gómez and directed by Monty Cole. This filmed theatrical experience interrogates the circuitous relationship between oneself and others, and how our existence in the world has ripple effects beyond us, even in times of crisis and isolation.
More information about streaming and live performances as part of the 2021-22 season at www.teatrovista.org.
DESTINOS SHOWCASES LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL THEATER COMPANIES
By Kaylen Ralph | September 23, 2021
By definition, futurology is the study of current trends, the findings of which can be used to forecast future developments. It’s also a schema that applies perfectly to this current, uncertain era of Chicago theater, and one that is the driving ethos behind Teatro Vista’s 30th season, the first to be helmed by the company’s new co-artistic directors Lorena Diaz and Wendy Mateo.
The first two episodes of The Fifth World, Teatro Vista’s new true-crime audio serial play, are the latest and final addition to the lineup of this year’s Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, which begins September 23 and will continue through October 17.
Now entering its fourth year, Destinos is the signature program of the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance (CLATA), a nonprofit arts organization that aims to showcase and elevate the work of existing and new U.S. Latino playwrights, actors, and directors primarily in Chicago, along with national and international counterparts.
There are a total of six Chicago productions in this year’s Destinos lineup, a mix of regional and world premieres, in addition to four out-of-town performances. The lineup launches with American Mariachi, the midwest premiere of José Cruz González’s play about an all-women mariachi band, presented by the Goodman Theatre. The world premiere of Teatro Tariakuri’s La manera como luces esta noche follows next on September 25.
This is the first Destinos that Teatro Tariakuri has been included in, says Karla Galván, the company’s executive director. Originally established in Chicago’s Marquette Park in 2004, Teatro Tariakuri is an educational Latino theater company that is fully Spanish speaking, and it remains the first and only theater in the Marquette neighborhood.
“We’ve opened doors to so many talents on the southwest side of Chicago, which is amazing for the company itself,” Galván says. “We’ve worked so hard as a company to get to where we’re at now. Just the fact that we’re the little underdogs, and [CLATA’s] actually looking at us and accepting our work . . . I am so grateful. I am very proud and so excited. This is our first year and I hope we give it our best and I hope that our audience, as much as CLATA, embraces our work.”
La manera como luces esta noche is a comedic fairy tale for adults, written by Alejandro Licona, that Galván describes as classical and Shakespearean meets slapstick, “picardía Mexicana” humor, “which is that spiciness of the Mexican comedy,” she says. “So it is raw. That’s what attracts my audience to come learn about theater. It is dirty, it is raw, and people who come in will enjoy it.”
On October 10 and 11 at the Chopin Theatre, Destinos audiences will be the first to hear the first two episodes of The Fifth World, written by Gabriel Ruiz and presented in English with sprinkles of Spanish, before its official premiere on October 28. In addition to premiering the first two episodes of the serial during Destinos, Diaz and Mateo will be announcing the new season of work for Teatro Vista.
“What we’re doing is really moving the theater company from just live stage theater to multimedia content using theater as a process,” Mateo says.
“We thought [futurology] was such a wonderful way to encompass what we are doing here,” Diaz says. “It’s a new time of creating art—what does that look like, and what is it that we’re going to be moving forward with into the future? I see a lot of companies dabbling and playing with this, but the key is going to be in what works for the audience.”
After 30 years cultivating a presence in Chicago, Teatro Vista’s goal is to expand to a degree where it can continue to serve as an “incubator for young and experienced, Latine and non-Latine talent,” says ensemble member Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel.
“We contain multitudes amongst our ensemble in terms of culture and race and ethnicity. I think our dream is to be that incubator where people can come and learn new things so that we can go out and bring those learnings into the Chicago theater community as a whole, to bigger houses and primarily white institutions, so we can show them a different way to elevate artists of color and to put them at the forefront of the stories.”
It is a goal very much in line with that of CLATA’s own future plans, which in the most immediate include fundraising for a performance venue that can house local Latino theater companies, “especially since many of them are itinerant,” says Sara Carranza, CLATA’s digital media manager. “Many of them don’t have a theater that houses more than 50 seats.”
The rest of the Destinos lineup of live and hybrid performances includes productions hailing from theaters—established and storefront—across the city, including UrbanTheater Company’s Brujaja by Melissa DuPrey, “a story about sisters who practice Santería, [which] has a very negative stigma, but is older than Christianity,” says the company’s artistic director, Miranda González.
“There’s such a very large diaspora of Latinx theater, and [UrbanTheater] placates more to the Black and Indigenous who are centered within our community,” González says. “We are a decolonized theater, all of our processes and everything we do is decolonized art, and we challenge the Eurocentric way of making that. [Santería] was a precolonial religious way in Africa that was brought over by the slaves. It’s very prominent and prevalent within the Latinx community and the world at large.”
Aguijón Theater is presenting an homage to La Lupe, the Queen of Latin Soul, with the world premiere of La Gran Tirana: Descarga Dramática, written by Rey Andújar. Visión Latino Theatre Company (which is also making their Destinos debut this year) is presenting the world premiere of Y tú abuela, where is she? by Nelson Diaz-Marcano, in which an interracial couple is presented with the chance to alter their unborn child’s genes—as well as choose its skin color. Additionally, there are participating visiting companies from as far as Miami, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.
“Just as important as it is for us to export our Chicago stories, it is also equally important to make sure we import the stories from Latin America, because we need to show the folks that live [in Chicago] that we have more similarities than we do differences with our brothers and sisters across borders,” Carranza says.
A full third of Chicago’s population is Latino, primarily Mexican and Puerto Rican, and yet—nationwide—the city is rarely recognized as a core epicenter of the Latino diaspora. For the most part, Hollywood always shows the U.S. Latino existence as either a border experience or something concentrated on the West Coast or the East Coast, says Carranza.
“They seem to forget that we have a very huge community here in the midwest,” she continues. “So that’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to have a festival like we have here in the midwest—it’s really the only one of its kind in this location. By highlighting our local companies, we are trying to get these Chicago voices out and heard and seen, because in the meantime, you’re only going to hear about the coasts and all of these generations of stories are going to be missed if we don’t have something as big as Destinos to tell those stories.”
