· The Firestorm, New York, 78th Street Theatre Lab, 1982;
· The House of Ramón Iglesia: A Drama in Two Acts (New York: S. French, 1983);
· a.k.a. Pablo, television series, by Rivera and others, ABC, 6 March 1984 - 17 April 1984;
· References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, in Plays from South Coast Repertory: Hispanic Playwrights Project Anthology (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2000).
· "Poverty and Magic in Each Day Dies with Sleep," Studies in American Drama, 1945- Present, 7, no. 1 (1992): 163-166.
While watching a production of Rumpelstiltskin in sixth grade, José Rivera felt as if he had been physically conveyed to another world. Fantasy and transcendence mark all of Rivera's work. Reading such authors as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Gabriel García Márquez, Maya Angelou, and Vladimir Nabokov taught him that lyrical dialogue could lift an audience out of the everyday realm into an altered reality. Often this fanciful setting is another world; frequently it is the internal landscape of his characters projected outward. Rivera probes the heart of his characters' selves, not like a psychoanalyst, but rather like a persistent friend, prompting them to speak about the events in their lives that reveal who they are.
Rivera was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on 24 March 1955, the eldest of six children. His family lived in the small farming town of Espino until his father, hoping to escape financial hardships, moved the family to the United States in 1959. Rather than settle with his other relatives in Newark, New Jersey, or the Bronx, Rivera's father chose a rural area of Long Island, New York, for his family--a site that recurs in several of Rivera's plays. Rivera's father repeatedly tried to make a better life for himself and his family on the mainland, working as a short-order cook, a janitor, an assistant in a greenhouse, a night watchman, and a cabdriver. At one time, he purchased his own diner, only to watch it go out of business when a shopping mall was built across the street. Rivera's father's struggles to gain financial success in mainland America and his subsequent failures are representative of the battles many Puerto Ricans must face against racial and class prejudice, but for the young Rivera, these disappointments darkened his understanding of his own culture. In a 19 March 1989 interview with Steve Winn of the San Francisco Chronicle, he explained how his own sense of his family's poverty was exacerbated by comparison to the affluent lives of his classmates at school: "In my child's mind, to be Hispanic was to be poor, and to be non-Hispanic was to prosper. It would be a long, long time before I let go of that idea." Being at a school that positively accepted racial prejudice and encouraged assimilation only added to Rivera's initial dislike for and self-imposed distance from his own culture.
Because of this criticism of Puerto Rican culture, Rivera differs from other Puerto Rican playwrights. Although he lived in New York City, he was not affiliated with any of the New York theater venues that have supported other Puerto Rican dramatists, such as the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater or the Nuyorican Poet's Café. Rather, his interest in writing plays began away from home, when he moved to the Midwest to attend Denison University in Ohio on a full scholarship in 1973. He wrote and produced four plays while at Denison, one of which was a musical about Sarah Bernhardt, and he drew on the technical support that the university provided, developing his craft as he learned to write and directed other productions. Spending a semester in London and another in New York, where he worked as an intern at Playwrights Horizon Theater, offered him more exposure to the theatrical world. His liberal education at Denison and his cosmopolitan experiences made returning home to his family after graduation difficult and painful, particularly because of the different values he and his father espoused. As soon as he could afford to do so, he moved out of the family home, and worked in a warehouse, a bookstore, and at a publishing company, while continuing to write on his own. He found support for his craft at Theatre Matrix, a group of playwrights who held weekly readings, and they introduced him to various theater groups in New York. Theater Matrix produced a one-act play of his, The Firestorm (1982), at the 78th Street Theatre Lab.
The House of Ramón Iglesia was Rivera's first play to earn him critical attention, winning the Foundation of the Dramatists Guild/CBS New Play Contest Award in 1983. Rivera's title echoes that of Frederico García Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936; translated as The House of Bernarda Alba, 1947). In García Lorca's play the title character is a newly widowed mother who decrees that her five daughters must--to protect family reputation--remain in mourning for eight years before they can wed. Similarly, in Rivera's play the title character is a father whose conventional beliefs press on the family members, particularly on the eldest son who has just returned from college. Written in the vein of the "angry young man" genre, The House of Ramón Iglesia is based on Rivera's frustration in trying to reconcile the white, upper-class, professional values he received at college with his family's old-world, Puerto Rican traditions. His rebellion against his family and its conventional ways is reflected in the leading character, Javier, who exhibits a passionate love/hate for his family and a particularly disparaging representation of his father. Looking back on this play in an introduction to On New Ground: Contemporary Hispanic-American Plays (1987), Rivera expresses some embarrassment over the poor and rather narrow portrayal of Puerto Ricans, but he acknowledges this work as the means by which he exorcized his own ethnic hatred and moved toward embracing his culture in his work.
In the play Javier returns home from college and inherits a series of problems that he associates with Puerto Rican culture. He tries to improve his family's financial situation, but they disregard all his instructions. His diabetic father, Ramón, drinks heavily even though it endangers his life, wasting money on alcohol and gambling, and he is unable to obtain the deed for the house that he professes to own. Javier's mother, Dolores, has never learned to speak English and constantly pines for Puerto Rico, superstitiously believing that her dead baby's soul will not rest until the family returns to their homeland. Ramón does manage to locate the deed, but forges the owners' signatures when they do not want to sell the house. He spends the deposit an interested buyer gives him, and he finds himself in debt when the real estate lawyers discover the forgery and prevent the sale from going through. Javier is forced to resolve the family's dilemma, while completely disgusted by the behavior that brought the predicament upon them. He stands in marked counterpoint to his younger brothers, who do not criticize their culture but rather respect the customs of the family, such as kissing their father and receiving his benediction. Javier's censure, though reasonable at times, makes him an outcast within his own family.
Javier views his struggles with his family as derived from cultural differences rather than seeing them as the generational disputes that occur in all families. As the oldest son, Javier is responsible for his family's welfare and repeatedly admonishes his family for their cultural practices and beliefs. His mother mixes Catholic rituals with black magic as a way of safeguarding herself against the new world, and his father tells stories of a woman who was turned into a witch in Puerto Rico for having slaughtered a pig on a saint's day. Not only does Javier accuse his family of holding onto puerile notions, he also is appalled by the poverty in the home; at one point the furnace breaks down; later the family members must carry buckets of water obtained from a neighbor into the house in order to cook and bathe. He longs to be freed from the values he finds inherent within the Puerto Rican culture, the "fatalism . . . superstition . . . docility" and "thinking like a peasant." His memories of childhood are also colored by violence and disturbing sexual encounters, initiated by members of his family--a female cousin took advantage of him when he was ten years old, as did an older male cousin a year later. These memories, which mark him and his family as different, make Javier angry and lead him to rebel against his culture and his family.
The play underlines Javier's unfavorable memories about his culture by illustrating how the family resorts to physical violence to settle disputes. Ramón at one point becomes violently drunk and tears up the boxes his wife has carefully packed. He verbally berates her, and turns on Javier, who tries to take away his bottle of rum. Their inability to solve problems rationally and to find practical solutions to the sale of the house compounds Javier's repulsion toward them. When Nick Calla, the potential buyer of the house, tells Javier that his people have a "helter-skelter way of stumbling about with other people's time and money" and notices the "smell of fear" coming from Puerto Ricans, Javier agrees with these accusations about his own people. Rather than being incensed at the racist assumptions behind these comments, Javier is angered by the cultural image he has inherited from his father and the work he must do to compensate for this image.
Ultimately, the play hinges upon the struggle between Javier and his father. Javier lacks any knowledge of Puerto Rican history, and of the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. He does not fully understand the nature of the Puerto Rican diaspora. He espouses a creed based on education, discipline, and self-promotion, and views his father as a failure for lacking these qualities, never understanding how the system has worked for him--by providing him with financial aid to attend college--but worked against his father, who has had to endure menial jobs and lost dreams. His brothers, Julio and Charlie, provide a more balanced view. They accuse Javier of "wiping his feet" on their father's back, of having taken advantage of Ramón. Julio and Charlie fully embrace their culture: Charlie is looking forward to life in rural Puerto Rico with its farms, beaches, and "pretty girls." The tension from these contrasting belief systems culminates in an intense battle between the father and son, in which Javier demeans his father by refusing to lend him any more money, making him feel worthless and inferior. He later finds his father out in the snow, limping and disoriented, having suffered the ultimate indignity: being rejected by his son. Javier's words to his father are cruel and painful; he agrees that his father should kill himself so that he would no longer suffer the embarrassment of having a janitor for a father. When Ramón falls into the snow, Javier yells "GET UP FOR CHRISSAKES! Don't you have any pride at all? Are you going to let this snow kill you while I stand here watching you? . . . Why can't you help yourself? . . . You should never have bent down so I could wipe my feet on your back." He resents the fact that his father, by holding on to old world practices, has fallen short of being the successful role model that a son needs. However, Javier cannot deny the duty he feels toward his father; he returns to his father's inert body lying on the ground and carries him to the hospital. The image of a son carrying his father in his arms, a kind of reverse pietà, suggests that family obligations override Javier's own goals of success and that his struggles to move away from his family only bind him more closely to them.
Javier manages to solve his family's problems at the end of the play. He negotiates with the buyer for more time; he flies to Puerto Rico and gets the deed legally signed; he initiates the sale of the house; and he finally kisses his father. His parents return to Puerto Rico, pleased that their son has done "right," according to their code of ethics. However, Javier is left with ambivalent feelings at the end of the play. He tries to embrace some element of his culture by playing the salsa music that his youngest brother listens to, only to see himself as entertainment for the white culture he has desperately wanted to join. In his mind, he can hear his father mocking white culture's false adulation of Latinos: "Dance for us, Javier. Salsa for us . . . Javier." The voice warns that he will always be viewed as an exotic amusement and not as a person. Distanced from his own culture, he acknowledges that he will never be a part of the white culture, but will always be on the cusp between two worlds.
The House of Ramón Iglesia received more attention when a taped production directed by Luis Soto aired on the PBS series American Playhouse in 1986. Rivera had already attracted the notice of Norman Lear, who invited Rivera to write for Embassy Television in 1983, where he worked for three years on scripts directed toward Latino audiences. One of his assignments was the 1984 show about a Chicano family in East Los Angeles, titled a.k.a. Pablo, which starred the Mexican American stand-up comedian Paul Rodriguez playing a Mexican American stand-up comedian named Paul (Pablo) Rivera. José Rivera now refers to the show--which was canceled after six episodes--as a disaster, primarily because the producers of the show, erroneously conflating Latino groups with different political agendas and cultural experiences, assumed a Puerto Rican writer who lived in the Bronx could write about Chicanos in Los Angeles. Although his work in television allowed him to support his then-wife, Heather Dundas, who is also a writer, and to send money to his parents, his experience of writing for television during this period was primarily negative, for he found, as he said in an interview with Jan Breslauer for The New York Times (6 September 1992), that he was only asked to write for shows with dubious Latino stereotypes: "I wasn't called for Murphy Brown and things like that because they couldn't believe a Puerto Rican writer could write a white show. Then, when I did get called, it was for gangs. There was one period where I went to three pitch meetings and I was pitched Salvadoran gangs, girl gangs and deaf gangs." After three years of working for television in Los Angeles, Rivera moved back to New York in 1986. He wrote for Jay Presson Allen's short-lived television drama set in a psychiatric hospital, The Clinic, in 1987, while also working on his second major play, The Promise (1988) as well as several one-act plays, such as Slaughter in the Lake (1988). Receiving support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Rivera then wrote Each Day Dies with Sleep (1990), which allowed him to experiment with the possibilities of magic realism on the stage.
Both The Promise and Each Day Dies with Sleep develop the character that Rivera had introduced earlier in The House of Ramón Iglesia--the abusive, violent, alcoholic father. As a child, Rivera often was afraid of his own father because of his volatile temperament, and he used that fear to create selfish, brutal characters in his plays. His father was a diabetic but would not refrain from drinking or smoking. Rivera revealed in his interview with Breslauer that "little by little, inch by inch, he lost both legs below the knee to amputation," and describes him as "infantilized. He can't do anything for himself." In The Promise and Each Day Dies with Sleep Rivera explores the generational opposition between parent and child with the added element of gender conflict. Rivera taps into a central struggle of Latino culture: female independence in the face of a strongly patriarchal culture. He explains how Latina women are often trapped between serving their fathers and serving their husbands--and eventually serving their sons--and how they devote themselves to these men in lieu of their own interests. In The Promise and Each Day Dies with Sleep, both fathers are jealous of their daughters' love for other men and try to prevent them from seeking happiness. While the daughters in each play are able to overcome their father's opposition, their liberty comes at a high price.
Published in 1989, The Promise, which won the 1991 Joseph Kesselring Honorable Mention, is a modernized version of Shelomoh An-Ski's mystical play, Dibek (1920; translated as The Dybbuk, 1925), and closely follows this tale of preordained love taken from Hasidic folklore. In the original, two young lovers, betrothed to one another by their parents before they were even born, wish to marry, but the avaricious father of the daughter prefers that she marry someone wealthy. Driven insane by the inability to consummate his love, the young rabbinical student turns to cabalistic magic and ultimately starves himself to death, but his spirit returns to inhabit his beloved's body. Through magic realism Rivera is able to adapt a mystical tale of spiritual possession to the modern-day setting of Pachtogue, New York.
Guzman, a factory worker from Puerto Rico, wants his daughter, Lilia, to marry Hiberto, a wealthy thirty-three-year-old man who is singularly unattractive and uncouth. But Lilia, who is only eighteen, longs for Carmelo, the boy her mother married her to in a pretend wedding when she was eight. Gone for seven years, Carmelo returns to Lilia and the two are reacquainted; Lilia's older brother, Milton, tosses crumpled- up balls of paper into the backyard, each bearing a poem from Carmelo attesting his love to Lilia. As she reads each one aloud, Carmelo appears, echoing her words. But the lovers' magical reunion is quickly defeated by Guzman's voodoo. Tying one of Carmelo's poems to the leg of his fighting chicken, played by a masked dancer, Guzman curses Lilia's lover, and the frenetic dance of the proxy causes Carmelo to fall ill and die.
The sorcery continues in the second act, where a withdrawn and anorexic Lilia, mourning the death of Carmelo, is about to marry Hiberto. At the moment they are to exchange vows, Carmelo's spirit inhabits his betrothed's body, preventing the marriage and bringing upon Lilia an intense and feverish sickness. She remains in a comalike state for two weeks as the two souls struggle within her body, until Carmelo's father entreats his son to release Lilia. The plot differs significantly from An-Ski's version in that Carmelo's soul does leave, acknowledging Lilia's right to live a full life, and Lilia struggles back to health. However, she exacts revenge on her father. Taking the magical watch he has used to stay young, she stamps on it with her heel, destroying him with each stroke until he is a broken man. Rivera takes a tale about female submission and creates instead a story of a woman who fully demonstrates her autonomy; she defeats her father and marries a man other than her betrothed, under the condition that she may remain faithful to her dead lover. She evinces control over her marital relations, her body, and the men in her world.
The play investigates the difference between loving someone and desiring to possess that person. Carmelo possesses Lilia in the physical sense of spiritual tenancy; his spirit literally inhabits Lilia's. The violent motions of her possession, described as her body "writhing, pulsating, spinning and shaking with supernatural energy," emphasize the greedy and all-consuming nature of obsessive love. The on-stage radio plays the sounds of howling dogs and bulldozers, reflecting the nightmarish nature of this chaotic, compulsive love. However, once Carmelo's father persuades him to give up Lilia's soul, Carmelo manifests a true, generous love and exits her body. Carmelo's initial inability to abandon Lilia's body symbolizes the kind of control a powerful lover can wield over the loved one.
Guzman, in contrast to Carmelo, is unable to let go of Lilia and continues to love her possessively. His jealous nature stems in part from the belief that his wife deliberately deceived him by pretending to be a virgin when they married. His wife had lost her virginity to Carmelo's father before marrying Guzman, which fuels Guzman's hatred toward Carmelo. During their marriage Guzman subjected his wife to his sarcasm and ridicule, and he took other lovers as a way of punishing her for this one transgression, until she starved herself to death to escape his cruelty. Guzman, for instance, would force his wife to stand out in his fields of sugar cane and laugh so that "her voice fell on that thirsty crop like sugar," enhancing the quality of his crop through the dispersion of her spirit. The first scene of the play shows Guzman spilling his own blood on his crop of corn as a way of increasing its growth and by the end of the play the blood seeps from the corn in streams. In religious iconography, blood that issues forth miraculously from statues and pictures represents suffering. The blood pouring forth at the end of the play, coupled with the laughter of a wife who was tortured to death, suggests the kind of sacrifice Guzman has demanded of his wife and daughter.
Rivera also offers satirical commentary on American commercialism. Milton buys some cowboy boots and moves out west to become the first Puerto Rican cowboy, drawn by the myths of the frontier. He is fascinated by stories he hears, such as the woman who stole babies and sold them to coyotes and wolves, but he soon learns that this story was not a real legend, but rather the plot of a movie. His disappointment reflects the sterility of U.S. culture, in which Hollywood, and not the native folklore, provides the imaginative core of a nation. The noise of bulldozers that increases in volume throughout the play reminds the characters of industrial invasion as do the references to the radioactive rocks that poison the residents of Pachtogue. These machines and objects also symbolize forced assimilation, as the invasive white culture encroaches upon this Hispanic enclave. Guzman joins the white, capitalist industry by taking advantage of the commercial possibilities of his daughter's unconscious state, such as the media attention and movie rights. Brechtian in nature, a marquee with neon lights floats above her inert form to demonstrate this capitalist drive. However, Guzman is also interested in legends and myths as a form of cultural preservation. As a would-be revolutionary thirsting for a Puerto Rican rebellion against the United States, he searches for someone to accept his book of stories collected from his small town of Marcario and to pass them on to his grandchildren. Oddly, Rivera has placed the gesture of cultural preservation in the hands of the villain of the play, perhaps as a critical commentary on those whose distorted sense of nationhood drives them to cruel means, as a way to provide the dark and evil Guzman with one redeeming characteristic.
Studying with the Colombian novelist García Márquez in a workshop at the 1989 Sundance Institute opened Rivera to the possibility of portraying a different vision of the world through the use of magic realism. García Márquez taught him about objective skills underlying magic realism, that fantastical events are not arbitrarily made up, but come from secondhand narrations of eyewitness reports. Magic realism does not alter reality so much as bend one's perception of reality. For example, rather than view the magical events in García Márquez's novels as allegorical, Rivera learned to read them as real experiences that were uniquely perceived.
Rivera wields magic realism as a means to expose certain human truths that cannot be explored through traditional realistic drama and as a method of reflecting the character's internal psychology onstage. As he said in a 1993 interview with Tad Simons, "the human condition is so absurd, and people are so outrageous, that insane things happen on a daily basis. All you really have to do is record them." Occasionally, Rivera finds the label to be limiting, "an ethnic, stereotypical badge" that assumes he will write in a certain manner based upon his Latino background. He understands the tradition as specifically Latin American and connected to certain cultural experiences-- immense poverty, superstitious beliefs, and the influence of Catholicism. While these factors were certainly influential during his childhood, he feels he grew up as a North American as much as a Puerto Rican and that therefore the term "magic realism" does not apply to him in the traditional sense. A possible alternative to the term "magic realism" would be "surrealism," in that it is not associated with a particular ethnicity or cultural tradition and yet still calls into play a reality that moves beyond rational laws of time and space.
Each Day Dies with Sleep premiered in a joint production by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California (10 April 1990) and the Circle Repertory Company in New York (16 May 1990). Written in a surrealist style, Each Day Dies with Sleep signifies a transformation in Rivera's writing toward a more stripped-down, uncomplicated plot. He focuses his social criticism in this play to a single topic, poverty; he limits the number of characters to three; and he follows a distinct story line pared of superfluous events. He dramatizes a woman's ability to transcend her economic and emotional deprivation by deriving strength from the interior worlds she creates. Nelly, the heroine, rises from a house ridden with emotional and economic poverty and, through perseverance, manages to make a better life for herself, her husband, and her father. However, the men ultimately forfeit her offers of sustenance and love and bring about their own demise.
The contrast between two sharply differentiated worlds, the primitive environment of the house on Long Island versus the sunny images of orange-laden Los Angeles, provides the dynamic context of the story. Nelly escapes from this dark past into a present moment filled with possibilities, but the house and her family continue to shape her present self. The sounds of her twenty siblings overwhelm the stage as the children slam doors, run off to bed or attempt to assassinate their father, Augie, for neglecting and mistreating them. Abandoned by a mother who sleeps all day and a father who cannot remember their names, these children have taken on the behavior of the animals they keep as pets. The monstrous house grows rooms overnight, until it becomes a maze of hunger, sex, teardrops, moss, and mushrooms, a tangle of things festering and growing unknown in the dark. This house, in fact, is one of Rivera's childhood memories of a house he visited in Long Island, as he mentions in an introduction to the play when it was published in Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present (1992):
. . . a dark baroque old house in the woods . . . with broken windows, cracked walls, twisted trees, discarded Fords, and babies--babies crying, crawling, eating whatever they could find--and young people who by default and bad luck had become the premature caretakers of these hapless children. There was chaos in this house: rice and beans and rum and salsa and screaming and crying and fighting. . . . I immersed myself in this world, among the bodies and melodramas, falling in love, listening to guitar players and primitive poets, the drumbeats of my adolescence nearly driving me crazy, watching the slowly dying dance of my besieged aunt and uncle who had managed to create sixteen children and were not yet exhausted.
While this image of the house is exaggerated by Rivera's childhood imagination and distorted by adult memories, this description nevertheless captures a sensual domestic sphere guided by sounds and smells and fears and sex rather than by rational thought. The connection between Rivera's memory and the setting of the play provides a good example of how the images in magic realism come from a fanciful perception of the world. Taking this household as the point of origin, Rivera hypothesizes about what would happen to a character who grows up in this environment and manages to escape. Using the talents and basic strengths she was given to improve her lot in life, he asks, "Can Nelley shed her past?"
Nelly is physically repressed by the house she grew up in as well and overwhelmed by the amount of work she does. The middle child of twenty-one children, she is the only one to care for her siblings, do the housework, and prepare the meals; the audience sees her settled, in Beckettian fashion, before a mountain of socks as the play begins. And like a Samuel Beckett character, she is fixed by her environment into a way of life that deprives her of autonomy; she scampers about on all fours, she cannot talk properly, nor can she stand up to her father, Augie, who refers to her only as "pinhead." Not only is Augie feral and vulgar, he views his sole purpose in life as making love to women: "I'm a one-man human reforestation program," he says, and allows Nelly to feed and bathe him while he brags about his sexual exploits. The only other man in her life, Johnny, is also self-absorbed. In love with his own good looks and his ability to play the guitar "like the wind," his sexual exploits go unchecked; he has fathered six children with three of Nelly's older sisters. Fascinated by Nelly's mismatched eyes, he spends time with her and encourages her to speak correctly and to stand up straight. Feeling loved for the first time, she sheds her bestial mannerisms and channels her newfound esteem into the courage to leave her home. She gives Johnny one long, tantalizing kiss that convinces him to marry her, and the two leave for Los Angeles.
Initially, their time in Los Angeles is dreamlike and glowing; an orange tree grows right inside the house and Johnny and Nelly take turns squeezing orange juice over each other's bodies in their newfound freedom and sexual delight. The juice from the oranges is electric and bright, signifying the success they have found with Johnny's new auto repair shop, a success only dimmed by the news of her father's automobile accident. He is paralyzed from the waist down and must sit in a wheelchair with square wheels to prevent him from escaping. He sits in a darkened room, covered with trash, and lets the mold grow on his arms because his wife, too busy making love to her new boyfriend in the next room, ignores him. Nelly invites him to share her new home in Los Angeles, fully aware that his abusive and heartless treatment of herself and her siblings merits no kind compensation. With strength and compassion, Nelly rises above the inadequacies of both her father and her immature husband, but the two, tugging at her like weights, relentlessly drag her down.
Augie proves himself to be truly evil as he poisons their household and their relationship, symbolized by the oranges turning black on the tree. Resentful that he can no longer have sexual intercourse ("If I can't sleep with a woman, what good am I?"), he is unrelenting in his drive to regain his place as the only male in Nelly's life and he competes actively for this position with Johnny. Johnny's vanity and laziness make him easy to manipulate; his entire self-image revolves around his ability to seduce any woman in Los Angeles, and he childishly longs to escape from his work as an automobile mechanic. Meanwhile, the cuckolded husbands become so furious with Johnny for seducing their wives that they attack him. Nelly arms herself with a shotgun and takes vengeance on the husbands, warning Johnny to stay home. Johnny, seduced by images of Nelly's younger sister, Gloria, that Augie has placed in his head, goes out searching for Gloria. His starting the car triggers a bomb set by the angry husbands; badly injured, he relies upon Nelly to nurse him back to health, which she is unable to do. Johnny is unable to withstand Augie's cruel insinuations that because of his burned body he is no longer a man, and he caves in to his father-in-law's suggestions that he kill himself. The contrast between Nelly's willingness to support others and Johnny's vanity and weakness illustrates how the female spirit is continually called upon to nurture others and is made stronger by each obstacle it overcomes. Nelly has moments of weakness in which she regresses to her primitive state, but reminds herself in mantralike fashion, "I beat my past, I slaughtered my inheritance," and rises from the ashes of each downfall. She finally comprehends her father's evil nature and sends him home where he is eaten by the carnivorous animals inhabiting the house.
Nelly's identity throughout the play has been based on her sense of self-sacrifice to others around her, particularly the two men in her life, Augie and Johnny, and what she feels is her duty to them. Rivera writes about the way fathers and husbands often oppress women because he has seen it so often in his own family. Nelly scampers about on all fours at the end of the play because her sole reasons for living--serving her father, or serving her husband--have been destroyed. The spotlight shrinks upon her movements, as if to close her in. A force runs through her body, and she stands "as if electrified." Her indomitable will to survive enables her to resist the self-defeating impulses of the men in her life.
Rivera had to make several difficult choices regarding his own ability to survive on his writing. He spent the 1989-1990 season on a Fulbright Arts Fellowship in Playwriting at the Royal Court Theatre in London, during which time he wrote Marisol (1992). Upon returning to New York, he and his wife decided not to raise their two-year-old daughter, Adena, in the small confines of a New York apartment. They chose instead to move to Los Angeles for more lucrative work writing screenplays, where they had their second child, Teo. In 1991 Rivera wrote Red Rainbow, a screenplay based on Theodore Taylor's book about Mexican migrant workers in northern California, The Maldonado Miracle (1973). The ninety-minute movie, commissioned by American Playhouse, required him to do on-site research in migrant camps in the Salinas Valley. His goal was to explore the particular issues the migrant workers had, such as poor work conditions, exposure to pesticides, or interactions with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). He also wrote an ABC television pilot in 1992; called "Tremont Avenue," it revolves around a single mother, her son, and a younger adult male, all of whom are Puerto Ricans living in the Bronx.
Writing for television the second time around proved more rewarding than his earlier experiences working for Lear. As creator and producer (with Karl Schaeffer) of the series Eerie, Indiana (1991-1992), for example, he had more artistic control over the project than he had previously held and was even able to contribute his interest in magic realism to the scripts. Reminiscent of David Lynch's 1990-1991 series, Twin Peaks, the television show Eerie, Indiana was about two boys living in a dull midwestern town who have trouble convincing others of the bizarre events they witness. The show only lasted for eighteen episodes, but received critical acclaim. Even after such success in television, Rivera admitted in his interview with Breslauer that he values theater more than television because it is about "language, ideas and moving culture forward. It's about a deeper form of expression, a greater soul-searching than TV. TV is fine, but I can create my lasting work in theater." But he also recognizes the power of the storytelling style of television, its pronounced beginning, middle, and end that provides the narrative satisfaction Aristotle first observed in tragedy, and wishes to see this kind of approach more frequently in the theater. He criticizes a post-Beckettian generation of playwrights who deride plot-driven theater, and he encourages using the theater as a place where stories can be told. He also writes screenplays, such as three feature movies for Walt Disney, and believes that the disciplines of the television and motion-picture media have encouraged him to be more compact and sharp in his theatrical writing, telling Breslauer, "In a scene that in my youth I would just meander on and on, I have developed a metronome in my brain that is very conscious of the passage of time. That has actually been to the benefit of my playwriting--I've learned to be leaner, more aware of theatrical time passing." This heightened attention to time manifests itself in the compressed temporal format of his next plays, Marisol and Cloud Tectonics (1995).
First produced 13 March 1992 for the Sixteenth Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky, Marisol features another of Rivera's strong female characters who manifest wisdom and concern for others. The West Coast production at the La Jolla Playhouse of San Diego, which premiered 8 September 1992, won six Drama- Logue Awards, including Best Play; and the 1993 Hartford Stage Company and Joseph Papp Public Theatre production won an Obie (Off-Broadway) Award for Outstanding Play in 1993. The play also won a Susan Marton Award, a PEN West Dramatic Writing Award nomination, and the 1993 Joseph Kesselring Award Honorable Mention. Produced in New York during the same theatrical season as Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1993), Marisol joins a tradition of plays that comment upon the millennium through an apocalyptic vision of the future, while concurrently deploring a capitalist society for its inhumanity. His goal is to shock nonchalant and jaded audiences into a socially conscious awareness of the world around them.
Ominous elements of the New York cityscape dominate the scene, such as a poem spray painted on the wall referring to the "souls of dead people," a subway announcer warning the travelers to "trust no one," and a Guardian Angel dressed as an urban warrior. Marisol, a young publishing copywriter, navigates her way through danger and is nearly beaten to death with a golf club, shot by a jilted lover confusing Marisol with the "other woman," and assaulted by a random stranger eating an ice-cream cone. She inhabits a disintegrating world in which apples and coffee have become extinct, where human pesticide is dropped over the Bronx, where a plague has killed half the population, and where cows give salty milk. The laws of the solar system and society are ignored; the moon has disappeared for more than nine months; and people are locked away and tortured for exceeding their credit card limit. When Marisol's Guardian Angel appears, Marisol demands an explanation for these events, but all the Angel can reveal is that humanity is decaying because of a dying God. She explains that "Constellations are wasting away, the nauseous stars are full of blisters and sores, the infected earth is running a temperature, and everywhere the universal mind is wracked with amnesia, boredom, and neurotic obsessions."
As T. S. Eliot did before him, Rivera turns to the myth of the Fisher King, a myth that connects the Fisher King's health to the well-being of the land and reveals how the land will die unless a new king is found. The Guardian Angel can no longer protect Marisol but joins in the fight against God and invites Marisol to do so as well. Marisol refuses to believe the angel, childishly chanting "God is great! God is good!" demonstrating her passive dependency on a deity to rectify injustices rather than face the social ills happening outside her window. Rivera wrote the play, in part, to examine and challenge outdated conceptions of God. "This is the first play I've written with an eye on the next generation. We need to find new heroes and new myths for our society--the old ones just aren't working," Karen Fricker quotes him as saying. "The God we know now is a right-wing, white male, corporate God, in whose world racism, sexism and political injustice are rampant." Marisol, who convinces herself that God "still cares" and that "he doesn't play dice," longs for the complacency that previously enabled her to remove herself from the misery of the world: "I just want to go home. I just wanna live with June--want my boring nine-to-five back--my two-weeks-out-of-the-year-vacation--my intellectual detachment--my ability to read about the misery of the world and not lose a moment out of my busy day." The journey she undertakes during the course of the play brings her face to face with poverty, hate crimes, homelessness, and violence--the same misery she wishes to avoid.
Rivera's emphasis on social ills within the city makes this play one of the most political plays he has written. In the interview with Breslauer published in The Los Angeles Times, he mentioned various events that influenced the play, such as a long-lost uncle who died homeless, the impact of Reaganomics, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He explained to Lynn Jacobson, in an interview published in 1991, how the "political essence of the play is about the homeless experience, the disorientation of the street," and in order to convey this, he creates bizarre and unreal human characters, fantasy-like, whom he refers to as "walking nightmares . . . who have to be dealt with." The main character is confused by this phantasmagoria of characters, such as the man who is looking around the city for his lost skin, having been set on fire by skinheads. Another man gives birth to a stillborn baby and asks Marisol for help burying the body. He leads her to a graveyard for children born on the streets and she is overwhelmed that the large number of tombstones actually make up the city streets. As Marisol meets these characters and navigates her journey through apocalyptic New York, she searches for her way home, much like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939). But unlike Dorothy, she has no final reassurance of finding home; she has been displaced and the secure belief in home no longer exists.
Marisol unwittingly assumes the role of a homeless person. A wealthy Woman in Furs accuses Marisol of being homeless and attacks her verbally, admonishing her that "homelessness is against the law." At another point in the play, Marisol dons a homeless person's coat and searches for food in the garbage can, slowly transforming herself from a yuppie New Yorker into a member of the homeless class she previously ignored. Her two friends, June and Lenny, also become homeless through an odd turn of events. Her coworker, June, casts her mentally retarded brother, Lenny, out onto the streets and worries whether anyone else will take care of him. He returns to knock her senseless with a golf club, causing her to wander the streets suffering from amnesia. In her search to find June, Marisol meets other street people and listens to their stories, and she is slowly jarred out of her numbed apathy and forced to deal with the millennial transformation.
In addition to the homelessness, Marisol must also battle the violence that is creating the universal rifts. The opening scene in which the Man with Golf Club, a different character than Lenny, attacks Marisol sets the tone for the play, for it is not clear whether she has died or not; other characters allude to the report of her death in the newspaper, which creates an eerie sensation that she is living on borrowed time. Several other characters attempt to harm her, such as the man who hurls an ice cream at her, the Woman with Furs, who swings at her with a golf club, or Lenny, who tries to rape her. While some of the violence is caused by women, Marisol's monologue specifically addresses the threat of violence that men constantly pose to women: "You are the enemy, and you'll always be there looking for me." Marisol is also forced to return the violence; the Woman with Furs engages her in a fight because of the "new world order," and Marisol clubs Lenny to the point of unconsciousness, defending herself and leaving the stage with blood on her hands. Images of violence also surround her, such as her Guardian Angel, hovering nearby in several scenes, who polishes an Uzi. A skinhead pursues a homeless person with a can of gasoline and sets him aflame right before Marisol; she covers her ears as a way to block out the sound of man's inhumanity to another. Marisol's journey ends with the realization that the problems of this world can only be solved by humans joining in the fight with the angels against God. Her epiphany is cut short when the Woman in Furs shoots Marisol with an Uzi, but Marisol returns, in a scene suggestive of the afterlife, to deliver her final speech. She relates how the people have joined the angels in their fight against a senile God until a true new order is established, with new ideas, new powers, new miracles. Marisol envisions this new peace as she gazes into the audience, at the potential of the people themselves, and murmurs, "Oh God. What light. What possibilities. What hope." The play demands that the audience members shake off their apathy and eradicate outmoded belief systems, in order that the ills destroying the social fabric of the United States not prevail.
Rivera continues his brand of social critique couched in fantastical stories in his six one-act plays, collectively titled Giants Have Us in Their Books: Six Naive Plays (1997). This group of playlets, subtitled in the typescript "Six Children's Plays for Adults" in the vein of Roald Dahl's short stories, originated when his daughter wondered if giants tell imaginary stories about humans in the same way that humans tell tales about enchanted creatures, such as giants. Rivera decided to turn his whimsical telescope in reverse, Gulliver fashion, and inspect people as he imagined that giants might examine humans-- bemusedly, and with some dismay.
The first three plays focus on minute moments in peoples' lives that have the transformative power of myth. The first play, A Tiger in Central Park, examines the paranoia surrounding AIDS and the need people have to identify a scapegoat for the disease so that they may feel more secure. A tiger has been terrorizing the citizens of Manhattan to such an extent that they have been afraid to have sex. Two people set a trap for the tiger but catch a jogger instead. In their desperate desire to catch the tiger so they might safely have sex, they resort to folklore about werewolves and rationalize-- based on his "one long eyebrow"--that the jogger is really a tiger capable of metamorphosing into a human and shoot him. With the sexual moratorium lifted, the two return home for wild lovemaking, falsely reassured that they have solved the problem by killing the person they have arbitrarily designated as the cause of their fears.
The second play, Flowers, examines human transformation but focuses this time on the onslaught of puberty and the inexplicable powers that transform children into adults. A twelve-year-old girl with a simple case of acne starts to feel strange, unaccountable forces acting through her body, which her brother explains as merely puberty. However, unlike simple hormonal changes, her face begins to sprout tubes, the tubes turn into flowers, and later branches begin to grow on her arms and roots spread from her feet. She foresees newspaper headlines that read "Twelve Year Old Suburban Girl Turns into Human Flowerbed," and by the end of the play she can no longer talk or walk but has completely shifted into a vegetal state. The metaphor of pubescent transformation is heightened by the brother's commentaries from the sidelines; he witnesses in awe his sister's changes, wishes he could help, but in the end stands silently by as she moves into another realm where he can no longer reach her.
Using allegory, in The Winged Man Rivera examines how people in society occasionally manage to bridge the divisions of race, religion, or ethnicity that can separate one group from another. A young woman exploring caves stumbles upon a winged man wounded from a bullet. Although he dies shortly thereafter, they make love and she becomes pregnant with his child--an allusion to myths in which gods transform themselves into animals and impregnate women. Determined to continue this race of winged species, she negotiates the hostility and disbelief of her mother and best friend during her inexplicable pregnancy; she refuses to eat eggs or poultry for fear it would be cannibalism; she builds a nest in her room; and she even perches in the tree to listen to the birds singing. As an allegory for seeing the world from another perspective, The Winged Man shows a woman believing in herself and the miracle she carries in the face of persecution from those closest to her.
The second half of the series of plays is less whimsical, and the stories convey stronger political commentaries and have darker overtones. The first piece, Gas, is a monologue by a Puerto Rican gas attendant whose brother is fighting in the Gulf War. Revealing both anger and sadness, the monologue shifts between the relationship he has with his brother and the rage he feels that the U. S. government has sent innocent boys overseas to fight a war purely for economic reasons. At the end of the monologue, blood drips from the gas pump, symbolizing the trade of human lives for gasoline, indicting both the government and the audience.
The longest piece of the six, The Crooked Cross, concerns teenagers' blindness to the horrors of history and the need for young people to be aware of the crimes committed against humanity. A girl receives a pair of swastika earrings as a gift and wears them as a sign of her autonomy and rebellion against society: "It's just a piece of jewelry. It's just a shape. . . . It's not a threat. It's just a piece of silver in a crooked cross. A lot of kids wear them, pins, medallions, the rebels, and I identify with that. . . . I'm here. I have my own mind and I know what I think and I don't hate Jews and I can wear whatever I want and it doesn't mean shit, it's only clothing." When a Jewish schoolmate's house blows up and she and her family are killed, the symbols suddenly become invested with hate-crime sentiment, and the girl is accused of anti-Semitism, which she denies. Only when a strange, ominous man, a neo-Nazi in disguise, encourages her to join a group of like-minded people does the girl understand that her choosing to wear the earrings identifies her with a particular belief system. Her schoolmate, returning from the dead, warns her that not all signs are innocuous and advises that she inform herself about the sufferings of others.
Tape, the final play, reflects Rivera's belief that lies are the root of all evil in the world. In an afterlife scenario that has echoes of Beckett's plays, a deceased individual sits in a room and is forced to listen to the lies he had told during his lifetime, captured on ten thousand reels of tape. While the audience never gets to hear the tapes--the first one begins to play just as the light fades--the play captures the character's mounting fear as he realizes he will have to suffer the pain he caused others by his mendacity. The last two plays, played back to back, emphasize humans' inability to rescind hurtful actions. The evil an individual commits will return to haunt him or her. More than curious tales with a twist, these six short plays represent Rivera's attempt to use the theater for the same reason fairy tales are told to children: to impart moral truths and to illustrate human values from a different angle.
The societal wrongs that Rivera examines are concentrated in large cities, and the cityscapes of New York and Los Angeles figure predominantly in his plays. In the next three plays he wrote, the cities act almost like characters, in that the misery and poverty found in large cities and their effect on the human condition are intrinsically tied to the plot. The total destruction of the cities in order to begin anew with a clean slate, as indicated in Marisol, seems to be Rivera's solution to these injustices, prompted by the racial riots that lacerated the city of Los Angeles in 1992. The central characters in Maricela de la Luz Lights the World (1998) ward off a snowstorm that threatens the city, while Cloud Tectonics offers a futuristic vision of a Los Angeles with integrated neighborhoods, signs in Spanish, and clear air, and that is now home to the White House, United Nations, and the World Trade Center. Finally, in The Street of the Sun (1997), Rivera's vision of a community coming together is initiated only after the eruption of an earthquake, a natural disaster that quietly threatens the busy lives of the inhabitants of Los Angeles.
Created from a series of bedtime stories that Rivera used to tell his daughter wherein each night she would be allowed to save Los Angeles from a particular danger, Rivera composed Maricela de La Luz Lights the World as a children's play about the nature of heroism in the twentieth century. In an interview with Stephanie Coen, appearing in the December 1996 issue of American Theatre in which the play was first published, he referred to the play facetiously as " Marisol's little sister," but his choice of the name Maricela was deliberate; both of the plays present apocalyptic views of a city in crisis and depict an unwilling but courageous heroine on her journey, encountering unworldly creatures and resolving a personal dilemma while fighting great external odds.
The play, part fairy tale, part urban legend, offers clear lessons to the children regarding the nature of contemporary evils and suggests why the Greek and Nordic heroes of ancient myths can no longer provide solutions. Maricela and her younger brother, Ricardo, find themselves stranded at the mall one day when it starts to snow. While all the crazed adults vacate the city, the two children are left to wander the streets of Los Angeles trying to find their way home. Instead, they run into all sorts of strange creatures who hint why the sun god, Hunahpu, has disappeared and insist that the two of them must use their wits to save the city. They meet, for example, Xbalanque, a Mayan moon god; Ofelia, Goddess of the L.A. River; a cyclops; and Jason of the Argonauts sailing with Hercules and Orpheus. They have to do battle with the Seven-Headed Hydra, two of whose heads are Richard Nixon and Adolf Hitler; a sleep- inducing Fog; and a Yellow Snake who carries a tuning fork in his mouth and is lulled to sleep by singing José Feliciano's "Feliz Navidad" (1970). In fact, the play relies heavily on this kind of sardonic humor and mixes an irreverent treatment of myth (Jason explains how Orpheus has had "a thousand hours of therapy and he's still pining away for his lost love Eurydice!") with a sort of urbane cynicism (Ricardo notes, "See what happens when you walk around L.A.? you slip into some kind of alternative universe!"). At first, the two children disbelieve that the creatures they meet are gods and goddesses guarding Los Angeles and only gradually awaken to the existence of a spiritual world outside of their tangible purview.
The children of divorced parents, they are accustomed to relying upon their own wits, but they still look to adults to help them in their search, refusing to believe in their own abilities to save Los Angeles. Maricela repeatedly expresses sadness over her parents' recent divorce and anger with her mother for her involvement with an opportunistic and deceptive boyfriend. They plead with the various creatures to help them, assuming that because they are "adults" they are more knowledgeable and brave. But the issues of the late twentieth century are not so clear, for as Jason tells Maricela: "How can you tell the good guys from the bad guys in your time? You gotta dump us and come up with some new heroes of your own." The message that the children learn during the course of the play is that "evil flourishes when good people do nothing," and that common people are capable of heroic acts. Through various trials they learn that intelligence, and not weapons, can solve problems, and that even intelligence is not enough when one lacks the courage of one's own convictions. At the end of Maricela's journey, she has discovered a courage within herself that makes her determined to speak to her mother about her dreadful boyfriend. The two siblings bring the sun back to Los Angeles, yet are surprised when no one applauds them for their efforts. The inhabitants of Los Angeles continue on as if nothing had ever gone awry. But unbeknownst to the children, the gods gather behind them and adorn them with lights, turning them into constellations and making them myths in their own time.
In her foreword to Marisol and Other Plays (1997), Tina Landau notes of Rivera's plays how each one can be read as explorations of the nature of time on stage: "Each Day compresses it, proceeding at a frantic pace with scenes popping in and out of each other. Marisol elongates it, as the first act's episodes dissolve into a seamless second act, which seems to take place in eternal limbo. In Cloud, we are introduced to Celestina--for whom time is nothing and everything--and a world in which a quesadilla can be cooked in real time while forty years go by in an instant." First produced 27 June 1995-16 July 1995, Cloud Tectonics, more than any other of Rivera's plays, adopts time as its subject, dramatizing Henri Bergson's theory of élan vital, or felt time--the passing of time that cannot be monitored by instruments. It originates from a memory Rivera had of a pregnant hitchhiker he had seen years before in Los Angeles standing in the rain one night. And it is also his response, as he admitted in an interview with Ed Morales, to what it is to be human and to experience the ravages of time on the human soul: "it's an uncontrollable passage of events, and there's a great deal of sadness in the passing."
This play has the same lyrical, fairy-tale quality of Marisol, but without the sense of fatality looming behind the characters' lives. Anìbal de la Luna, a disillusioned baggage handler at Los Angeles International Airport whose every other word is the expletive "coño," picks up Celestina del Sol, a drenched pregnant hitchhiker, during the "deluge of the century." Her body, as she describes it, is unable to process time. A woman who never ages, she has lived her entire life in one room and is now searching for the man who impregnated her the one and only time she had intercourse. The two take refuge in Anìbal's Los Angeles home, running inside to keep dry, munch on quesadillas, and exchange stories, all the while slowly, and heedlessly, falling in love. Meanwhile the clocks have stopped and two years have passed, documented only by the fact that Anìbal's macho brother stops by on his way to fight in Desert Storm, but returns in what seems a half hour later, an emotionally ravaged veteran, to say he has been fighting in Bosnia.
This play is Rivera's most condensed, occurring all in one act; its premise of time compression is thus supported by its structure. The play allows him to mix the lyrical and the pedestrian. Anìbal is a man firmly rooted in the world of day-to-day activities, a man who lugs baggage onto conveyor belts and who has no way of comprehending the mystical Celestina. However, Celestina is not only spiritual; her extremely pregnant body attests to a tangible fecundity onstage, and her joyful, innocent exuberance about sex ("I love the word 'sex,'" she tells Anìbal, "and if I could fuck fuck fuck all day I would!") makes for potent physical tension between the two of them. The stories they exchange define who they are and create a romantic world that they--and the audience-- inhabit for two years. Celestina reveals how her parents, realizing their daughter was not aging, made her ride a bicycle around the house as her father yelled out numbers to give her a sense of time based on the shape of a clock--as if time were a circular phenomenon. She tries to explain to Anìbal her predicament: "And what if these people don't progress through space and 'time' the same way you do? They don't age smoothly. They stay little far longer than they should. Or the rhythms of the day mean nothing." She demands of Anìbal to tell her what muscle of the human body feels time--the heart, pushing against time's movement, or the spinal cord, that "silver waterfall of nerves and memories," but Anìbal can only conclude she is insane, though she exerts a powerful sexual presence. She desires to feel time through her body because this physicality seems to be the only way she can make sense of the universe; the way she runs her fingers over the ceramic dinner plate or strokes the furry softness of the blanket roots the play deep in the realm of the physical, even while it meanders into philosophical questions about the nature of time. Finally, she seduces Anìbal into kissing her, and their love becomes palpable as she orders Anìbal to kiss her toes, her knees, her belly, her breast, all the way to her lips: ". . . Home, traveler. You're home!"
Celestina's presence in Anìbal's apartment is like a homecoming of sorts for him. During the course of the evening Celestina speaks Spanish to Anìbal, and he suddenly remembers growing up with his cousins in New York City; even though he has forgotten his heritage, words return to him, as do memories, passions. This play illustrates Rivera's desire to retain his own culture, not only for the stories, but to be identified as Puerto Rican by speaking the language. Anìbal, like Rivera, can understand Spanish, but had refused to speak it while growing up, as part of his method of rebelling against his family and his heritage. Celestina, embodying the culture, brings back memories to Anìbal, but he can only examine these fragments of his Hispanic past and cannot recover the culture any more than he can return in time. Celestina tells him "Solamente hablo espanol cuando estoy enamorada" ("I only speak Spanish when I'm in love"), but Anìbal misses this revelation of her love for him because he has lost his own language.
In contrast to Anìbal's misty sensitivity stands his younger brother, Nelson. A sexist pig who spouts blasphemous and dirty comments about liberals and the female anatomy, he enters and clears the dialogue of all its poetic and metaphysical musings of time. His Rambo bravado and his belief in weaponry and violence juxtapose the sensation of missing time with the reality of the outside world. When he first arrives to visit his brother before being sent off to fight in the Persian Gulf, he, too, falls prey to Celestina's timeless spell. The shift from his bravado antics of body-slamming his brother to the moment where he sits quietly on the floor, his ear pressed to Celestina's stomach, and speaks to the baby about the stars scraping against the sky is comparable to a miracle. But this change is not the only one he undergoes; his return on stage as a depressed and cynical civilian, limping and lacking the energy of his previous self punctures the self-enclosed time capsule that has surrounded Anìbal and Celestina. A bubble of sensuality and lost languages and dreams has encompassed them, where there has been no time, only "an endless now that needs to be filled with life." In the epilogue of the play, the unaged Celestina returns to Anìbal, now a man of eighty, and tries to remind him that they once loved each other. Not recognizing her, he only remembers the dreamlike quality of the evening that they spent together, and the Spanish words she spoke to him, expressing the possibility of loving Anìbal in every age of his life. She calls this "El amor de una vida," the love of a lifetime, a love that finds no obstacle in time.
Rivera also wrote Sueño (Dream), an adaptation of the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream, 1635), for the Hartford Stage Company in 1998. Rivera melds lyrical poetry with colloquial matters to modernize this play about a king, who, because of astrological warnings, believes his newborn son, Segismundo, will become a tyrant if he is allowed to grow up and inherit the throne. The baby is imprisoned for twenty-five years without any human contact save for his teacher until he is released to rule as king for the day. The play turns on whether Segismundo (originated by John Ortiz, who also played Anìbal in the New York production of Cloud Tectonics) will rule as a tyrannous or gentle ruler, whether he will be able to tame the "beast" that lurks within men when deprived of the civilizing touch of the royal court. Rivera does not alter the sequence of events much, except for brief tampering with the ending and relocating the play from Poland to seventeenth-century Spain. His contribution consists of modernizing Calderón's florid, seventeenth-century language by incorporating such anachronistic references as a minimum wage and by inserting occasional vulgar street talk into the mouths of these royal characters. Estrella, the lead female, comments how a love interest "does something truly wacky to my personal chemistry" while another character offers theological wisdom: "If God really wants your ass, he is going to get your ass." Rivera's ironic treatment of Calderón's characters keeps the audience amused and entertained, but some critics such as Bill Marx from The Boston Globe and Alvin Klein from The New York Times Review, complain that the play suffers from this ironic treatment, which renders the characters shallow and the issues superficial, eroding the intellectual and psychological core of the piece. The difficulty of adapting another's work often depends on whether the author agrees with his predecessor's positions or whether he chooses to parody or criticize them; in this case, Rivera's critique of Calderón's conservative political views left the critics unsure of how to understand the play.
The Street of the Sun, recipient of the Kennedy Center for New American Plays Grant, has a stronger political thrust than any of Rivera's previous plays. Like Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman show about the riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the policemen who assaulted Rodney King, The Street of the Sun focuses on the cultural and racial divisions that plague Los Angeles. A quasi-biographical story, The Street of the Sun is about Jorge Cienfuegos (again originated by Ortiz) and his French wife, Thérèse Icard, who move to Los Angeles when Cyclops Films offers Jorge a career as a screenwriter. Jorge, a burnt-out public-school teacher from New York City, embraces the opportunity to make money, while Thérèse finds Los Angeles oppressive. At the end of the day, their attitudes toward the city are reversed.
Jorge, in Joycian Ulysses-like fashion, wanders the city of Los Angeles during a twenty-four-hour period, accompanied by a mythic Big Hairy Man who is invisible to everyone, including Jorge, but visible to the audience. He journeys, in a kind of picaresque way, to various points and meets the diverse individuals who make up Los Angeles. He meets actresses who are assigned stereotypical television and movie roles based on their race, and he encounters a young Mexican refugee whose father was killed earlier that day and who now wanders lost throughout the city. An African American mother deplores the racist environment in which her son grows up and expresses to Jorge the fear of violence she lives under constantly; the fear continues to grow as she waits for him at the Griffith Park Observatory and he does not appear. One mother shares with another her concern that their son is learning Spanish from his nanny; when he runs onstage exclaiming about the beauty of the stars in Spanish, the two women shudder about the incomprehensibility of his words. Their racist fear becomes all the more evident when they calmly respond to another child who is speaking in English, even though he is swearing offensively, for at least they understand his language. Throughout his travels around Los Angeles, Jorge witnesses a section of society that Hollywood either refuses to acknowledge or molds into false ethnic or racial representations.
The machinery of Hollywood is fueled by the discovery and promotion of exciting stories. Jorge understands that his economic worth depends upon the story that his grandmother told him about a poor young farm girl impregnated by the sun. Even as he tells the story to Thérèse, however, other ensemble actors pantomime the myth behind a scrim, illustrating how a myth takes on a life of its own beyond the storyteller's control, and that no one can truly "own" a myth. Later, two mothers tell this same myth to entertain their children; one tells it in Spanish, the other in Korean, demonstrating that myths transcend cultural boundaries. Near the end of the play, Jorge turns on the television set and watches in horror as his own myth unfolds before his eyes as a late-night movie. Furthermore, Rivera treats myth irreverently: the Greek god Apollo is a character in this play, handing out eight-by-ten-inch glossies of himself and living in Bel Air. His quick escape from the catastrophe at the end of the play is a subversion of the deus ex machina device used to end classical drama; rather than assist the citizens, Apollo is the first one to evacuate the city after the earthquake, in his private helicopter. As he does in Maricela de la Luz Lights the World, Rivera exposes modern man's dependency on the ancient constructions of deity.
The danger in storytelling lies in who tells the story, who claims authority of the tale. In an attempt to approximate the truth about someone else's reality, television and movie stories often distort the truth or portray contrived images of minority groups that ultimately reinforce stereotypes. At Cyclops Films, Jorge is greeted by two receptionists, an Asian woman wearing a Carmen Miranda costume and an Anglo woman in blackface, implying that Hollywood understands race as a "costume" or a disguise one can assume to create a good story. The producers are juvenile and superficial, insulting Jorge with the suggestion that he write a hideously disparaging show about Latinos. Jorge is disgusted by the producers' racist depictions of his people, but what also sickens him is that he has tried to persuade them of the merits of his story instead of merely walking away. Between the quips of their foolish banter, he has been able to pitch a story about Latinos that he would like to write; he was able to join into the rhythms of their conversation, speaking their language in order to be heard. This danger of compromising one's ideals to join with the mainstream voices is made all the more apparent when Jorge meets a former friend, Lydia Ruiz, a Cuban playwright, who has changed her name to Bianca Stewart in order to assimilate with the white commercial world of movie moguls. Even as she espouses foregrounding Latino issues in the motion-picture industry, her tirade about the "archetypal events of Latino life" that have never been depicted dissolves into a ranting litany of the pain Latinos have suffered in order that she may have a story to sell: "the little stories of bodega-owners and abuelitas and campesinos and Chicano cops and housewives and nannies from Guatemala." Her projected stories, limited in vision, are no better than the monocular view of minorities that Cyclops Films proposes. The contrast between these potential depictions and the real-life stories shared by the individuals Jorge meets on the streets of Los Angeles evokes a blistering indictment on how Hollywood shapes the way that whites view minority groups and even how these ethnic groups see themselves and their community.
After a tremendous earthquake shakes Los Angeles, represented by the Big Hairy Man exploding in rage, Jorge and Thérèse go out onto the streets with the rest of the citizens of Los Angeles, rich and poor, black and white, who, forced from the isolation of their homes, must interact with one another. No longer are they isolated in their own respective monologues, but rather they share stories as they comfort one another and pass around a thermos, drawing collective strength as a group. The crisis, dissolving racial and economic boundaries, has encouraged people to communicate and help one another. At the end of his mythic journey throughout Los Angeles, Jorge realizes that the stories of the people in his own community need to be told and that their lives, rather than his grandmother's myths, can provide him with narrative material. Thérèse, who has had her own parallel journey throughout the city, shares his view, relishing the eccentric and eclectic diversity of people she has met during the day. The stars, which have been so difficult to see throughout the play, now begin to burn brilliantly because the artificial lights of Los Angeles have gone out.
As a playwright interested in representing the internal colorations of his characters' states of mind, Rivera emphasizes characters over plot and nowhere is this emphasis more apparent than in Sonnets for an Old Century and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, both of which premiered in January 2000. Inspired by Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology (1915), Sonnets for an Old Century provides a glimpse into the afterlife, while References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, inspired by García Lorca, depicts an estranged couple attempting to communicate with one another. The characters of Sonnets for an Old Century have recently died and are given an opportunity to summarize a moment from their lives before they pass over. These people have been the victims of cruel forms of hatred during their lives--of abuse, of racism, of homophobia--or have suffered from certain regrets or failings. Rivera offers no resolutions for either play, no upbeat promises that the human condition is improving, but instead reaffirms the individual's strength in being able to share his or her story. As Rivera's focus becomes more internal, he shifts slightly from the magic realism that informed much of his work and draws upon the tradition of existential philosophy.
The deliberate ambiguity in the set designs marks Sonnets for an Old Century as different from his previous works. "It could be a tunnel, a cave, a warehouse, an airplane hangar," he explains in the stage directions, and he provides scant information about the decor: "This space could have walls, it could be surrounded by clouds, or rocks, it could look infinitely deep and tall, it could be full of signage, machinery, windows, iron bars." Although these ambiguous stage directions assign the location of the play as everyplace and no place, the nebulous background attests to the dizzying sense of nothingness that occasionally constitutes the human condition. Rivera wants his characters, like the existential heroes of Beckett or Albert Camus, to witness and confront the vacuum encompassing their lives, compelled as they are to account for themselves in the face of a nameless God. Echoing these absurdist precursors, Rivera explores the reaction of the human psyche when confronted with the abyss of one's own death, but unlike Beckett, he does not leave his characters dangling in a realm where language has no referent. Rather, his characters reveal their pain and aspirations in the colloquial idioms they use, and they find meaning through their ability to create their own narrative.
The undefined zone in which the characters deliver their monologues appears to be the afterlife, where they undergo a kind of rite of passage from one world to another. Twenty-three characters, representing all sectors of the United States, rich and poor, old and young, gay and straight, white, black, Latino, and Asian, takes turns stepping forward into a circle of light to offer their "sonnet" of life. Although not formal sonnets of rhyming, iambic pentameter, each character's speech is a rhapsodic outpouring of an inner song that describes an emotion, relates a personal tale, or reveals a mystical connection with life. Indicative of the variety of human emotions and experiences, these sonnets range widely in scope. Some characters relate slice-of-life scenarios, such as the outraged Latino mother of sixteen children, who, swearing profusely, describes giving birth to her sixteenth child when her husband's mistress called to inform her of their adulterous affair. A deaf girl tells a tale of abuse through an interpreter, relating how she was beaten up by a gang of boys while other classmates silently watched. Another victim of hatred, a Latino man, tells how he was shot by suspicious police merely for waiting outside a house in a white neighborhood where his girlfriend was babysitting. Several other characters express regret for missed opportunities, such as the man who witnessed another human being beaten up on the city streets but was too frightened to intervene, or the forklift operator who never visited his dying father because he could not bear to see him as an invalid. (Rivera's father also had his legs amputated while terminally ill, and the similarity between this character's father and Rivera's, in addition to the fact that the play is dedicated to Rivera's father, suggests that Rivera still confronts the ghosts of his father in his works.) Occasionally individuals discuss the pleasures they have experienced in life: the couple who had sex anywhere and at anytime as a way to guard themselves against the meaninglessness of life or the man whose disgust for the polluted air of Los Angeles lessened when a stunning sunset caused by this same pollution introduced him to his gorgeous next-door neighbor.
In contrast to these realistic stories, several characters offer an unusual perspective on life, relating experiences of insanity or of inexplicable phenomena. One individual who spent time in an institution recounts how he took pleasure in exploring the strange and twisted pathways of his own mind, finding a curious refuge in his own madness. He speaks directly to God on this point, crediting him with the gift of insanity that freed him from the normalizing experience of civilization: "A strange liberation is what you gave me." Another character, an astronomer, experienced bizarre, unexplainable forces when he was a child that distorted his backyard, prompting his lifelong professional study of the expanding universe. A third character recalls a childhood incident when the ghosts of dead Latinos visited him through the hole in his bedroom floor, telling him dispirited stories of their struggles to survive but sharing with him the ability to laugh at life's misfortunes. These episodes of life's mysterious moments reveal the inscrutable side to human experience, made less terrifying by the characters' ability to share with others and dissolve the solitude of their singular experiences.
In addition to the mystical, Rivera delves into the mythopoetic. The 18th Person, for example, begins a matter-of-fact tale of political imprisonment, but reveals himself to be Icarus when he mentions how his father made wings out of wax and feathers for the two of them. He explains that it was his father's condescending attitude that caused him to fly toward the sun, not hubris, and that after his fall and subsequent rescue by Maine fishermen, he went to live in New York City. Introducing a commonplace version of the myth into the play connects the play to an entire tradition of mythic revision, from Euripides to James Joyce. The use of myth universalizes the character's experience and suggests that the same story that spoke to the ancient Greeks has value today. This theme of continuity appears again when a character argues that the history of any race never dies because the traces and memories of ancestors live in the bodies of the next generation, recycled in the features and traits of a person's physical self. He reasons that if U.S. citizens are a melting pot of different races from all over the world, then any racial fighting is akin to harming the body, destroying the natural corps of one's country. "Everything is recycled," he explains: "I ask my ancestors: Who had my face before? Who shaped my brain? They laugh. They know I carry my nation's tragedies with me. I sing its anthems. Its coastline mirrors the shape of my back. I know the laughter and faces of my people are encoded forever in my deep spaces." This notion of recycled spirits permeates the play, for it is understood that all the characters at some point have experienced one another's emotions and lives. The 23rd Person cautions a fellow character about his final speech, for the "words go out to the universe, to be recycled among the living, like rain, like part of some ecology of the spirit." The human desires these characters possess, now that they are dead as well as while they were living, are not benign but affect others in the interconnected web of human existence.
God, as in a Beckettian play, is an absent presence in this world; the characters conceive of him as a force behind their lives and believe him to be listening to them as they tell their stories, but they receive no proof of his existence. God serves as the measure or guiding principle of how one leads one's life; the character who regretted not visiting his dying father feels confident that he can "look right into the terrible eyes of our Lord Jesus and be secure in the knowledge that the smudges on my eternal soul are slight and unimportant and simply the wages of living in an imperfect world run by man and his laughable laws." Another character whose forte involves analyzing peoples' laughter to detect what kind of day they are having, asks God to laugh, listens intently for a moment, then concludes, "God's not laughing today." Thus, the group waits for a sign from God at the end of the play, after the last person has spoken, to indicate that he has heard them and that they have been recognized. They receive no such sign, but this becomes irrelevant in light of the fact that they have been heard--by one another. Although the act of standing in a lighted space to voice one's story aloud implies that a divine being is listening, the significance really rests upon the remaining eleven people who surround the central character; humans are not lonely voices crying into the wilderness. Thus, the tenor of the play is more gentle than in a Beckettian universe, because the characters have some narrative that they can fashion and hold onto, and they each have some significant memory that represents who they are. While it would be impossible for these sonnets to define or encapsulate an individual, each of these stories, representing a different understanding of life, illustrates the fabric of humanity. The characters, but more specifically their stories, stand as an act of revolt against the meaninglessness of the human condition, particularly in those characters who have been hurt by others.
If Rivera is indebted to Beckett for Sonnets for an Old Century, then References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot owes something to the namesake of the play. The theme of the play about the nature of love and its multiple permutations--lust, friendship, idolatry, spiritual communion--is reflected in the Dali painting hanging on the wall, Two Slices of Bread Expressing the Sentiment of Love. Secondly, the structure of the play borrows the surrealistic method of juxtaposing reality and fantasy, of sandwiching realism between two dreamlike scenes. The marital conflict at the center of the play reflects, in part, Rivera's own separation from his wife while writing the play, and questions whether it is ever possible to know another person. If the human condition is basically one of isolation, where each person's view of reality is determined by his or her particular experiences, then the greatest obstacle to loving one's partner can be the inability to share his or her perspective. The impossibility of fully knowing her husband frustrates the main character, Gabriela, and lies at the crux of the couple's arguments.
The decorations in their bedroom signify the most obvious difference in their personalities: Gabriela's posters of unicorns and Dali's art suggest her belief in fantasy, while Benito, whose name recalls the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, displays his pragmatic, combative nature by his military awards hung on the walls. Gabriela suffers from the isolated, lonely life of an army wife who has moved around so much that she has no friends nor any sense of stability. Her neurotic belief that her husband will be tortured at the hands of Iraqi soldiers causes her physical and psychic pain. But even more distressing to her is the dawning realization that Benito no longer wishes to be with her and uses his commitment to the military as an excuse. He does not know how to be an equal partner in the day-to-day activities of making a life together, only how to be a military hero who provides his wife with financial support and sexual satisfaction, but not emotional and spiritual support. He fulfills the archetypal role of the male warrior because it corresponds to a world he understands, a clear world of action, physical combat, and hard and fast rules, allowing him to ignore the political implications of fighting in the Gulf War. Benito clearly embraces the militaristic lifestyle for its valid channeling of hate; he tells Gabriela how he destroyed an Iraqi village out of spite, and he refers to their fourteen-year-old neighbor as "fagface, fagmuffin," indicating the intolerance that the military inculcates in its members. He mocks her description about dancing with the moon or her fears about vampires buying up the neighborhood--a veiled allusion to the superficial army families around her that suffocate her spirit. Her surrealist vision of the world distances her from Benito, who cannot understand her complaints about their marriage. The irreconcilable differences driving them apart seem greater than any love that might keep them together.
The dream sequence that frames the play like two bookends, however, suggests otherwise. The moon is originally what brought the characters together, and like the personification of the moon in García Lorca's play Bodas de sangre (1933; translated as Blood Wedding, 1939), the moon in this play is a real character. Played by the same actor who plays Benito, he sings to Gabriela and comes down from the sky to dance with her, wooing her in the same way that Benito must have won her love. Gabriela recalls how she met Benito while he was fighting with skinheads in a bar, and that even as they ran from the brawl, he paused to point out the moon to her, a gesture which showed his sensitivity to nature and appealed to her romantic temperament. Also, in these scenes, a cat and a coyote, like characters out of a suburban fairy tale, discuss the potential for their own love affair; the coyote offers the unbridled passion of love in the wild, while the cat prefers the diluted, pampered love of her human owners. Their conversation provides a glimpse of another kind of love: sexual lust versus patronizing care. Meanwhile, Martin and Sam, two neighborhood kids, spy on Gabriela, hoping with adolescent glee to catch a glimpse of her walking naked in the backyard. Martin matures overnight, moving from pubescent lust to the noble desire of sharing his heart with Gabriela. This profound knowledge of the other is what Gabriela longs for most from her husband.
The Moon articulates for Gabriela this desire to connect. He describes an insomniac, living in the neighborhood, who lies awake nights flipping through photo albums as a way to access her past life, to remember a self that is gone but for the photographs. "Her eyes trace memories back to their original moments," the Moon says. "The photos excite faded pathways in the brain where old ghosts are too tired to haunt." Another elderly neighbor checks his sleeping wife's breathing with a mirror to ensure she still lives, just as he checked it years ago to prove to himself that the exquisite creature he loved was real. Thinking about this story, Gabriela later holds a mirror to Benito's mouth in an attempt to peer into the secret cosmos of his soul. The outer frame of the play meditates on the possibilities of love as a way to connect with the Other: the carnal love the coyote offers the cat, the Moon's poetic seduction through stories, Martin's adolescent lust that matures to spiritual fulfillment, and Gabriela's desire to know her husband's thoughts. Like the "green world" of a Shakespearean romance, the dream sequences provide an alternate backdrop to the real tension within Gabriela and Benito's marriage.
What problematizes the various studies of love, however, is the conflicting realities of the play; the audience is never certain whether the action is real or Gabriela's dream. While the first act, because of its fantastical characters, seems to be the dream and the middle two acts seem to be reality, Gabriela wakes up at the beginning of act 4 and awaits Benito as if the earlier conversation with him in acts 2 and 3 had never transpired but had been only a dream. It would appear that act 4 is reality, but the Moon still converses with her and the Cat and Coyote still express themselves in human voices. She opens the refrigerator and it is full of sand. Thus, the dreamworld of talking animals, dancing lunar bodies, and refrigerators that bear witness to Desert Storm turns out to be reality. Much as the real midnight wanderings of the four lovers in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1600) possess all the imprecision of a dream, the conversation between Gabriela and Benito loses its basis in fact. The audience is forced to question which scenes are reality and which are the dream as the two worlds fold back into one another. The cat asks Gabriela what she intends to do, and she replies with a list of improbable activities, from metamorphosing into Dali's foreskin, to melting time, to drinking the saliva from a hummingbird. She adds that she will "stare into Benito's eyes" in order to read his mind and determine if they still love one another, but coming after such a long list of fantastical acts, this goal of ascertaining Benito's love for her seems close to impossible. The blurred boundary between reality and fantasy within the structure of the play proposes that knowledge of the other can only be attained in this penumbra between waking and sleeping, and the whimsy of the ending hints that this half-lit world of hopes and compromises never becomes reality. The roles of Gabriela and Benito were played by Ana Ortiz and Robert Montano when the play premiered in Costa Mesa, California, in 2000; these roles were played by Rosie Perez and John Ortiz in the New York production that premiered 11 April of the following year. Perez won a Theatre World Award for Outstanding Debut Performer; Rivera won an Obie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting; and Ortiz won an Obie Award for Best Actor.
Rivera, whose characters find comfort, hope, and even redemption in their collective involvement with others or in their own sustained dream life, defies the traditionally bleak or cynical view of American life shaped by such writers as David Mamet or Sam Shepard. Even as he writes about such topics as racial tension or inner-city violence, his plays never fall into despairing portrayals of the evils inherent in American society. Nor do they naively depict Pollyannaish, impractical solutions to such serious problems. Rivera carefully constructs an atmosphere in each play so that even while the characters encounter distressing exigencies, they maintain hope. The tonal shifts in his plays between earthy, kitchen-sink realism and sibylline flights of magic realism destabilizes any preconceived expectations an audience may have about the status quo and instead demonstrates the infinite possible ways to live or to view the world. These shifts between realism and the imaginary are not easy to negotiate and often make it challenging for directors to produce a Rivera piece, especially when the play defies easy generic classifications. Nevertheless, Rivera's trademark style of magic realism has served to promote his own notions of the American spirit. Much like his famous predecessor, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who deliberately blurred the distinctions between dream and reality in his great work, Don Quixote de la Mancha (two parts: 1605, 1615), Rivera uses this tension to represent the confrontation of the exceptional individual in an unexceptional society. The ability of his characters to exist in the here and now, while simultaneously seeking alternate realms of existence encourages Rivera's audiences to make similar shifts in their own perceptions and to accept the extraordinary in their own lives.
· Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 19 March 1989, "Puerto Rican Playwright Honors Past in 'Promise,'" Datebook section, 25-27;
· Kenneth Cavander, "The Art and Craft of Jumping Fences," American Theatre, 15 (March 1988): 15- 18;
About this Essay: Miriam Chirico, University of North Florida
Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 249: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Third Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Christopher Wheatley, Catholic University of America. The Gale Group, 2001. pp. 281-301.
Source Database: Dictionary of Literary Biography