LOS ANGELES—The Latino Theater Company, launching its 40th year and named to the Los Angeles Times “Best of Latino L.A.” list, opened on April 19 with the professional West Coast premiere of Just Like Us by Karen Zacarías. This self-styled “non-fiction play,” directed with non-stop energy by Fidel Gomez (Tacos La Brooklyn), is inspired by the bestselling book by Helen Thorpe, Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America.
As a reporter who soon came to see that her original project of a newspaper series would be inadequate to probe the complexities of the larger story she needed to tell, Thorpe (Elyse Mirto) appears as a character in Zacarías’s play. Her factual coming-of-age story about four Latina girls in Denver, first published in 2009, is, if anything, more timely now than then.
Born in London to Irish parents who moved to the U.S. when she was an infant, Thorpe herself held a green card until she was 21. So, apart from the racial and cultural dimensions of the story she tells, she is in a position to relate to the thorny, yet necessary issues wrapped up in the issue of what makes an American. As she puts it, she has “something and nothing in common.” As the play unfolds, step by step, we witness her gradual understanding of the ubiquity, as well as the specifics for these four girls, of the immigration dilemma.
The four Latina girls in Denver whose lives Thorpe documents straddle the two worlds they inhabit: Clara (Noelle Franco) and Elissa (Valerie Rose Vega), born in the U.S.A., hold legal documents, while Yadira (Newt Arlandiz) and Marisela (Blanca Isabella), having been brought to the U.S. as small children, do not. Defying the image of exuberant screaming teenagers, each girl excels in high school. Much of the play features the struggle to oppose traditional parental demands to stay at home and get married early, and relatedly, whether or not they are suited to advance to college.
Even if they were accepted, who would pay for it? Crushing as a student loan can be, will a non-citizen without a Social Security number even qualify for it? And if your parents face deportation, even President Obama, who assumed office in the year Thorpe’s book was published, was dubbed “deporter-in-chief”—your siblings, with no other roof over their heads, might need to move into your dorm. And if you are accepted at a college in another state, how can you fly there without a legal ID? How will you feel safe riding a bus there if federal agents can swarm in and snatch you away? Privately funded scholarships in part allowed the girls to finish college degrees, and one, Marisela, the protagonist of the play, if one has to be singled out, is her graduating class’s valedictorian. There are 235 seniors graduating in our high school today, she says in her speech, but what became of the rest of the 600 who started off with us four years ago? Three of the girls attend the University of Denver (DU)—“10 miles south to the other side of the world”—and the fourth goes to Regis University, a Jesuit institution also in Denver.
At DU, the girls meet students from a much wider range of society than they had been exposed to up to now. In the character of fellow student Lucy, who volunteers as a Bible teacher, the class divide comes across clearly: wealth, privilege, opportunities, vacations, and ignorance. But Lucy will soon learn a thing or two about the rough-and-tumble realities of a working-class life with a paucity of papers. The playwright even depicts Marisela speaking at a May Day rally.
”I like to play with archetypes and assumptions,” Zacarías said in an interview. “The girls are all straight-A students and leaders in their high school, but the two girls who have documents have opportunities that the two undocumented women don’t. I am a Mexican immigrant. I was a straight-A student. I understand these girls on a visceral level.”
As for the book on which the play is based, “I was not looking to change people’s political opinions,” Helen Thorpe explains. “I want to change people’s emotional relationship to the individuals at the heart of the discussion. I want readers to relate to people caught up in the middle of the issue as fellow human beings, to walk around in their shoes. Then, they can draw whatever conclusions they want about ‘they should be here, they shouldn’t be here, they should have gotten this or that document, they should have done it this way.’ All of those opinions are legitimate, but if you can’t relate to the people caught up in the whole debate, it’s a shallow conversation.”
Of Thorpe’s book, O Magazine said, “When she embarked on her galvanizing book, Helen Thorpe had a policy wonk’s interest in immigration, leavened with her own ‘odd sense of dual identity’ as someone who herself arrived in the United States as a child. As her eyes are slowly opened to the catch-22 aspects of American immigration law, ours are, too…. Thorpe intelligently drills away at the harsh reality—what should we do, deport half a family? Thorpe puts a human face on a frequently obtuse conversation, and takes us far beyond the political rhetoric.”
With that in mind, it was a brilliant stroke on the playwright’s part to include Thorpe as a character, often the “outside observer” with whom at least some in the audience can relate, and increasingly a mature woman who cannot but do the right thing and step in on the girls’ behalf when morally compelled to do so. She says of Yadira, “She’s growing up fast. She has to.” But Helen is growing up fast, too, seeing with her own eyes how so many hearts hurt so deeply in every immigrant community. Zacarías sets all the heated rhetoric to the side as she creates four interesting girls and brings them and their community to life on the stage.
Karen Zacarías, a resident of Washington, D.C., with her husband and three children, is the most produced Latina playwright in the United States, voted 2018 Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian magazine for her advocacy work in the arts. According to the Boston Globe, “Karen Zacarías’s plays start with the simplest situations but build in layers of complexity and a lot of laughter for surprisingly memorable drama.”
The dominant mantra, now in the Trump 2.0 era, is that immigrants only take from American citizens. As Marisela says, it’s as if she walks around with a big letter “i” on her chest labeling her. Just Like Us reminds that in many ways the U.S. could not function without immigrants—and never has—and that limiting their potential for advancement only impoverishes us all. In one scene, an immigrant is reluctant to report his eyewitness account of a crime for fear of being seized by la migra. Public safety is imperiled owing to official racism.
If a theatergoer—or a reader—questions the playwright’s decision to allow Thorpe, the white journalist, to tell these girls’ story, Zacarías steps in with her characters by the end of the play boldly asserting their own agency. “I am as real an American as anyone can be—except I am missing one piece of paper,” Marisela declares, and she graduates from college, gets married, plans to have a baby, go to law school, and “realize all the potential in being me.”
Apart from the four girls and Helen Thorpe, the cast of nine also includes Brenda Banda, Oscar Emmanuel Fabela, Saul Rodriguez, and Sari Sanchez in a variety of smaller roles (one being the faux populist Colorado right-winger, Rep. Tom Tancredo). The creative team includes scenic designer François-Pierre Couture; lighting designer Xinyuan Li; composer and sound designer Robert J. Revell; projection designer Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh; costume designer Maria Catarina Copelli; and choreographer Marissa Espinoza. Casting is by Espi Revell. The production stage manager is Alexa Wolfe, assisted by Martha Espinoza.
Just Like Us runs through May 18 with performances Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 4 p.m. The Los Angeles Theatre Center is located at 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, 90013. Parking is available for $8 with box office validation at the Los Angeles Garage Associate Parking structure, 545 S. Main St., Los Angeles, CA 90013 (between 5th and 6th Streets, just behind the theater). For more information and to purchase tickets, call (213) 489-0994 or go here.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
