World premiere play ‘Luzmi’ illuminates the environmental crisis in Latin America

From left, Peter Mendoza, Helena Betancourt, and Stephanie Hoston / Aaron Gallegos

LOS ANGELES — Theatre has infinite purposes, aside from entertaining the public and providing work for writers, creative professionals, actors and many others. This city’s HERO Theatre is a community-based company that uses art to model and bring about social and environmental justice. The company invites audiences to envision and experience America [read: The Americas] as they do, examining classical and contemporary works, ensuring that equity, diversity, and inclusion remain at the forefront.

With Luzmi, its current production, HERO premieres a projected series of new works under the rubric Nuestro Planeta (Our Planet), a commissioning initiative rooted in research around environmental justice issues happening in Latin American countries and demonstrating how populations both there and here in the U.S. are directly affected. First up is Colombia, home of the late novelist Gabriel García Márquez and painter/sculptor Fernando Botero, two of the 20th century’s great fabulists.

Luzmi tells the story of a young woman, the daughter of Colombian parents who split up just around the time she was born. The mother, Luna (or Mami), settled in the U.S. with her infant daughter, and the father, a Magütá shaman known as El Profe (the teacher), stayed in Colombia to practice his study and continuity of Indigenous culture and healing arts. Luna left her sister Alma behind, who now runs an ecological resort, fighting off predators on all sides—the military, paramilitary vigilantes, expropriation for a proposed national park, and the corporations coming to carve cattle ranches, single-crop agricultural plantations and extractive industries out of the highlands, jungles and forests. These forces threaten the precious biodiversity of this land, the largest biodiverse nation among Spanish-speaking countries, and only behind the far bigger Brazil in the variety of flora and fauna it claims.

Luzmi is carrying her mother’s ashes with her, which is the occasion for the trip to visit her aunt and perhaps uncover some of her mother’s deep secrets. Having no recollection of her father, and never having heard anything positive about him, Luzmi has no interest in meeting him. Mami died early of mysterious causes, and now Luzmi herself, who teaches about biodiversity and capitalist hegemony at a university in New York, is racked by an autoimmune disease that doctors seem unable to understand. The remaining members of the cast are employees of the resort—the driver Verso and guide Carlos—and a pair of lovers, Claudia and Elan, who are independent entrepreneurs catering to foreign eco-tourists.

Smaller roles abound as well, including a team of puppeteers who wander through from time to time in the guise of wild animals or manipulating sticks representing flying birds and river fish. Behind the stage is a video screen on which translations from or to Spanish appear, as well as images of the landscape from the coffee-growing highlands to the lush, steamy Amazon with its hundreds of rare orchids and hummingbirds. One of these latter, a colibri, is an object of Luzmi’s search, having been important to her Mami for reasons unknown.

Presented mostly in English and subtitled in Spanish, the play by Colombian immigrant Diana Burbano, now resident in Southern California, is based on two research trips to the Amazon rainforest with HERO’s Producing Artistic Director Elisa Bocanegra, and serves a frankly didactic goal in educating audiences about the environmental injustices Indigenous communities in the Amazon rainforest face.

The Nuestro Planeta project was first conceived in an environmental art class, taught by Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of Black Lives Matter. Devisor and director Bocanegra graduated with an MFA from Cullors’ Social & Environmental Arts Program for activists at Prescott College. The research, development, and production of Luzmi is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, The MAP Fund, and Fulbright Colombia.

Though Luzmi is already an accomplished university teacher by the time we meet her, she is definitely on a quest to find herself on this first trip back to her homeland. From the people she meets, the questions she finds answers to, and the very immersion in the soil and waters of her birthplace, the play amounts to a belated “coming of age” story. The action and dialogue go fast, so I might have missed some key information, but it seemed to me that the unidentified “sickness” tormenting her (and her mother before her) was essentially that of being torn from her roots and natural environment. It’s no great spoiler to say there’s a love story folded in, so perhaps a permanent return to Colombia may be in her future.

The central role of Luzmi is taken by Stephanie Hoston. Colombian actor Bibiana Navas makes her U.S. stage debut here as Tía Alma. Peter Mendoza portrays the roles of Carlos (the love interest) and Sol. Julián Juaquín plays the roles of the driver Verso and the boyfriend Elan (who apparently is Brazilian, from the other side of the border, judging from the few words this character speaks in Portuguese). Colombian-born Helena Betancourt stars as Claudia, and Emanuel Loarca plays Luzmi’s father El Profe. Adrian Quinonez and Carla Valentine play a variety of smaller roles.

The creative team includes Maggie Dick (Costume Design), Willow Edge (Sound Design), Marvin Hidalgo (Costume Assistant), Jesus Hurtado (Scenic and Projections Design), Andrés Felipe Jiménez (Cinematographer), Alejandro Montoya (Composer & Colombian Music Consultation), Osiris Galvez Paredes (Props Design), Beth Peterson (Puppet Design), and Gabe Rodriguez (Lighting Design).

The title protagonist is, of course, the central character, and while her sense of purpose is clear, I found her somewhat predictable. Information about the various other characters is shared, but it doesn’t all contribute to the building of a fully-rounded person. To me the more interesting characters in the play are those torn by loyalties, by their own pasts, by the economic survival necessities they face. Even as the setting is the luxuriant forest with its infinity of life that every “woke” person on Earth would want to preserve in its pristine proliferation, the playwright understands that some of the locals might be tempted—for a generous gratuity—to pluck a rare orchid, say, and hand it over to a “selfish, obnoxious, entitled” American visitor to propagate at home, perhaps even for commercial gain. Or might be gainfully employed as a bulldozer operator ordered to mow down acres of jungle for a sprawling future agro-business. Does “progress” not command its price?

Many of the issues explored in Luzmi—rights of Indigenous peoples, use of the land, paramilitary terror, foreign investment—were also the focus of a Witness for Peace delegation to Colombia which I reported on in three related articles in early 2023: On the call for “total peace”; on the fear of war in the Afro-Colombian community; and the Pacific port of Buenaventura and its role in U.S. plans for further exploitation of the Indigenous and Afro-Colombians.

The projected translations often went by so fast, and with insufficient brightness for contrast, that much was missed. In some cases the translation was off—for example, when someone mentioned that people had left the area, “left” was rendered in Spanish as “izquierda” (meaning left as in left-handed or the political left wing).

Luzmi runs two hours, with one intermission, continuing through Oct. 27, with performances on Fri., Sat., and Sun. at different hours, at The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., Los Angeles 90021. For schedule, ticket reservations and other information, go the Hero Theatre website, or call (323) 206-6415.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Eric A. Gordon

Eric A. Gordon, People’s World Cultural Editor, wrote a biography of radical American composer Marc Blitzstein and co-authored composer Earl Robinson’s autobiography. He has received numerous awards for his People's World writing from the International Labor Communications Association. He has translated all nine books of fiction by Manuel Tiago (pseudonym for Álvaro Cunhal) from Portuguese, available from International Publishers NY.