From the beginning, Grise understood the novel as “stories of the F Troop” and noted that “everything else spiraled out of that.” This is in keeping with her most celebrated works, blu and The Panza Monologues, co-written with Irma Mayorga, each spotlighting not only the lives of women but the empowerment inherent in women being able to narrate their own lives. Given the virtuosity of Viramontes’s novel and the need to streamline both time and character arcs for the stage, Grise said she “had to learn to love the story more than the words.” Grise narrowed the novel’s focal points to three key characters. The first is Ermila (Leilani Clark), a young woman navigating the city’s unwarranted lockdowns as she goes to and from work, school, and hanging out with friends in the F Troop. The second is Turtle (Manny Rivera), the younger sister of the ghostly Luis Lil Lizard (Mel “Melo” Dominguez), whose efforts to be accepted into the McBride Boys gang leads to dangerous consequences. Last is Ben (Luke Salcido), a student suffering from mental illness, who wanders the neighborhood’s streets, oblivious to the threat of the Quarantine Authority.
While the majority of the play’s twelve-actor cast play multiple characters, these three roles are portrayed by single actors, emphasizing how pivotal these characters are to Viramontes’s most potent themes. Grise gives each of these three primary characters’ sustained soliloquies, and each speaks at length to the audience about the perils and frustration of living in occupied streets. At other times, they narrate moments of coincidence and happenstance, showing the audience how the disparate lives in such a large neighborhood intersect and interchange. In Borderlands’ production, these three performances emphasized a physicality, a proximity of touch, and an amplification of voice that had not been possible in Perryville’s staging because of strict rules for the incarcerated actors. This type of shift underscores Grise’s commitment to have each iteration of the play respond anew to its community: the actors themselves determine, in her words, “the needs of the play.”
Staged under the I-10 overpass, Tucson audiences recognized not only the pain of neighborhood demolitions that they, too, have experienced, but the role of art in honoring those lost.
Musical director Martha Gonzalez, with fellow musicians Tylana Enomoto, Juan Perez, and Bob Robles, provided accompaniment to signal both simple scene transitions as well as significant memories and flashbacks. Invited to collaborate by Grise to reflect a musical “ethos of East LA,” the music blends Mexican rhythms with jazz, rock, and gospel inflections appropriate to the multicultural and multiracial neighborhood. (The score will soon become a standalone concept album and concert, tentatively titled “Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind.”) The music also provided cues for the audience about where to focus their attention in this nontraditional theatrical space: on the sloping concrete of the ramps, the public bike path threading through the area, or the shadows and peripheries of the playing space itself. Crucially, music was integral to the play’s finale, which replicated the novel’s celebrated and much-discussed depiction of a character literally taking flight above the despair of the cityscape. It was accomplished here as a literal lifting up of one of the characters by the entire cast, a gesture that served as a final statement of Grise’s vision of the play as a community effort.
The South Tucson freeway underpass site reflected the play’s transmutability to its chosen audience; South Tucson, like East Los Angeles and many other communities, has lived the story of gentrification and its stark environmental disasters, and the play gave witness to the individual lives that had been affected by these forces. In Grise’s developmental work with Perryville Women’s Prison, the incarcerated actors imagined Viramontes’s Los Angeles geography as the Arizona cities where they had once lived and still had family. This alerted Grise to the possibility that the play could be “in a constant state of transformation, where how the play is made is as important as the play itself.” Borderlands’ production was, to a degree, a rethinking of the staging Grise developed in Perryville Prison, and she has plans for yet another iteration, this time in Los Angeles itself.
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