In a wonderful bit of theatrical synchronicity, there are two multicharacter Latinx LGBTQ-themed solo shows playing right now in San Francisco. Tina D’Elia is performing “Overlooked Latinas” at The Marsh performance space in the Mission, and Theatre Rhinoceros kicks off its season with Guillermo Reyes’ “Bad Hombres” in the Castro.
Writer-performer D’Elia describes “Overlooked Latinas” as “a screwball comedy queer telenovela farce” about best friends Angel Torres and Carla Garcia trying to create a TV show about legendary Latinx movie stars in the McCarthy era. Melodrama ensues as a femme fatale wreaks havoc with Angel’s relationship with her wife.
Like her earlier show “The Rita Hayworth of This Generation,” featuring some of the same characters, “Overlooked Latinas” was developed with David Ford at The Marsh and is directed by Mary Guzmán. Both shows pay homage to great early Latinx movie stars.
“I was inspired while researching ‘The Rita Hayworth of This Generation’ to uncover the behind-the-scenes of who these Latinx people were,” D’Elia says. “I was really interested in revealing who was impacted directly by the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare. We often hear about the white artists who were blacklisted, and I’d known from my research that other folks like Delores del Río and Rosaura Revueltas were blacklisted. And there were different levels of being blacklisted or even being deported.”
D’Elia plays 10 characters in the show. “At one point there’s eight people in a hotel room together running around, as any good farce would have,” she says.
“Overlooked Latinas” had its first production at San Francisco’s Brava Theater in 2019. Its originally scheduled run at the Marsh in April 2020 was delayed by the pandemic. That November, Theatre Rhinoceros opened its season with a live streaming production of “Overlooked Latinas” broadcast from Spark Arts, which is now the Rhino’s new home in the Castro. D’Elia will do a run of “The Rita Hayworth of This Generation” at the Rhino next April.
The show currently making its West Coast premiere at Theatre Rhinoceros, “Bad Hombres,” is Guillermo Reyes’ follow-up to “Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown,” a collection of monologues about gay Latino immigrants that’s one of several Reyes plays the Rhino has produced in the past. In fact, an earlier version of this play was titled “Men on the Verge 2.”
“Because of September 11, there were some monologues that were a bit morose and did not seem to fit into the comedic, farcical style of this series of monologues,” Reyes recalls. “And then an actor in Phoenix wanted to do this one-man show, so I took the opportunity in 2019 to do major rewrites. I took out those monologues and created more comedic monologues.”
The new version, “Bad Hombres,” is nine monologues by seven characters based on people he’s met or stories he’s heard, heightened to farcical proportions.
“One is based on an actor that I met in San Francisco,” Reyes says. “He came to San Francisco to be a dancer at San Francisco Ballet, and then somewhere in the Castro one night he got bashed severely. He lost a lot of his memory. After that, he was not able to dance, and so he took up acting. That’s how he ended up acting in one of my plays at Theatre Rhino in 2001, ‘Sirena, Queen of the Tango.’”
Others include the dating misadventures of an undocumented student from Mexico while he’s waiting for his U.S.-born father to take a paternity test so he can get citizenship; a Guatemalan drag queen infatuated with a border patrol agent and a closeted married man trying to keep his lover from intruding while he teaches his son lucha libre wrestling.
“I like that it’s really addressing some issues that are not strictly Latino but inherently Latino, like the toxic masculinity in the culture,” says Rudy Guerrero, the actor who plays all these characters. “And that all these characters are gay. Homosexuality in that culture is not addressed a lot. It’s sort of skipped over, and people don’t want to talk about it.”
Guerrero has been in several past Rhino productions, but this is his first solo show.
“I would like audience members to leave the theater laughing — after all, it is a comedy,” he says, “but also carry with them empathy for people who identify as gay or queer in Latinx communities.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘OVERLOOKED LATINAS’
By Tina D’Elia, presented by The Marsh
Through: Oct. 29
Where: The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco
Tickets: $20-$35; www.themarsh.org
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‘BAD HOMBRES’
By Guillermo Reyes, presented by Theatre Rhinoceros
Through: Oct. 30
Where: Theatre Rhinoceros, 4229 18th St., San Francisco
Tickets: $15-$25; www.therhino.org
Source: www.mercurynews.com