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[0:01] Michael Ritchie: Welcome to 30 to Curtain, a Center Theatre Group podcast.

[0:06] Michael Ritchie: As one of the country's most influential non-profit theatre companies, we produce and present the work of most of the leading theatre artists of our time.

[0:15] Michael Ritchie: We do this across all three of our stages, the Ahmanson Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and the Kirk Douglas Theatre, as well as in educational outreach and community programs.

[0:27] Michael Ritchie: I'm Michael Ritchie, Artistic Director of the Center Theatre Group. For each episode of this podcast, we'll talk with some of these talented artists from both on and off the stage, so that you can learn more about them, their process, and their work before arriving at the theatre.

[0:42] Michael Ritchie: Our guest on this podcast is Luis Valdez, founder and Artistic Director of El Teatro Campesino, a legendary theatre artist who has a storied history with Center Theatre Group, including as the writer and director of Zoot Suit, which made its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in 1978 and had a celebrated revival in 2017 as part of our 50th anniversary season.

[1:09] Michael Ritchie: Luis returns to the Taper this season with his latest play, Valley of the Heart, which is on stage here October 30 through December 9, 2018. Valley of the Heart is an epic play that examines the difficult divide between America's ideals and its actions, set against the backdrop of World War II. Like Zoot Suit, it's set here in California, and it confronts a troubling chapter in our country's history—in this case, the internment of Japanese Americans. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and I look forward to seeing you at the theatre.

[1:47] Michael Ritchie: First of all, welcome, Luis. Welcome back. Welcome back home. It's good to have you here.

[1:53] Luis Valdez: It's great to be back home. Thank you very much.

[1:56] Michael Ritchie: Let's start with where we are right now with this show, and then we'll go back and talk about building it. We're in performances. We just started previews. So we've had three or four performances. We have rehearsals during the day. This is a big show to get on the stage. How's it been going so far?

[2:15] Luis Valdez: Well, tremendously in a creative sense, you know. Technically, it's a huge challenge because we've got a lot of cues. We've got sound cues. We've got projections, of course, dramatic action, but moving stages, you know, two platforms. So all of that really complicates the tech part of our production. The human part we more or less laid out in the rehearsal room, but now that we've been on stage, it's been a challenge to try to coordinate all those elements. As far as that's concerned, it also includes the audience, to include their responses and their reactions. So it's all a process. We're in the middle of it. We're not finished with that yet. I'm still making cuts, actually, to tighten and compress.

I believe that the two operative principles in drama are compression and tension, the same two architectural principles that define bridges. You compress or you use tension. So in our case, compression means tightening the show completely scene to scene, and the tension means maintaining that really taut quality that you want from scene to scene and from act to act. So that's what we're working on now. That's the purpose of previews, it seems to me, in relation to the audience, but also the actors in relation to everything else, the props, the scenery, the projections, and all of that's going real well. I've enjoyed the creative process.

[3:37] Luis Valdez: I have to say, coming in for the first preview, which is always the most, I'd say, tense moment in the entire process, is that first preview where you've been in the rehearsal room for a number of weeks, you've worked out things on taped floors, you've done some technical rehearsals on the stage, but when the lights go down on that first preview and the audience is there, all the stakes rise and you're still in a working process. You're not showing a finished product. So you're both catching reactions from the audience, things you already know beforehand that you want to change or fix or try, but also getting the interplay. And for the actors as well, they're finding out what the audience does to the show. They've been in a vacuum. So how do you sit in the back of the theater during first, second, third preview and assess? What are the things you're looking for? Obviously, problem on the stage, fix that. With the audience, though, what do they tell you?

[4:37] Luis Valdez: They tell me that they like to laugh and they like to cry. I mean, why do people come to the theater? That definition goes all the way back to Aristotle, right? We come to purge. We come for a certain kind of catharsis. Humor can do that, but so can tragedy, so can sad things. And it's been our experience with this play that even grown men have cried sitting there as part of the audience. And that's OK, quite frankly. It's OK that people feel that the pain on stage somehow evokes the pain in their lives. We all have carried that kind of pain and we all need to let it out. And that's what the function, the most basic function of the theater is. It's a cleansing device, if you will. We come to be freed of our anxieties and of our fears and to have our hopes also reinforced.

But in this case, I sit up there in the audience as two people. I'm a playwright and a director. And so fortunately, I have the cooperation of my associate director, who happens to be my son. He's really a co-director who has his eye directly on all the mechanics of the staging and gives me the freedom to really react also as a playwright. I'm looking at the text. I'm looking at scenes. And he's not bad with actors as well. He knows how to coordinate scenes. So it's all been a very, very intense and personal process.

[5:56] Luis Valdez: I continue to try to condense this play, wondering how much do people know, need to know in order to understand and react to the story. The story, as far as the period is concerned, is familiar. There have been a lot of movies about World War II and a number of plays about the period, even about the Japanese-American experience. But the fact is, this is, I hope, a new take. This brings it into a different perspective because of the two families. And as I said before, if you can contrast the Japanese-American experience with the Mexican-American experience, what emerges is the American experience. And I think that's the abstraction we're looking for.

[6:34] Michael Ritchie: I want to talk a little bit about your life and career. You are, as you said, both a director and a playwright. You're a filmmaker. You're one of the founders and the current artistic director of El Teatro Campesino. You're a union organizer. How did this—I won't even say career—how did this life start, this life of activism, writing, art? What was the spur for you?

[7:02] Luis Valdez: I think in a lot of instances in our lives, life takes over and defines it for you, your conditions. Define what you are going to do with your life. In my case, I was six years old, 1946, on a migrant path with my family after we had owned a ranch that I thought was ours but actually belonged to a Japanese farmer. My father took it over in 1941 in the Delano area. I thought that we had land. But by the time I was five, and certainly by the time I was six, I realized it wasn't ours at all. It was leased. The Army really owned it. But it had belonged to a Japanese-American farmer. So by the time I'm six, I'm realizing the world is very different than I thought it was. And what happened to the Japanese-American farmer, I don't know.

We don't know what happened to the family. But we were on the migrant path. And so we're touring the state. We used to come up to San Jose and Santa Rosa and all those areas, make the big round. We come down to San Fernando, to the citrus groves. So I got to see the state, you know, from the ground level. But among those experiences was the feeling that we're wandering when we had had roots and that we had been better off during the war than we were after the war. And I asked my brother, what happened? And he wouldn't explain to me. My older brother, he said, well, it was the war, you know, and it's dad's fault. He lost the ranch. My older brother blamed my dad. But it had been the high point of my dad's life to have taken over this ranch at the age of 28.

And that became the character of Benjamin in Valley of the Heart. It's really a tribute to my dad because it was a turning point for our whole life. And even though we lost it, I always kept that memory that we were better than migrant workers.

[9:01] Luis Valdez: So in 1946, we're in a big cotton camp and picking cotton. And the cotton season is over. We can't move on because my dad's pickup had broken down. It's up on blocks. And we were living from hand to mouth, day to day. And one day I almost drowned one morning. And my mother got very concerned that I'd almost drowned in the San Joaquin Delta. And so she said, you and your brother better go to school. There was a yellow bus that used to come into the camp. And so we climbed on, knowing that we weren't going to be there for very long. But I used to take my lunch in a little brown paper sack, which was a rarity because there were still wartime shortages in 1946. But my mom used to put the tacos in there, and that's where we'd go to school.

Fish tacos, you know, before they were trendy. And so we'd go to school. And one day my bag is missing. I used to fold it and take it back to my mom the next day. And one day it's gone, and the teacher saw me running around. She said, what is it? And I told her. And she says, oh, I took the bag. And I said, well, give it back. She says, I can't. And she escorted me into this little room in the back, and my bag was all ripped up floating in a basin of water. And I thought she'd gone berserk. I said, why'd she destroy my bag? She said, no, look at this. And she pulled out a piece of the bag, dipped it into some paste, and put it on a mold. First time I noticed it was an animal. It was a monkey.

And I said, what is this? And it was November already, early November. Couldn't be for Halloween. What's this for? And she says, well, it's a mask, and we're making it for a play. And it's a monkey. And I said, wow, why is it a monkey? Well, it's Christmas in the Jungle is the name of the play. The whole school's involved. We need two first graders to play monkeys.

[10:42] Luis Valdez: So I forgave her about the bag and the next week we had auditions and I got my first role in the theater, right? And so I got a costume that was better than my own clothes, quite frankly. It was a little red vest and some green pants, little tail, had red shoes, you know, cap and the mask that she made from my mama's taco bag. At that point, when she dipped the paste into the piece of bag into the paste, I discovered one of the principles of the universe. It's called paper mache. You can take any paper and make something. And so I got this beautiful mask that she painted beautifully and I loved it. I mean, I connected with it. I'd see myself in the mirror. I was larger than life and I was looking forward to my debut before the world.

The week of the show, I get home to the camp. My mother says, we're leaving tomorrow. It was like on a Tuesday. I said, but mom, the show's on Friday. And she says, I know. And she said, but we're being evicted and we've got to go. And so I cried and she cried with me. But the next morning at dawn, my dad got the truck going somehow and we left. And I'll never forget that it was a little community called Stratford in California, not Stratford on Avon, Stratford on the San Joaquin, you know. But we left and I remember driving through the fog and seeing the school recede and I felt this hole open in my chest and that could have destroyed me, I'd say. But what happened is I took the secret of papier-mâché with me, the desire to do theater, the unquenchable desire to do theater, and also residual anger because we had been evicted from the camp.

So roughly 20 years later, I went to Cesar Chavez and proposed him an idea of a farm workers theater. And these elements came together in my life. It is absolutely amazing that an event like that, that one could forget, has defined your life. It is absolutely amazing. So you carry that through your adolescence and interested in the art, the people at the theater. It was my saving life, you know, my saving grace in my life that I had the arts, you know, because I could then plan stuff. I could make masks and puppets. I eventually became a puppeteer, you know, in my grandfather's garage. And I'd been a ventriloquist in high school. I had a couple of dummies, an Anglo and a Mexican. So I was doing bilingual stuff.

[13:05] Michael Ritchie: Your lips aren't moving right now. You can still do it.

[13:08] Luis Valdez: And I actually ended up on television, live television in San Jose in 1956. No kidding.

[13:13] Michael Ritchie: No kidding. Black and white television. I was in high school living on a dirt street in San Jose, but I was on TV on Sundays.

[13:21] Michael Ritchie: You did it, like your own show?

[13:22] Luis Valdez: Yeah. Well, no, I had five minutes.

[13:25] Luis Valdez: Five minutes of the show, as far as I'm concerned.

[13:27] Luis Valdez: Five minutes of a half hour variety show. Right. And it was in Spanish, but I was bilingual. So they allowed me to do English and Spanish, you know, and the two dummies talk to each other. And so it was amazing. I had an art director. I was 16. I didn't know anything, but at that point I knew that there was a higher level. I could take my puppets to a higher level. And then eventually the puppets faded away. And I started thinking of actors and I started thinking of plays. And I became a playwright. I mean, all I ever wanted to be was a playwright. I could have become a nuclear physicist. That's what I was slated to become. I got my scholarship to San Jose State in 1958 on my strength in math and physics.

I was a math and physics major for one year, straight A. I mention that because I don't look like a math and physics major. But in any case, my love for the theater never went away. I used to go to Winchell's Donuts to do my math and I had to go to the theater department at San Jose State. And I just lingered longer and longer at the theater department. Eventually I said to Howard, I'm changing majors. I'm going to become an English major with an emphasis in playwriting. And so that's what I became. With the theater department. So about the art, about the people, a combination of both. When I fell into the theater, it was solely because of the people. I went to Summerstock when I was 15 years old and I had never been in a theater.

I had never seen a show, but it was an opportunity for me to apprentice. It wasn't even a paid position. Apprentice and work about 18 hours a day, which for me at that age, the idea of working 18 hours a day didn't interest me at all. But I loved the people. I remember feeling, this is my tribe. They speak a language that I'm not fluent in, but that I love. They have an attitude that I admire. I know of no one else like this group of people, this tribe. I just have to be in it. That was the turn for me. It's a global tribe. I mean, in my travels with the theater, I've discovered that regardless of the language, we all speak the same theatrical language and that they're all, regardless of where the theater is, where the stage is, we've been in Europe, all over Western Europe. We've been in Mexico, we've been in Asia. And the fact is, once I get into a theater, I'm home. It doesn't matter there. Oh, I connect here. This is it.

[15:49] Michael Ritchie: I agree. I agree. So now, Cesar Chavez, you went to him and said you wanted to create a theater in support of the union efforts at that time. So tell us a little bit about that. What was his reaction? Did he go ahead and do it just because, or did he get what you were going after at that time?

[16:03] Luis Valdez: Well, his immediate response when I suggested a theater and four farm workers is he was very blunt. He said, well, he said, there's no money to do theater in Delano. There are no actors in Delano. There's no place to perform. There's no stage. There isn't much time to rehearse. We're on the picket line day and night. Do you still want to do it? And I said, absolutely, Cesar. What an opportunity. I was going for the spirit. I also Delano was where I was born. I was born in Chinatown in Delano and half the strikers in my family were members of my family and the other half were scabs, you know, so I was in the middle of that struggle in that sense. But the fact is that I came with a dream and I took whatever opportunity was there and it was on the picket line.

About a month in, they elected me picket captain. And so once I had control of the picket line, I could set up chants. I could get people up on top of the flatbed trucks, you know, to do stuff. And it was natural because I was a picket captain. So it, and then from there we maneuvered and went into the weekly Friday night meetings. They give us 15 minutes at the end of all the business to do theater, to do actos, usually funny, satirical stuff, but it was like a relief for people. They came, they packed the meetings because they wanted to see the Teatro Campesino.

[17:32] Michael Ritchie: So, so you had a very distinct mission at that point, a very specific cause, using theater to promote that idea. Who, you were in charge of everything. You were writing it, you were directing it, you were setting up the stage. Was it a one man band at that point?

[17:50] Luis Valdez: Well, yeah, but I got some recruits early on, among them Agustin Lira, who played the guitar. So we had a musical component. He wasn't a bad actor too. He was very dedicated, a very angry young man, but very creative, a poet really at base. He was one of the founding members. We got my brother, Daniel, who's still with me and my partner, and he also played the guitar. So he joined me. He was very young. He was 17, but getting in trouble as a juvenile in San Jose. So my mother says, take him, get him out of here. And so he joined us and I had to train him, you know, to get into the theater. He was a natural. And Felipe Cantu was the snake man in La Bamba. You know, I finally cast him in a movie and he was incredible.

He brought a spirit. He was 47 years old. He was the old man of the company, but he brought a spirit from Mexico. He'd been a clown in Mexico. So he was a mime, you know, not a trained mime, a natural mime. And so his humor lives to this day in the work of the Teatro Campesino. And there were others. I mean, to this day, there are others. We've been around for 53 years and there are at least half a dozen people that have been with us 40 years and more, and some have aged within the company and they're maestros in their own right, you know, as musicians or as teachers, but we're a family. That's another thing. That's a continuous kind of activity, you know, that our kids have had their kids. And so now those are the new members of the Teatro Campesino, but we're always adding people and always pushing people along.

We've had people come and join the Teatro Campesino and end up at Yale Drama School. We've had people come and join the Teatro and end up in Hollywood. You know, we have people working in television. In other words, we've seeded, we have seeded the entertainment industry with new talent through where we are. We keep our doors open in San Juan Bautista because there are no other doors available nearby. And that's part of our mission to open an entrance, you know, where none exists at the mouth of the Salinas Valley so that other farm workers can come through.

[20:07] Michael Ritchie: Well, I know you have a base and you've traveled the world with the company. But I have to tell you the truth, those of us in Los Angeles think you belong to us. And it's very true. Certainly the theatrical community has embraced, but in particular, the greater community of Los Angeles first, I think, acknowledged and really embraced you was with the original production of Zoot Suit here back in the seventies. Can you tell us how that came to be?

[20:35] Luis Valdez: In 1973, Peter Brooke came to San Juan Bautista with his company. And of the three months they spent in the United States that summer, two were in San Juan. And we worked on a Conference of the Birds, which was a Sufi tale on a Persian carpet. And these were trained individuals from all over the world that he had coalesced in Paris. And then we had the Teatro and yet we came together. It was amazing through improvisations. So we worked on their piece and they worked on ours. The summer of 73 was particularly violent in the San Joaquin Valley, but we took them straight into the struggle. So there's Peter Brooke and his actors, among whom was a 26 year old blonde called Helen Mirren acting in the San Joaquin Valley in the context of the Teatro. And the most

[21:25] Luis Valdez: First amazing performance for farm workers of the Conference of the Birds, a Sufi tale, was in Livingston, California, when the weekend a couple of farm workers had been killed on the picket line. And that play, the Sufi myth, that ancient Persian tale, suddenly fell into place with an impact that was tremendous, because it referred to the murder of the farm workers. And yet, it was a Sufi tale. And in, again, in Livingston, in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. So because we had, we were working with Peter, we also opened up and Gordon Davidson came to visit us as a special guest. And he became very aware of the Teatro Campesino. And so shortly after that, he invited the Teatro Campesino to come and perform one of our signature pieces, the Carpa de los Rescuachis, the Tent of the Underdogs, on the Taper Stage.

And we had a three day, four day run or something, but we packed the house and he saw the potential. So in 1977, when he was setting up the New Theater for Now series, he invited me to come talk to him about a play about Los Angeles history. And we both arrived almost instantaneously at the same thought, let's do the Pachucos. In 68, the Teatro had been performing at the Ash Grove over here on Melrose. And David Sanchez, the leader of the Bromberes, had brought me a pamphlet written in the 1940s by Guy Endor, a Hollywood screenwriter, called The Sleepy Lagoon Murder Mystery. And it was about the Sleepy Lagoon case. And I, it was 1968. I paged through this thing and I said, this is unnatural.

This is a play. But it's 1968. Martin Luther King had just been murdered. We were working on the Bobby Kennedy campaign and they killed him. It was not a time for me to put, you know, step aside and start writing a play. So I shelved it for nine years. In 1977, when I talked to Cesar, to Gordon, he, he, he suggested the Pachucos and I said, I have, I have that material. I want to do this. So I pulled out the pamphlet and that was the beginning of my research. Diane Rodriguez and her husband, Jose Delgado, were members of the Teatro and they were my creative team. They were my Google team. We had no Google then. But they helped me to do the research, to amass mounds of books and informations and articles.

And of course, I was working on an old Smith Corona typewriter. I had no computer. There weren't any in 78 and 77. But I managed to pull all this information together and created the first draft, which we called Baby Suit, in the spring of 78. And for the new theater for now, it was a, it was rough going. I'll tell you, it was a new experience. I had more than one play. One was a character called Yamaguchi's Ghost that was part of the early suit version because Henry Leibas's father, and he was the inspiration for the gang leader, had also taken over the ranch of a Japanese farmer in City of Commerce here in Southern California. And I said, oh, I know that reality. I'm going to write it into the play.

And I realized very shortly, this is a totally separate play. So I pulled it aside. I said, I'll come back to it. I didn't come back to it until 2013 when I was finally able to sit down and start writing Valley of the Heart. In the meantime, I had to learn more about the Japanese. I had to take another 30 years to study Japanese culture and the way that I like people to study Mexican culture with respect and attention to detail. And that work is still continuous. I mean, it, the Japanese community, like every community is complex. They have their own issues, but I want to be respectful. And so at first I had asked Jeanne Wakatsui Houston, one of the, who wrote Farewell to Manzanar, if she would co-write this play with me about 20 years ago.

And she said, sure, I'll help you. Finally I, she was busy and I said, well, I got to take it on myself. That's why it took until 2013. And then I was capable of, I think, beginning to portray the Japanese American family.

[25:36] Michael Ritchie: And you were capable because of research or information or maturity as a writer?

[25:44] Luis Valdez: Maturity and also befriending Japanese Americans, you know, on a personal level and asking them about this and that, about their parents. And, you know, I have friends I could mention, but the fact is that I knew ultimately it had to be a love story because that's what it's all about. All drama, I think, is based on that, you know, regardless of gender. I mean, it's, it's, if we can respect each other to the point where we can love each other, then there's a lot of human traction there. There's a, there's an attraction, attraction and traction at the same time. And so in that sense, it took me 20 years to arrive to that point. And unfortunately, ever since then, since 2013, we've had also people that have offered their opinions and their suggestions, and I've taken them.

I'm open to it, right? Masashi Moto, who's a professor and teacher up in Watsonville, has been very helpful. And his wife, Marsha, they're Japanese Americans. He teaches about the Japanese American experience. So he's been one of my, my consultants, you know, very important.

[26:46] Michael Ritchie: Why don't we give a capsule snapshot review of what the play is about, and then we can talk a little bit more about the specifics. So what's the big arching story?

[26:56] Luis Valdez: Well, what's interesting, it begins on December 6, 1941, and ends on September 10, 2001. So the night before Pearl Harbor and the day before 9-11. So it's a complete cycle in terms of the story. I wanted to touch those two points in American history. But basically, it's in the 1940s. It's during World War II. And it's the love story between the farmer, the daughter of a Japanese farmer, Issei, first generation Issei farmer. Her name is Thelma. But Teruko really is her Japanese name. And the son, the eldest son of a Mexican American sharecropping family that lives on the ranch.

[27:42] Michael Ritchie: So somewhat based upon some of your experience.

[27:45] Luis Valdez: Well, it again, when we produced in 1947, I was seven years old, a family moved down the street from us in a little town called Early Mart next to Delano. And they were migrant farm workers and a playmate. I found a new playmate my age. I thought he was Filipino, frankly, we started playing. But one day, he invited me over to his house. And it wasn't a house. It was a shack. We all lived in shacks. But the kitchen was a little cardboard lean to. And I was shocked that his mother was Japanese. She was not Filipino. You know, his father was Mexican, Benjamin. And his mother was Japanese American. Her name was Thelma. So there's Benjamin and Thelma. It was my first taste literally of Japanese culture.

She cooked like my mom. She cooked Mexican food like my mom. But she also cooked Japanese food that I had never tasted before. My first taste of a rice ball was from her hands. And I never forgot that. And I never forgot my friend Esteban. They moved away after the end of the summer. It was just one short summer. But I kept that in mind and really nurtured that idea. And so when I came to write Valley of the Heart, I named the lovers Benjamin and Thelma. We performed the first workshop production in 2013 in San Jose. A couple came to see it. And after the show, they asked, Why did you name your lovers Benjamin and Thelma? And I told them this story. And I said, Why did you ask? And they said, Well, we had cousins that were named Benjamin and Thelma.

And I said, Did they have a son named Esteban, Esteban? They said, Yes, they did. Oh, my God. And it turned out that it was that family. And but Benjamin Thelma had since passed away. And my friend Esteban had just died of prostate cancer. But his wife, his kids, his grandchildren, his brother, his sister, they all came to see the play. And we're in contact with them again. And they're going to come see the play here in L.A. Now, it's not their story. It's not really Benjamin and Thelma. I just borrowed the names. But in that general sense, it is their story. It's a story of all the Japanese Americans that were incarcerated. And and they've been so great about it. They've been very helpful in terms of anything we've asked them to do.

But in any case, this is a story about real life. My life, like all playwrights, is better to write about your own life in every way that you can. And these are massive, epic themes that somehow have occurred in my life. And that's all right. You know, I acknowledge them for what they are. The context of our life has to be as broad as we can make it in order to understand the little bickering, really puzzling stuff that happens to us. If you just understand a little about the history around you, it'll help alleviate some of the confusion in your life. So that's what playwrights can do. I think we provide a very basic service, which is they allow people to experience something by going through the heart to the mind and affecting, again, the way that people think about themselves in the world. And so that's the purpose of Valley of the Heart. It's very much about the heart, but it's also about the mind.

[30:53] Michael Ritchie: It has been a pleasure talking to you and clearly for all of us here at Center Theatre Group and Los Angeles. We're so happy to have you with us. We're proud of your career from the age of six until now. We expect more out of you in the future.

[31:10] Luis Valdez: I'm still sick.

[31:11] Michael Ritchie: That is right. That's it. I know. I really want to thank you for sharing some of that with us, but most particularly for your body of work in this particular piece, which resonates, although it's set largely in the 1940s, it resonates so perfectly for today here in America. It's an American play by a great American playwright. So thank you.

[31:42] Luis Valdez: Thank you, Michael, and thank CTG for all of their wonderful help and inspiration.

[31:47] Michael Ritchie: You've been listening to 30 to Curtain, a Center Theatre Group podcast. You can find out more about Valley of the Heart, our organization, and upcoming productions on our website at centertheatregroup.org.