Geographical Acts: Place, Performance, and Pedagogy

Abstract

The idea that New York dominates American theater is something of an uncritical commonplace. Despite the original work produced in diverse venues from mainstream regional theaters to improvised performance spaces in cities with distinctive performance cultures such as Los Angeles, Chicago, or Minneapolis, the idea that this work be legitimated only once it hits the Great White Way or points just off persists, reinforced not only by critics in the New York papers, especially the New York Times, but also by scholars based elsewhere in the US. Even those documenting theater that could not have emerged in New York often seem obliged to end there. A recent review in this journal of three books on theaters of color includes two that privilege the arrival in New York of Asian American and Latino writers and performers, despite the fact that theaters associated with both groups have closer relations with writers and audiences in and other points in the Southwest. To be sure, one of these books, Jose, Can You See? (1999), by Alberto Saindoval-Sanchez, notes that the visibility of Latino theatre began... with the establishment in 1965 of Teatro Campesino in California (105), but his book focuses, as its subtitle indicates, on Latinos on and off Broadway instead of on the more varied Chicano performances that have emerged in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Chicago since Teatro Campesino. Furthermore, rather than engaging the critique of the mainstreaming of founding institutions such as the formerly activist Teatro Campesino, articulated by scholars such as Yvonne Broyles-Gonzalez, Jose, Can You See? follows what reviewer Rena Fraden calls, with a certain irony, an uplifting trajectory from negative stereotypes to and empowerment (Fraden 203). While Sandoval-Sanchez allows that nationalist and ethnic labels are no longer capable of completely representing...identities that are plural, hybrid, and in flux, he nonetheless asserts unequivocally that through theater, US Latino/ as can articulate new forms of identity that offer models for agency and empowerment (Sandoval-Sinchez 123) and implies at