Zoot Suit and Other Plays by Luis Valdez

The mob hysteria against the so-called “ pachucos” was stoked by a sensationalist press, with headlines fanning the animosity towards Mexican Americans. by servicemen stationed in Southern California. In what became know as the Zoot Suit Riots, young Chicano men were attacked and stripped on the streets of L.A. It taught us about the era’s shameless assault on Chicano youth, persecuted for their ethnicity and their jazzy zoot-suit style, featuring long coats, feathered hats, baggy pants, and long chains looping down their legs. The play is both instructive and entertaining.

(Portillo was recently featured in the alumni magazine of Pomona College, her alma mater where she now teaches theater.) And actress Rose Portillo, who was barely out of college when she starred in the original production as Della Barrios, girlfriend of the falsely imprisoned protagonist Henry Reyna, will be back as Reyna’s mother. The role of El Pachuco, which originally launched the career of a young and charismatic Edward James Olmos, will now be played by Oscar-nominated actor Demián Bichir. It returns to the Mark Taper Forum starting January 31, with Luis Valdez again in the director’s chair. Zoot Suit comes back to mind this month as the Center Theatre Center Group prepares to stage its first revival of the Chicano drama. Zoot Suit still stands out as one of the most memorable, right up there with Los Van Van at Marina Hemingway in Havana (1988) and the Beatles final concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco (1966). I’ve seen hundreds of live artistic performances in my career as a critic and culture writer. I remember watching the play during its run at the Aquarius Theatre on Sunset Boulevard. It's about becoming American, a story perhaps more important today than ever before.” As I wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2001, ' Zoot Suit continues to be a play about possibilities, about individuals from clashing cultures finding common purpose. The fact that Valdez had started his theater career as founder of El Teatro Campesino in the 1960s, associated with Cesar Chavez’s farm-worker movement, made his play’s mainstream success even more meaningful. The first professionally produced play by and about Mexican-Americans, Zoot Suit shattered cultural and social barriers.Īnd it was indeed a smash, at least in L.A. Unless you experienced it at the time, it’s hard to appreciate just how much this cultural milestone meant to Mexican Americans, striving for a more respectable place in American society. The Luis Valdez play opened at the Mark Taper Forum on July 28, 1978, and a year later had a short run on Broadway. It’s been almost four decades since the Los Angeles debut of Zoot Suit, the groundbreaking musical about overt racial hostility facing Mexican Americans in Los Angeles during the 1940s.

Zoot Suit and Other Plays by Luis Valdez