Teatro Caló breathes life into local history with their upcoming cultural/theatrical presentation, Golden State Stories: Local and Global Legacies. This UCSB-based production company is helmed by theater-department graduate students, including the Global Latinidades Center’s theater project coordinator, Mayra Gomez-Labrada. The project is directed by Sara Sotelo and informed by the research of dramaturg Ángel Miguel López, and features student performers from a variety of majors and fields of study.
Golden State Stories features “actos,” short, skit-style plays in the style of Teatro Campesino, a California-based theater troupe led by Luis Valdez during the United Farm Workers strikes in the 1960s.
“The actos bring attention to societal problems in satiric and comedic ways,” says Gomez-Labrada, using the hyper-characterization of bosses and supervisors as an example. The original purpose of these actos, as performed by Teatro Campesino, was to spread information to agricultural laborers about their rights and options. They characterize Latino and underrepresented narratives, shedding light, says Gomez-Labrada, on the ongoing issues of racism and economic inequality. The recent racial profiling targeted at the Latino population, she says, makes these works feel “more urgent than ever.”
The dramatic action in Teatro Caló’s production was developed in a playwriting course focused on the creation of 10-minute plays. The subject of these works is the untold histories of Santa Barbara, Goleta, and Isla Vista, a region with deep ties to the Chicano theater movement. These plays, says Gomez-Labrada, one of the course’s lecturers, are inspired in part by prolific Chicano playwright Carlos Morton, who in turn was inspired by Teatro Campesino. The course also featured a lecture by Dr. Jorge Huerta, a leading academic expert whom Gomez-Labrada calls “the father of Chicano theater.”
See the shows for free from 2-5 p.m. at the following locations: November 21, Santa Barbara Museum of Contemporary Art (653 Paseo Nuevo); November 22, Goleta Community Center (5679 Hollister Ave., Goleta); November 23, UCSB Theater Courtyard (Theater and Dance West, USCB).
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