10 DOWNTOWN NEWS
DT
TWITTER: @ DOWNTOWNNEWS
MAY 23, 2022
Covered California SUMMER GUIDE will help
Magical new play introduces a Latina Mary Poppins By Bridgette M. Redman LA Downtown News Contributing Writer he Latino Theatre Company is reopening its doors with a new work by its resident playwright, “Sleep with the Angels,” a show that is definitely a family affair. Running from Friday, May 27, through Sunday, June 26, “Sleep with the Angels” is about a magical nanny who literally dropped in from Mexico to help out a newly single mom with her two teenagers. It was written by Evelina Fernández, an award-winning company resident playwright. Her husband, José Luiz Valenzuela, is the company’s artistic director and the director for this show. The lead actress playing the part of Juana, the fantastical Mary Poppins-like nanny, is Esperanza America, daughter to Fernández and Valenzuela. America’s husband, Robert Revell, composed the play’s music and performs it live. Fernández said she didn’t particularly have her family in mind when she wrote this piece many years ago. “Sleep with the Angels” was written as a commission for another theater that eventually passed on the rights. It was then it came home to the Latino Theatre Company. “I knew Jose would be involved because of our involvement in the Latino Theater Company for 37 years, but I didn’t specifically think about my daughter to play the role of Juana and I didn’t think about my son-in-law to play the music,” Fernández said. America read the role of Juana during a pandemic Zoom call. While she hadn’t expected that would be an audition, she was drawn to the show. “Sometimes we’ll do a reading for the company, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s who’s going to be cast in the show,” America said. “So, I told my mom, ‘If this isn’t me, it’s totally fine. I don’t know who you want for this.’ Then we did the Zoom reading and Robert and I wrote music for it, and it just kind of evolved from there. They haven’t fired me yet.” It is important to them that Latino stories are told in ways that are authentic, culturally specific and uplifting. The theater company specializes in putting important issues onstage and talking about them from a Latino perspective. “Many people talk about single, professional moms and young people in search
T
The cast of “Sleeping with the Angels” is bringing the new play to the Los Angeles Theatre Center stage. Xavi Moreno/Submitted
of their gender identity, but not necessarily from a Latinx perspective,” Fernández said. “That’s been the trajectory of our company to tap into issues from our community’s perspective.” Just putting a professional, educated Latino woman onstage is a political statement, Fernández said, in part because it isn’t often seen. “It’s really important for people to know that our community is as diverse as any other community,” Fernández said. “Many times, you only see one image of us onstage or on screen. It’s always the same.” She also wanted to contrast the two women who both leave their children in the hands of other women so they can survive. She wanted to do so with elements of Mexican humor and folklore and the cultural remedies that people in the community use daily. “ They don’t seem magical to us,” Fernández said. “They seem like everyday things. When people observe it from the outside, it might be enlightening and humorous. The beautiful thing about our culture is that we tend to approach everything with a sense of irony and a sense of humor. That’s what we do in this play.” Valenzuela said people often hire Latino nannies and immigrants and barely know anything about them and their private life and struggles. They’re expected
to take care of the family, while no one is concerned with them. “That’s kind of beautiful to put on the stage in this magical way,” Valenzuela said. “There is the relationship to Mary Poppins because Mary Poppins was the nanny who came in to solve the issues of that particular family. Juana in a way has great magic, but all to do with cultural things.” He is also entranced by how the everyday cultural things intermix with complicated issues about being a single mom and the relationship to the estranged husband and teenagers. “The play starts out on a whimsical note — Juana is a sort of Indigenous Mary Poppins,” Valenzuela said. “Before we realize what’s happening, it has us thinking about serious issues: immigration, homophobia, parent-child relationships, marriage. The magical part is learning to be a real human being and the complexity of that.” Since the script was written, Fernández was inspired to rewrite many times due to the pandemic and racial and political divide. “I had to do some soul searching about the script I wrote,” Fernández said. “Many things don’t ring true anymore, even though we’re still dealing with the young person’s gender identity. Just in two years that subject is so much a part of daily life for young children, so much more than it was before.”
She finds it fitting that her daughter plays the main character, because she inspired the script. One of her daughter’s side jobs before she became a mother was to be a nanny to a young boy. She shared stories with her mom, which gave her the idea for “Sleep with the Angels.” “It’s not biographical by any means, but it inspired me — the story of a nanny to a single mom and this young boy who wasn’t Mexican but really wanted to be,” Fernández said. “He was Jewish, and he had his bar mitzvah with a mariachi and taco truck. I just loved the relationship that they had with each other.” While America drew upon that experience as she created the character of Juana, she said the character is a blend of many people. One of them was her own nanny, one of her mother’s cousins. She arrived in the United States for a few months before America was born. “She was very funny, and Juana is very funny,” America said. “Juana represents many, many people, especially in LA, because there are a lot of people in the entertainment industry who have nannies and housekeepers who you never see. Without them, daily life would not be able to go on, because they take care of the kids, they clean the house, they cook. I think it’s important for them to get recognized.” For the show, she had to hire a nanny to take care of her young child. She