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Jorge Huerta: You've known the members of the Latino Theatre Company since and even before their inception in the mid-1980s. You also reviewed their 2008 production of La Virgen de Guadalupe Inantzin. What expectations did you have about this new production?1
Carlos Morton: I expected to see a high-quality performance by first-rate actors and I was not disappointed. It was a superb production by a dream team of professional artists. What did you think?
JH: Yes, these Chicana and Chicano actors have been working in Hollywood for almost three decades, playing all the stereotypes you can imagine and this production allowed them to demonstrate their versatility as actors.
CM: They played multi-faceted characters with depth and a wide range of tones. For me, the characters were well- written and incredibly human.
JH: As a playwright, why don't you encapsulate the play?
CM: It's the story of a man, Gabriel (Geoffrey Rivas), who forsakes his past in order to achieve material wealth. He is married to Sonia (Lucy Rodriguez), a white-washed Hispanic like himself. The play begins at the funeral of Gabriel's mother, whom he hadn't seen in twenty years. His boyhood friends, Johnny (Sal Lopez) and Ramona (Evelina Fernandez) who stayed in the barrio, show up to honor his mother's memory and invite themselves to an improvised post-funeral party. A mysterious limo driver, who refers to himself as "The Man" (Robert Beltran), transports everyone to Gabriel and Sonia's penthouse presumably high above the city of Los Angeles. Later we discover that in their youth Gabriel may have fathered Ramona's son named Angel (Fidel Gomez).
JH: For me the question of whether or not Angel is Gabriel's son is left unresolved, especially at the end of the first act.
CM: A clever device to get the authence to return for the second act.
JH: And thus begins the unraveling of the plot, a series of monologues and dialogues between different characters, interspersed by elegantly choreographed transitions in which everyone dances to a variety of Latino musical standards.
CM: The musical interludes added some nostalgia that contrasted with the verbal exchanges.
JH:...