Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, its past, its present, and the challenges it faces in the future, make for an eye-opening theatrical experience in Casa 0101’s World Premiere docudrama Remembering Boyle Heights.

 Those unversed in Los Angeles lore may be surprised to learn that the now 94%-Latino neighborhood boasts a history of racial and ethnic diversity almost unheard of in pre-1960s L.A..

Playwrights Josefina López and Corky Dominguez and their racially, ethnically, and age-diverse ensemble explore that history and its effect on Boyle Heights circa 2018.

The first of Remembering Boyle Heights’ three distinct sections unfolds in the Casa 0101 lobby where Ángel Juárez’s smoldering vocals are followed by monologs describing the challenges facing longtime residents like mariachi Juan Vasquez (Joe Luis Cedillo) and local artist Rosalie Ramirez (Yvette Karla Herrera), victims of an ongoing gentrification that has hipsters, developers, and landlords taking advantage of Boyle Heights’ proximity to downtown L,A. to redefine the community’s ethnicity and economics, i.e. whites with money in, lower-income Latinos out.

Audience members are then invited onstage where a mock Town Hall Meeting has company members sporting cardboard signs designating their various roles (Historian, Activist, Developer, Resident, Artist, etc.) while weighing in with decidedly different takes on the current state of Boyle Heights affairs, an overwrought polemic against gentrification not helped by the distracting Brechtian style masks hiding each of their faces

 Fortunately, it’s not long before the audience gets to take their seats and López and Dominguez’s theatrical piece starts actually Remembering Boyle Heights in a multicultural potpourri of ways.

Cast members provide a crash course in Boyle Heights history all the way up to the heady mix of Mexican-Americans, Japanese Issei and Nisei, African-Americans, and Jews who made early-and-mid-20th-century Boyle Heights the epitome of the American melting pot.

L.A. native Emilia Castaneda (Roberta H. Martínez) describes the devastating effects of President Herbert Hoover’s Mexican Repatriation Program on over two million people of Mexican descent “repatriated” to a country many of them had never seen.

 Segments on “Food, Culture, & Music,” “Community Social, Faith & Politics,” “Theodore Roosevelt High School,” and “War & The Removal Of The Japanese” put a personal face on historical events.

 Cast members recall Canter’s Deli, where residents of all ethnicities discovered the joys of pastrami, pickles, and matzoh ball soup. Harriet Owens-Bynum (Jackie Marriott) describes her journey from African-American maid to real estate mogul. Black resident Jerome (Raymond Watanga) recalls experiencing his first Passover Seder at the home of Papa Bernstein (Michael Berckart), his wife Shira (Allyson Taylor), and their son Joshua (Jose Alejandro Hernandez, Jr.).

 High school baseball games may have united Boyle Heights’ diverse communities and a Japanese-American resident (Marcel Licera) may express pride in being bicultural, but interracial relationships like that of a disapproving Mrs. Watanabe’s (Megumi Kabe) Americanized daughter Amy (Juárez) and her African-American boyfriend Jermaine (Watanga) were less easily accepted.

Later, when the attack on Pearl Harbor brought about the forced internment of Boyle Heights’ Japanese and Japanese-American residents, at least one of the neighborhood boys (Hernandez’s Ralph) made a declaration of friendship and unity that made him a local hero.

 Finally, Remembering Boyle Heights tracks the rise to political prominence of Edward Roybal (Cedillo), elected in 1949 as L.A.’s first Latino councilman, before ending with a journey to Evergreen Cemetery where Boyle Heights’ ethnic diversity lives on in death.

 Director Dominguez deserves credit for imaginative staging that has an enthusiastic ensemble executing nearly as much blocking and choreography as there are lines in the script.

Design kudos are shared by César Retana-Holguín’s multi-locale-evoking set, Kevin Eduardo Vasquez’s striking lighting design, Masha Tatarintsev’s projection design mix of black-and-white stills and live videos, Abel Alverado’s multitude of ethnically diverse costumes, and Xavi Casanova’s vibrant multicultural sound design.

 Remembering Boyle Heights is produced by López. Emmanuel Deleage is executive producer. Vincent A. Sanchez is technical director. Casanova is production stage manager and Georgina Rios Escobar is state manager. Andrew Ortega is assistant to the director. Casting is by Edward Padilla.

A surefire conversation starter, Remembering Boyle Heights serves as both a reminder of L.A.’s fascinating if all too forgotten past and a call to keep its many communities alive and thriving.

CASA 0101 Theatre, 2009 E. 1st Street, Los Angeles.
www.casa0101.org

–Steven Stanley
November 16, 2018
Photos: Ed Krieger

Tags: Casa 0101, Corky Dominquez, Josefina López, Los Angeles Theater Review