If John Leguizamo’s Latin History For Morons sounds like it’s going to be nothing more than a light-hearted accumulation of dates and names and facts we all ought to know but don’t, think again. Though Leguizamo’s one-man show is indeed as funny and elucidating as any theater-going moron could wish for, it’s also a justifiably rage-filled attack on those who’d rather see his people erased not just from history books (as they already are) but from America itself.

Among the morons Leguizamo has written his one-man show to educate is an earlier version of himself, forced by his then eighth-grade son Buddy’s middle school graduation assignment into researching four-thousand years of ignored and/or repressed Latin History stretching from 1000 B.C. Mayans to 2019 A.D. rapper Pittbull and everything in-between.

Adding to the urgency of finding a Hispanic Hero for his son to write about is the bullying young Buddy finds himself enduring at school for being a “beaner” among white classmates, no matter that “My son’s actually a spic-greaseball-hebe-kike, okay?”

And so the fiftyish father of two sets about researching his people’s past and in the process uncovers four millennia of rarely appreciated or acknowledged greatness, discoveries he enumerates like a nutty professor on speed, and the facts he has turned up are as surprising and illuminating as they are shocking and heartbreaking.

I’ll let Leguizamo do the educating (and so should you and everyone you know, Latinx or otherwise).

Suffice it to say that what our unlikely history prof has uncovered are “3 million Taínos in the Caribbean, 33 million Incas in South America, 30 million Aztecs in Mexico, and 7 million Apache, Comanche, and Navajo in the West for a grand total of 73 million people until the great extermination, and then, yo, 95% of us vanished off the face of the fucking Earth.”

Over the next hour and three quarters, Leguizamo sets about filling us in on the hows and whys of said extermination, and if you think it’s because the Spanish conquistadors were more advanced or better armed, think again.

Not that Latin History For Morons is all doom and gloom. In addition to impersonating villains like Columbus (“the Donald Trump of the New World”), Cortés and his infamous if unwitting partner in genocide (“We have a word in Spanish for Moctezuma. Un pendejo.”), and a chalk-haired Andrew Jackson, Leguizamo introduces us to war heroes Loreta Velazquez and Guy Gabaldon, launches into a medley of tango, cumbia, cha-cha, mambo, and samba steps to do Dancing With The Stars proud (Emmanuel Hernandez is movement director), and ultimately inspires his son to look inside his heart and reach inside his soul to find the greatest Latin hero of all.

Not only was the Berkeley Repertory Theatre/Public Theater production nominated for a 2018 Best Play Tony, Leguizamo’s force-of-nature star turn scored its own Special Tony win for a performance honed by ace director Tony Taccone, who along with his superstar leading man and a Broadway’s-best design team (scenic designer Rachel Hauck, lighting designer Alexander V. Nichols, costume designer Luke McDonough, and composer/sound designer Bray Poor) ensure that even in a theater as mammoth as the 2000-seat Ahmanson, audiences will get their money’s worth.

Victoria Collado is assistant director. Randall H. Kamay is tour manager and Steven L. Guy is general manager.

Newly added references to the atrocities being perpetrated in detention centers across our southern border make Latin History For Morons as current as this morning’s headlines, and since it’s long past time for us morons to get ourselves educated, who better than human hurricane John Leguizamo to do the trick?

Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N Grand Ave, Los Angeles.
www.CenterTheatreGroup.org

–Steven Stanley
September 8, 2019
Photos: Matthew Murphy

Tags: Ahmanson Theatre, Center Theatre Group, John Leguizamo, Los Angeles Theater Review