Learn to Be Latina

Learn to Be Latina
Impact Theatre
La Val's Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., Berkeley
Ticket cost: $12-20
Show runs to March 27, 2010
Running time is two hours and 10 minutes

Sitting in a small basement full of cobwebs beneath a pizza place where UC Berkeley students gather to shoot pool, do homework, and drink beer you would never expect to see a phenomenally written and directed play. Up and coming playwright Enrique Urueta did not have a wide variety of venue choices for his play Learn to Be Latina, but the talented cast made the intimate setting work.
Learn to Be Latina is a contemporary comedy that addresses issues of race, sexuality, and identity that seeks to offend and entertain at the same time. 22-year-old aspiring singer Hanan Mashulani, played by Carlye Pollack, brings her demo to a record label where she is told that she will not be marketable because she is Lebanese Will, Bill, and Jill, the label consultants, are vetoed by some kind of “ethnic advisor” Mary O’Malley. Mary O’Malley shines throughout the entire play with her blunt humor, awful Irish accent, Spanglish, and a Cuban hand puppet named Casatina. Mary decides that Hanan should be marketed as a Latina, completely ignoring her Lebanese roots, due to a personal vendetta we later learn of.
Mary points out that Latina artists Selma Hyek and Shakira are both of Lebanese descent yet their Middle Eastern heritage is never highlighted in the media. The music executives make terrorist references to Hanan’s ethnicity and take cover when she picks up her bag. Their comments are extremely racist but the audience cannot help but laugh at their ridiculous assumptions. Urueta calls attention to the tumultuous careers of Middle Eastern ethnic pop stars Tiffany and Paula Abdul, establishing a need to change the ethnicity of Hanan. After a “Latina boot camp” Hañan emerges as a international superstar who speaks little Spanish and takes on a Colombian heritage, that she later confuses with Cuban. She struggles with her identity throughout the play and her sexuality as well when she falls for “Office Bitch,” a.k.a the Chicana office secretary.
No minority group is exempt from Urueta’s humor. He pokes fun at Mexicans, black people, lesbians, gays, Latinos, women, and he even makes fun of white people calling them the “race-less” group. The characters use racial slurs, “politically incorrect” words, they cuss, perform sexual acts, do and say anything and everything to make us feel uncomfortable. As a resident of San Francisco and a product of pop culture, I was not offended. However, perhaps a more conservative, older audience would not have been a fan of Learn to Be Latina.
The small basement theater allowed for a relaxed setting where most of the audience enjoyed pizza, beer, and wine from La Val’s Subterranean (the pizza place above). The lighting was appropriate for the small space that was allotted for the stage, and the sound was just right. The costumes looked as though they were thought out, but perhaps needed to be a bit more flashy for Hañan’s role as a superstar. I enjoyed all two hours and 10 minutes of the up-beat, in-your-face dialogue, multiple dance performances, pop culture references, crude comments, and high energy performance. Overall, I think Urueta’s play was fantastically written and well thought out. His professional partner, Director Mary Guzmán did an equally amazing job at directing the actors and helped put Urueta’s words into action. Together, the two nailed it.
My Rating: ****

Rating:
* (Yawn)
** Still listening
*** Great acting and solid plot
**** Amazing acting, great storyline, and no one’s sleeping.

Alice in Wonderland, quite a dissapointment

Thank goodness for 3D graphics because they were just about the only thing that saved Tim Burton’s 2010 take on Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps established actors Johnny Depp (the Mad Hatter), Helena Bonham Carter (the Red Queen), Anne Hathaway (the White Queen) and Burton’s reputation as a director are the reason this film had so much hype and publicity. With strange sexual undertones, unexplained circumstances, and frightening looking creatures, I would not suggest taking the kids. As an fan of the old Disney movie Alice in Wonderland, my longing for childhood nostalgia was crushed with this slow and anticlimactic storyline.
From the first scene we see young Alice as a girl who suffers from bad dreams often and then we abruptly fast forward to her life as a 19-year-old rebellious girl on the way to her engagement proposal. As an audience we are not quite sure what occurred in those passing years but we are to assume that Alice once visited what she calls “Wonderland” and has now forgotten all about it.
The beginning of the film sets up for what seems like might be a nineteenth century film about arranged marriages. Alice, who has about a 2.5 second attention span, fails to pay attention to the fact that she has just been proposed to and instead chases a rabbit that, surprise, goes down a rabbit hole. Following the rabbit she enters what is called “Wonderland” or what looks like a place drug addicts might go after their first hit. This is a land where you can drink a potion to make you smaller, eat a small cake that magically makes you grow taller, animals can speak, and humans take on strangely enlarged facial features.
Alice encounters a number of creatures that she befriends who are convinced that she is not the same Alice that visited this land once before. She meets the wise caterpillar who smokes out of a hookah until he cocoons, a magical healing cat, and the most intriguing character, the Mad Hatter who looks like a clown on methamphetamine. A quirky, hat-making, Mad Hatter played by Johnny Depp takes on the role of Alice’s “watcher,” yet it seems as though the two may have a connection deeper than friendship, perhaps a romance.
Alice also has an interaction with the King where he expresses his lust for her by pushing her up against a wall. Throughout the entire movie she is constantly consuming potions that alter her size and her clothing disappears as she grows taller or smaller. Her lack of clothing and risqué attire distract audiences from the once innocently portrayed Disney Alice and turns her into a bit of a sex symbol. She is even charged for unlawful seduction and brought before the Red Queen who delivers her famous line “Off with her head!” Explaining the reason for Alice’s beheading may not be inappropriate for the young ones since the PG rating allows anyone to view the film.
Alice in Wonderland is drawn out over an hour and forty minutes of film that attempts to keep audiences suspenseful for a climactic ending in which Alice must slay a large evil creature. However the ending is the opposite. It is quite slow and Alice eventually returns from Stonerland, crawling out of the rabbit hole and arriving at her engagement proposal party. The amount of time that has elapsed is unexplained and viewers are unsure what the party guests have been doing all this time that Alice has been missing. Despite all of her adventures, Alice’s character does not go through much of a transformation. In fact, she seems to be the same Alice that the film opened with. Was she dreaming, did she really go to Wonderland, or did she do some serious drugs?

Rating:
* Not a great film
** Somewhat entertaining
*** It was good, but I wouldn’t see again.
**** Mind stimulating and entertaining throughout
***** Film genius

My rating:
** 1/2