Writer: Guido Garcia Lueches
Director: MarianaMalena Theatre Company
Cultural clichés are dashed to the wall by embracing all of them in Guido Garcia Lueches’ Playing Latinx, a show that playfully draws out our bigotry and laziness in the presentation of South American and Latinx people. Running at the Camden People’s Theatre, this high-energy show manages to be far more inclusive than the behaviours it satirises while skewering the bland stereotyping that blurs national and cultural boundaries.
Staged as a seminar led by a South American actor and teacher, Playing Latinx offers four modules each of which will help audience members to become more Latinx and therefore be more widely acceptable because other people will be able to easily compartmentalise them. No complexity, individuality or even reality required, just three emotions – angry, sexy, confused – and an opportunity for some Practice Based Learning (PLB).
Garcia Lueches, performing their first one-person show, creates a vibrant, warm atmosphere from the start. Appearing only in a tiny pair of shocking pink pants at an audition for ‘sexy Mexican’, it’s a statement opener and a device that is repeated through the show as Garcia Lueches earns audition after audition, first being asked to play a Peruvian shaman worrying about the land and the spirituality of plants, later a salsa dancer and a Latino doctor, each one showcasing the limitations and expectations placed on Latinx characters in the media.
They use those stereotypes as the launch pad for a four-point plan that will help participants to essentially gain more work as an actor and greater integration by giving people what they want. So, whether building elaborate backstories about poverty, natural disasters and cartel violence, creating a more acceptable multiword name, limiting personality to the three core emotions or focusing only on permissible conversation topics including the Macarena, Playing Latinx is both a crash course in the ridiculous simplification of a continent and its people and the perfect balm for it.
A lot of the show requires audience participation both in the comedy exercises that illustrate each module of the course as well as in the audition scenes – the performance even opens with a sign noting ‘the show will start when someone sits in the chair’. And while there are eventually enough willing volunteers to keep this 55-minute show on track, Garcia Lueches creates a safe space that doesn’t seek to embarrass or single-out individuals.
As the course leader, Garcia Lueches is a fantastic host not only teaching but also embodying all the wisdom they have to deploy. Maintaining an upbeat enthusiasm throughout that leans into overplaying in order to reinforce the show’s core message about roles and performance, Garcia Lueches makes some very serious points but has a great deal of fun bringing the audience along for the ride.
Playing Latinx has some direct things to say about Britain funding and protecting former dictators, but for all its exuberance this cleverly crafted show is generally far more subtle about the persistence of clichés rooted in a European desire to feel superior to other cultures. And by deconstructing our need to believe in an amorphous singular Latinx nationality, personality, culture and vocabulary, Garcia Lueches’ show reveals far more about us than the cartoonish version of South America we cling to.
Runs until 2 April 2022
