Welcome to the big time
NOW PLAYING AT HARTFORD STAGE, ‘KISS MY AZTEC!’ A DOOR OPENING TO PEOPLE OF LATINX HERITAGE TO CREATE
Sunday is American theater’s biggest night: the Tony Awards. Given the persistence of COVID-19, it’s a miracle that 34 new shows managed to open to compete for this evening’s trophies. Even more miraculous — to this veteran brown-skinned actor, anyway — is that an Afro-Latina, the amazing Ariana DeBose, is hosting the whole ball o’ mofongo. This is a small victory for Latinx performers and creatives, and a testament to theater’s standing as a place where societal problem-solving often starts. We are the country’s largest ethnic group, comprising nearly 20% of the U.S. population. But you wouldn’t know this from watching TV or going to the movies.
According to a UCLA report published last year, television shows starring Latinx and Hispanic actors made up just 7.1% of the total number of scripted programming on broadcast networks, 4.7% on streaming platforms and 3.9% on cable. A 2021 study by USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative found similar ratios in film.
Theater, by contrast, is the medium that gave Latinx artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda and myself the opportunity to develop our stuff and to discover that — guess what? — our own peculiar brands of freakiness hold wide appeal!
That’s great, but it’s still not enough. If we’re 20% of America, why aren’t we represented
proportionally in American entertainment? Why aren’t we telling 20% of its stories?
These questions are part of what motivated me to make my first foray into musical theater, via my new show, “Kiss My Aztec!,” which opened on Friday at Hartford Stage. Don’t worry, I’m not in it; I can’t carry a tune for the life of me. But this musical comedy is an opportunity for our brilliant cast of 15, all actors of Latinx, Black and/or AAPI ancestry, to shine. In big, fat roles, too, not the usual “Si, señor” walk-ons or “Ay yi yi” explosions of stereotypical hysteria.
“Kiss My Aztec!,” which I co-wrote with Tony Taccone and the songwriting team of Benjamin Velez and David Kamp, also
provides the chance to tell an important story from Latinx history: of the Spanish conquistadors’ erasure of the Aztec Empire. This event marks the tragic end of something, but it is also the beginning of us: Latin America as we know it today, the multihued, complicated consequence of centuries of indigenous people mixing with Europeans, Africans and whoever else was thrown into the mix, voluntarily or, too often, involuntarily.
In our show, we cheat a little by giving our Aztec rebels a fighting chance to defeat the Spaniards. But hey, that’s what you get to do when you assume the creative reins. I started doing this in the ancient days of my youth, when I decided to get into acting. I was an avid student of theater, which was my passport to places I had never been. As a spectator, I could be in the South with Tennessee Williams, in
London with Harold Pinter, or in Kansas with William Inge. But as an actor, I couldn’t go anywhere but the janky street corner, where my characters were always either selling drugs or getting busted for selling drugs.
This exclusionary reality motivated me to create my own material. It was the only way I could tell stories that represented the full spectrum of Latinx experiences I knew. I drew strength not from the entertainment and media complexes but from the real world, which is populated by people who look like me. As I built up my collection of one-man shows, from “Mambo Mouth” to “Latin History for Morons,” an audience found me.
Some of this audience, I recognized, was not a traditional theater crowd. These people were paying prices they could barely afford just so they could feel validated, to see versions of themselves and their culture onstage. Just so they could feel the entirety of their experience — the joyous, the tragic, the mysterious, and the outright absurd — represented onstage. Representation doesn’t have to be a solemn exercise in bleak drama and oppression chic. It can be fun! That’s why we made sure “Kiss My Aztec!” gives our very funny actors a chance to be clowns — to be as goofy and silly and moony as Josh Gad and Sutton Foster get to be on Broadway.
I will not rest until we have truly shifted the paradigm and shows like “Kiss My Aztec!” are commonplace rather than outliers. I hope that when young folks of Latinx heritage check us out at Hartford Stage, they’ll be empowered to become creators themselves. To those kids I say, consider this show a door opening, a welcome, better late than never, to the big time.
John Leguizamo is a Tony Award-winning writer, comedian and actor. His iconic solo shows have been seen on and off Broadway. “Kiss My Aztec!,” now playing at Hartford Stage, marks his first musical collaboration.