San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
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In San Ysidro, theater company Teatro Máscara Mágica finds a permanent space for the first time in its 30-year history
For a few weeks last year, a long-vacant church destined for new life as a theater space seemed for all the world to levitate above its San Ysidro neighborhood.
What might’ve looked like some sign of the divine was actually a less celestial matter: The 1927-vintage Church of Nuestra Señora de Monte Carmelo needed to be raised for construction of a new foundation and basement.
But for William Virchis, the site of a historic house of worship suspended 20 feet in the air was perhaps less miraculous than what the church represents now that’s it firmly back on earth: his long-wandering theater company’s first home of its own.
“The shepherds have finally found their manger,” as Virchis puts it, chatting on a recent morning inside the church’s former nave — now a spare performance space dubbed El Salon — at Casa Familiar’s Living Rooms at the Border project, where Teatro Máscara Mágica has been named theater in residence.
That imagery runs deeper than it might seem: TMM, as the 30-year-old company is colloquially known (its name is Spanish for “Theater of the Magic Mask”), is perhaps most identified with its yearly production of “La Pastorela,” the traditional Christmas saga about the biblical shepherds’ quest to reach Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus.
And for Virchis, now retired from a long and distinguished academic career at Southwestern College, the journey to this church in some sense began on the grounds of another one, nearly seven decades ago.
“I keep looking at Tijuana,” Virchis says, gazing through the new theater’s windows and out over San Ysidro to the hills of the city to the south.
“In 1951 we came, and I landed right in those mountains,” he says of his childhood journey from Mexico City with his father, a manager with Aeromexico, and mother, a renowned Mexican declamadora (or spokenword artist) and devoted Catholic.
“And then we came here to San Ysidro, and spent about a month waiting to go to L.A. And then when we were going to L.A. we stopped at a church — actually, to bless the car. My father had just bought a brand-new 1952 Plymouth, and you have to bless everything!
“So we stopped at St. Rose of Lima,” a church in Chula Vista. “And across the street was a house for rent. And my mom said, ‘I’m staying here. You go to L.A.’ And my dad commuted for 35 years to L.A.
“It’s like all these connecting dots.”
And just to connect the last one: “Souls came in here because they had something to pray about. This emptiness. And maybe that’s what theater does, is fill your soul with courage, and maybe a new voice.”
Art and community
Connections, especially to the surrounding San Ysidro community, are in large part what the new theater and Living Rooms at the Border are all about.
The long-in-the-making Living Rooms project, which was officially dedicated at a ceremony in mid-february, includes not only the performance space but artists’ studios, 10 units of affordable housing and other facilities.
Designed by architect Teddy Cruz (of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman), a professor of public culture and urbanism at the University of California San Diego, the 13,469-squarefoot project increases the reach of Casa Familiar, the 47-year-old nonprofit that provides a range of key social services to the community. The idea behind TMM’S residency is in many ways for the company’s work to complement Casa Familiar’s broader mission. In that spirit, the first theater project in the space (set for this spring) will be a work about domestic violence, created in part through interviews with some 30 people in the community on the subject.
“We see how our social services and arts and culture intersect in many ways,” says Andrew Sturm, Casa Familiar’s public vitality facilitator, taking a brief break from helping outfit the space’s basement with utilities. “And how somebody who comes out of something like a play that has domestic violence as a theme sees the world a little differently — and also sees that we have social services right across the street.
“On-site, we have financial services and immigration services. And we want to figure out a way that makes sense with the art, but that also connects people (with us). You’re here for a show, and maybe you’ve heard about Casa in one way, but then while you’re here you also could find out about our services.
“For us to have someone like Bill and TMM who understand that component, and how the art is not separate from social services and not separate from the people, is infinitely valuable.”
UC San Diego also will be an important presence at the project alongside TMM, bringing educational expertise.
“This space is meant to kind of function like a classroom,” says Casa Familiar CEO Lisa Cuestas, a key force in shepherding the project to fruition. “And it will be where a lot of civic engagement happens, and workshops and discussions with interns and faculty from UCSD. And also tapping into the arts and culture that they have to offer there and can share with the community.
“Casa doesn’t do theater. We do arts and culture, and we understand and appreciate lots of aspects of that. And that’s where (TMM’S) expertise and where expertise from UCSD is leveraged for different things,” including the domestic violence project, which Cuestas calls “a creative piece that will provide awareness and that can act as a preventative tool.”
TMM is partnering with Casa Familiar in other ways as well, including training theater docents. That program runs in tandem with Casa’s initiative to train youth baristas in an on-site cafe facility.
“We’re not training people to become baristas,” says Sturm. “We’re training people to become empowered and take control of their lives and their labor.
“And we tie all this back to TMM because we want all our lights and our house to be run by a young person who lives in the neighborhood. We want to employ as many people in San Ysidro as possible, and we want them to benefit from the artistic education and theater experience of TMM and their partners.”
Dreams realized
To hear Virchis tell it, Casa Familiar’s perspective on the place of theater in the organization’s ecosystem dovetails well with his own beliefs about his company’s craft.
“I’ve never thought about theater as an art form,” he says. “I’ve thought of theater as a health form. It kind of matches my philosophy of theater, how it heals. It’s just like another medicine, if you will, another source of health.”
And having El Salon as a home is a healthy development for TMM — one that Virchis still can’t quite seem to get his mind around.
“We actually have a theater,” he says. “It’s been a dream for 40 years, since I was at the Globe,” helping develop the pioneering Teatro Meta initiative launched by that theater’s late founding director, Craig Noel, an important mentor.
Virchis calls Teatro Meta “the first bilingual, bicultural theater wing in the United States,” and it led directly to the launch of TMM, which Virchis founded with Jorge Huerta, now a UC San Diego professor emeritus.
As Virchis looks around El Salon now, he calls it “an interesting, challenging place, you know?” The narrow theater has 70 seats, although Virchis says more can be placed in the balcony.
There’s no raised stage, and at the moment Virchis is concerned about providing more cushioning for the seats. The windows and skylight also will need to be blacked out for performances.
But the space should be flexible enough to host everything from a Mexican movie night (a chance to screen a few of more than 4,000 donated vintage films, Virchis says) to plays such as “The Last Angry Brown Hat,” the Alfredo Ramos work that TMM hopes to do here in late summer.
Partnerships with the theater departments at San Ysidro and Mar Vista high schools are also in the offing.
“I’m 75 years old, and I started at age 9,” Virchis says. “And this is actually a passing of the torch, you know? I’m not going to be here every day. You need new direction and new voices and new directors, new playwrights. And I hope this is a place where you hand off the baton like in a relay race.”
Virchis’ mind wanders back to his thesis project at San Diego State University. Its topic: “Life Is a Dream,” the 17th-century Pedro Calderón de la Barca play about (in part) the pursuit of free will.
“That’s what it is,” Virchis says of El Salon, finally. “A place to dream.”