Her demons fill the stage
NEW YORK — Paola Lázaro’s inner left wrist is marked with a jagged outline of Puerto Rico, where she was born and raised. “My uncle tattooed me, in exchange for a pack of Marlboro Reds,” Lázaro, a playwright and actress, explained. “My dark theory is that if I’m found dead in a corner of a street, and I have no ID, they can just take my body there. Everyone will know where I come from.”
Lázaro had just spent the morning watching a rehearsal of her new play — her first to be produced professionally — “Tell Hector I Miss Him,” which is in previews and opens Monday, Jan. 23, at the Atlantic Theater Company. The cast includes two stars of the hit Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black,” Selenis Leyva and Dascha Polanco, as well as Lázaro’s fellow writer-performer Lisa Ramirez, in whose work “To the Bone” she acted two years ago.
Before the company broke for lunch, two other actors, Flaco Navaja and Luis Vega — playing a luckless cocaine enthusiast named Hugo and a clownlike figure called El Mago in Old San Juan — ran a scene in which they have drug-induced visions. The dialogue is gritty but lyrical, sprinkled with Spanish and pocked with profanity.
Lázaro drank it in, plainly still tickled to hear her words read back to her by pros. As Vega patted down and shook out his jacket, pretending to look for Hugo’s fix, she bent over laughing. She then stared, rapt, as El Mago shed his joyful mask and addressed a spirit from his past.
El Mago (Spanish for magician) is based on Lázaro’s paternal grandfather, who has so longed to be reunited with his dead wife that he has devised various suicide strategies and related them — with some humor, apparently — to the playwright’s mother. “He says, ‘Tell the kids to come visit me in the next 20 days, because I’m going to die,’ ” Lázaro recalled. “Poor man, he’s 97, and he keeps living and living.”
At 28, Lázaro is as effervescent as her wit is sometimes morose, and she sees no contradiction in that. “The pain comes in through my back,” she explained. “I’m always questioning: How do my characters stay sane? How do I stay sane in the world? When I leave my apartment, what mask do I need to navigate it?”
Stephen Adly Guirgis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who mentored Lázaro as she earned her master’s in fine arts from Columbia University in 2013, remembers when she first approached him after a panel: “Her head was down. She couldn’t look me in the eye.” Guirgis still recognized a “kindred spirit” in Lázaro, even before reading her thesis play, called “Contigo.” He recommended her for a summer ensemble program at Labyrinth Theater Company, with which he has had a long affiliation. “It helped save my life,” Lázaro said.
“I was not doing good,” she added, “and these people came into my life like angels.”
For Guirgis, “the mentoring process was about sorting out which demons are your friends, which you can use and run with, and which need day-today management. So much of her stuff is really big and deep and painful, and intensely personal.”
Indeed, Lázaro said of her new play: “Most of this is based on my family and people I grew up with, and yes, there’s a lot of me in it. I’m showing concepts of love that may seem faulty — that are faulty, but they are love. They were to me, you know?”
The community represented in “Tell Hector” would seem more disenfranchised than the one that produced Lázaro, whose parents are professionals; Lázaro lived with them in a suburb of San Juan before moving, at 17, to study at the State University of New York at Purchase.
But the plot has echoes in her experience, including a character with fetal-alcohol syndrome inspired by her uncle.
Lázaro was also interested in addressing broader issues in Latino culture, as well as universal themes. “This could be any neighborhood,” she said. “For me, it’s always about the relationships. I’m asking, where is the love in macho culture, in tradition?”
In “Tell Hector,” mind you, love can blossom when the guys aren’t around. Polanco’s Malena — “the hottest woman in the neighborhood,” Lázaro noted — is coveted by Isis, a breathless teenage girl.
“People think that in Hispanic countries they don’t accept gay people, and in some cases they don’t — there are parents that would try to beat that out of you,” she said. “But there are parents who are more accepting.”
Lázaro defines herself as pansexual; her parents, she said, are “the people you can come to with all your problems, and they won’t judge you.”
She paused. “They’re the people you can come to and say, ‘I want to kill myself.’ ” Her eyes were warm as she uttered the last sentence, offering reassurance, telling you not to worry.
“She’s grown so much,” Guirgis said. “Everything great about her was there from the beginning, but she’s really blossomed. She’s become my best friend, really.” When Philip Seymour Hoffman, who collaborated frequently with Guirgis, died in 2014, “Paola was the one who called me first, and she was over in 15 minutes.”
Neil Pepe, Atlantic’s artistic director, first met Lázaro during readings of Guirgis’ “Between Riverside and Crazy,” which had its debut at the theater in 2014.
“There’s a bravery and power in Paola’s writing I find rare among young writers but also a maturity,” he said. “She spoke so empathetically to the humanity of these characters, and she also understood how to flesh them out dramatically.”
Although consumed with “Tell Hector,” Lázaro has finished another play and has been auditioning for film and television roles. (She’ll play a prostitute in the coming movies “Pimp” and an undercover cop in “Scenes From the Underground.”) “I’d love to make this play into a film,” she said of the Atlantic show. “And I’d love to write for television. I think there should be more Hispanic writers, especially for shows that have anything to do with Hispanic people. Let’s write our own stories and create work for ourselves.”
She tapped her left wrist again. “It all comes back to the same thing, to here,” she said. “It’s for the people who supported me — and the people who brought me down, too. My thing is, if I show you my heart, maybe you won’t feel alone. If I show you my pain, maybe you can express yours. And we can all work through it, together.”