Latin History for Morons
Reviewed by Katie Buenneke
Center Theatre Group
Through October 20
John Leguizamo has a remarkable knack for drawing an audience in and making them feel comfortable immediately. Before you realize you’re even watching a one-man show, you’re well into it, you’ve unknowingly taken a leap of faith and you’re trusting this man to guide you through the next two hours.
Leguizamo is no stranger to the form of solo performance, with past outings including Freak (which debuted on Broadway in 1998) and Ghetto Klown (which played at the Montalbán in 2011). He slides in and out of the various characters he plays (his son, wife, and daughter, primarily, in addition to various historical figures), but that’s not the main attraction in this show.
As the title would indicate, Latin History for Morons is Leguizamo’s version of a collegiate lecture, a primer on a topic often left out of the curriculum. So often left out of the curriculum that Leguizamo is compelled to learn and teach — the show is framed by his quest to find a Latinx hero for his son to look up to (and write about, for a school project). “If you don’t see yourself represented outside of yourself, you just feel fucking invisible,” he says early on, and it’s the first of many gut-punching moments throughout the evening.
Leguizamo strikes a delicate balance in the show, keeping the audience’s spirits high from joke to joke, but then — just as the audience might be starting to get comfortable — he tells you the unvarnished truth about what happened to the Latinx people of the Americas not too long ago, before bouncing back to levity. The history of Latinx people is a history of repeated genocide and intentional persecution, which continues to this day under the Trump administration’s inhumane treatment of citizens, immigrants, and refugees. Presented without comic diversion, the topic might be too much of a downer for most audiences, but by telling parts of the story humorously, Leguizamo makes learning about trauma more tolerable.
Speaking of audiences, Leguizamo knows his. He knows that most of the people in attendance at The Ahmanson Theatre will likely be white and the type of people who listen to a lot of NPR. He jokingly makes fun of the audience, but he never talks down to them. Of course, there are layers to his circumspection; perhaps he’d like to bellow about the unjust treatment of Latinx people and the intentional obfuscation of the contributions of Latinx civilizations, but he wouldn’t be able to take it out on his (white) audience, no matter how representative he feels they are of the injustices people from his culture face. There’s a power dynamic at play that’s too easy for white audiences to ignore, but likely impossible for Leguizamo to forget. Though he never states as much, he subtly indicates that there are two types of white people: outwardly racist ones (like Trump and a dad at his son’s school who often references being descended from a line of Civil War generals) and the types who’d shell out $35-$145 per person to see a show that’s literally called Latin History for Morons. By virtue of being a part of the latter group, it’s tempting for the audience to become complacent, and distance themselves from the horrors of their ancestors, but the success of European colonizers in the Americas is inextricably linked to their proclivities to exploit indigenous peoples.
Here’s the conundrum: Perhaps it’s odd to want a performer to make the audience feel worse about themselves just by virtue of their ancestry, but by failing to make this context explicit, it lets the (majority white) audience off the hook. It’s too easy for white people to live in ignorance of the atrocities their ancestors committed upon communities of color, or simply to argue that those crimes aren’t theirs, but those of their ancestors, and hence they’re not responsible. But it’s impossible for the descendants of oppressed people to forget those same actions, and to let bygones be bygones.
Leguizamo is insightful, with a razor-sharp wit and a knack for impersonation, but it’s uncomfortable when he uses his skills to mock other marginalized groups. In particular, there’s an extended sequence where he portrays the Aztec leader Moctezuma as a pre–Will & Grace–era caricature of a gay man. While Moctezuma made some extremely poor choices, Leguizano’s use of tired stereotypes to depict him as gay creates an implication or a correlation between being gay and being a bad person or an ineffectual leader.
Despite those occasional fumbles, Leguizamo has an effervescent presence, and he’s a great entertainer and teacher. The show lags slightly (it now runs 10-15 minutes longer than it did on Broadway or on Netflix), and while his portrayals of his family are affecting, the show is most compelling when Leguizamo is leaping in and out of history, showing the audience an aspect of history that was previously unacknowledged. It’s an educational evening, which Leguizamo tries to make palatable for as many people as possible.
The Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown L.A.—Civic Center; Wed.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m. & 8 p.m.; Sun., 1 p.m. & 6:30 p.m.; through Oct. 20. (213) 628-2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org. Running time: one hour and 50 minutes with no intermission.
