Vance Valencia and Gilbert Reynoso in “Tuesdays With Morrie” at CASA 0101. (Photo by Francis Gacad)

Identity Politics in the Trump Era

Tuesdays With Morrie at CASA 0101

Pre-Show Rites: Taquitos and a Broken Light Switch

Over the Easter weekend, I was in Boyle Heights to see CASA 0101’s production of Jeffrey Hatcher and Mitch Albom’s autobiographical Tuesdays With Morrie. There are still the architectural frames of synagogues across Boyle Heights, the East Los Angeles district where the CASA 0101 theater is located. These former synagogues are relevant because the play is about a pair of Jewish men — a sports journalist and graduate of Brandeis University who, after 16 years, visits his former college professor of sociology. The older man is dying from neurologically degenerative Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease). It’s a play about the meaning of life, and the meaning of death. Here the men are played by Latino actors, Gilbert Reynoso and Vance Valencia, before an almost entirely Latino audience. In so many ways, this production is about echoes. A Jewish play comes home, only to find itself in a different neighborhood. As the professor lies dying, he’s covered with a Mexican blanket.

Historically, Boyle Heights is idiosyncratic. In the 1930s and 1940s, restrictive covenants were in force across entire swaths of the city, including Hollywood. These covenants banned People of Color and Jewish populations from owning homes. An exception in Boyle Heights created what would today be called a diverse neighborhood. Not anymore. Is this a harbinger?

Los Angeles at that time also had a policy of racial segregation at public swimming pools uniformly applied across the city. But because Boyle Heights was so ethnically diverse, local residents persuaded the L.A. City Council to offer an exemption to the policy of racial segregation at the public swimming pool at Boyle Heights’s Roosevelt High School. That Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Italian and Jewish people all swam in the same pool was a kind of emblem, and the promise of a harmonious, racially integrated future only vaguely realized in the decades to come.

Starting in the 1950s, banks offering mortgages starting “redlining” Boyle Heights, which is a means of excluding home mortgages, thereby overriding the equity and inclusion that had defined the neighborhood. Only people with sufficient cash could now buy a home there, a policy that led to the migration of Boyle Heights’s Jewish community west to the Fairfax District, to Beverlywood and to Encino, which also did not have restrictive covenants or mortgage redlining.

Policies shifted over the decades, and Boyle Heights today is 95% Latino.

I arrived about an hour early to CASA 0101 for the performance. The drive in from Idyllwild was uncharacteristically open. With time on my hands, I walked around the neighborhood and grabbed a quick dinner at a local Mexican eatery. I was the only customer. The owner and his wife, who was cooking, or started cooking after I ordered, spoke no English. I speak almost no Spanish, though was able to sputter out dos tacos por favor. The wife looked concerned. The couple’s daughter emerged from a back room into the dining room. She spoke English and showed me a menu containing a photograph of taquitos. Would that suffice? Of course, I said, and the daughter slipped away. The wife started preparing the food. I asked if they took credit cards. The owner re-emerged into the kitchen from the back room and said “cash only.” Panic washed over me. I had only $6 cash in my wallet? He read my facial expression and said “Zelle?” I said fine, he showed me his name and a phone number that were hand scribbled on the back of a receipt book. Together, we tapped out this transaction on our respective phones. There are bonds that interlink cultures: food, finances, and technology.

The taquitos came with a beautifully prepared salad. As I was about to leave, the trio came out into the dining room to ask how I enjoyed the food. I thanked them all for their help in a moment of what can only be called cross-cultural bonding, so desperately needed in 2025.

Before heading back out onto the sidewalk, I walked in the other direction down the hallway to use the bathroom, where there was a stall but no urinal. Fine. I closed the door and was immersed in darkness. I propped the door open and pressed the light switch. Nothing happened. I flipped the switch back and forth. Nothing happened. Okay, I’ll pee in the dark I figured, before closing the door and being enshrouded in total black.

This presented a conundrum. Perhaps I can do this with the door propped open, which will let in some light. I propped the door open only to see the daughter, who stood watching in the hallway. Braver men would have proceeded with the task at hand, but not I. Rather, I closed the door again.

That’s when I realized the full dimension of my plight. Moving feelingly in the dark, I pondered, but not for very long, the stakes of relieving myself in the absence of any light whatsoever, and the disconcertingly high odds of pissing on the floor by accident. This would be so damnably typical: The well-meaning White man who walks into Boyle Heights and, with no intention of doing so, creates chaos. This is a part of world history, I suppose.

They could have fixed the light switch, I muttered to myself, which is true but petulant. I also could have figured out a way to sit on the commode and complete the task from that position, but I decided against it, choosing instead to walk with a full bladder the five or so blocks back to the theater, and to use the bathroom there.

As I left the restaurant, the three of them greeted my departure with friendly waves.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

A couple of weeks ago, The SAG AFTRA Foundation hosted a colloquy that I moderated, with two artistic leaders (Center Theatre Group’s Snehal Desai and IAMA Theatre Company’s Stefanie Black) and two casting directors (Phyllis Schringa, who works mainly out of The Geffen Playhouse, and independent casting director Michael Donovan). Though SAG AFTRA is a screen actors union, the focus here was the stage.

There were many topics discussed — including how-to (get work) primers for actors, and the virtues and drawbacks of creating theater in Los Angeles. What struck me as most pertinent for this politically surreal moment was the intersection of casting and identity politics.

Regarding the Trump administration’s recent edicts to shut down Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives in all agencies and institutions (educational and cultural) that receive federal funding: The trauma that has struck higher education and white-shoe law firms appears to have bypassed local theaters. The reason for this is self-evident: National funding of theaters has always been so anemic that the government’s bully pulpit is about the size of a matchbox. Both Center Theatre Group and Geffen Playhouse ran the numbers and, according to both Schuringa and Desai, in terms of DEI, they’re just going to keep doing what they’re doing — both as a matter of principle, and because they can afford to.

Yet the issue of diversity in hiring, within the theater and within a particularly diverse region, is so layered that stridency from any camp is hard to justify.

Desai told the story of how he got involved in theater. He started out as an actor. Having a youthful appearance, he said, he would get cast as very young characters yet, being of Indian heritage, he encountered a roadblock — there weren’t enough Indian actors to portray his relatives in the mainstay of family dramas being produced at the time. Therefore, he says, he lost multiple opportunities for work on the stage. He decided to remedy this by becoming a director, wherein he could make/approve of the casting choices himself. He rebuked the literalist casting in the theater that had cost him so many roles, saying that the art form depends on “imagination.”

Because this anthem (the theater is the art of pretending to be who we’re not) is somewhat at odds with statements I’ve heard over the last few years coming out of Center Theatre Group, I asked Desai how he balances his argument for imagination with literal casting justified by issues of social justice.

“It depends,” he replied — always a smart, lawyerly retort. If there’s a role for a deaf actor, and there’s a community of deaf actors in Los Angeles who are endemically underused, we’re going to hire a deaf actor rather than a hearing actor pretending to be deaf, he said.

Climbing for a moment to an altitude of 30,000 feet, there seems to be a tug and pull among issues of authenticity, imagination, and social justice. This trinity is constantly rubbing up against one other, as though trapped within a soccer ball that’s being kicked around a large field, constantly in motion and spinning.

The authenticity question asks: What will audiences believe is true? If a production cannot persuade an audience that what’s on the stage is authentic, the theatrical event dies on the vine. The spinoff question is whether a theater can guide an audience to believe that, say, Jewish characters who spout Yiddish aphorisms can be played by Latino actors at Casa 0101 in Boyle Heights, before its predominantly Latino audience?

From the sniffles of empathy I heard coming from that audience, I’d argue that there was no shortage of the requisite “imagination” (seeing beyond the literal) coming from that crowd in a production that clearly landed its emotional punch.

If Jewish actors had played those roles to the same audience, I have no way of knowing if the play’s impact would have been as devastating. It may well have been. Where lie the bonds of empathy? Within the play itself? In the community watching it? Had the actors been Jewish, might there have been a small barrier between the two?  I hope not. And perhaps that’s why I also believe not. From chatting with a few people after the show, this audience seemed to me empathetic and generous.

Then there’s the long and storied history of theater serving causes of social justice. The looming sword of Damocles hanging over our theater, our nation, and so many others is and has always been bigotry. Internationally, the theater has always been a refuge from the toxin of bigotry, which doesn’t mitigate the legacies of racism that permeate American theater, despite some noble efforts to provide some remedy for these institutional biases, and its rationalizations of them. (The audience is “not ready” to see People of Color performing leading roles in Shakespeare or Moliere, ad nauseum.) Historically, this bigotry has been infused with the “meritocracy” argument, that People of Color are not as well-trained or competent in the classics, as they used to say of women, who weren’t permitted on the stage in Elizabethan England.

In some ways, we owe a debt of gratitude to the Trump administration for laying bare how the meritocracy argument is and has always been used as a front for yet more racism. Look at the credentials of Trump’s cabinet. Almost none have experience or merit in the agencies that they are now destroying. Meanwhile, playing the roles of judge, jury and executioner, they label Venezuelan immigrants as violent domestic terrorists, then hustle them off to a gulag in Central America, where they’re deemed unworthy of due process to defend themselves in a court-of-law, or even to speak to a lawyer or to their families. Meanwhile White gangs, who, on American soil, in courts of law, have been convicted of violence (unlike many of these Venezuelans), receive full pardons. This is not an aberration. It’s a toxic vein of our legacy reasserting itself.

The rage engendered by this vein goes a long way to explaining the backlash against White-run theaters nationwide following the George Floyd killing, and the cowed silence and collective guilt among White theater makers, ostracized if not cancelled if they spoke up against their feelings of now being excluded from this conversation, which included the argument that punishment for the sins of the fathers must be borne by their descendants, and people who simply look like those fathers. “Reckoning” was the word employed, but this is a misnomer. What we’ve seen for decades is backlash followed by backlash. It’s an ugly way to move forward. “It’s our turn now, get out of the way,” is not a particularly humane guiding principle in a theater and in a nation that artistically and theologically espouse empathy. Nor has it any fidelity to the principles of diversity, equity, or inclusion. It’s the very argument currently being used by White supremacists, here and abroad. Backlash follows backlash.

How do we move forward without destroying each other? Without destroying ourselves?

“Tuesdays With Morrie”

 On the face of it, Hatcher and Albom’s 2002 play (following a 1999 television movie), has nothing to do with social injustice. And yet it does. It’s based on Albom’s best-selling 1997 autobiographical novel, wherein the adverse behavior depicted is the author’s (Albom) own self-absorbed ambitiousness.

And yet, contemporary social ills resonate throughout this play, through the inability to connect when we’re perpetually logged into diverting social media streams, diverting us from each other, and from ourselves. The narrator is, after all, a journalist. It would seem to be an authoritarian’s dream, to keep the public diverted and self-absorbed. Who needs a CECOT mega-prison when people “self-deport” to social media tribes of the like-minded? Or if we’re working so hard, two, three jobs, weekends included, never saying “no” to supervisors’ or editors’ demands, all on a hamster wheel to pay the rent, or in pursuit of some facile version of fame, and leaving at a far remove what the play’s dying professor, Morrie Schwartz would call “living.”

The story is told from the point of view of Mitch Albom (Gilbert Reynoso), in both narrative and dialogue with his former sociology professor Morrie (Vance Valencia). The dying professor has a singular lesson that’s theme-and-variation on “slow down and smell the roses.” Mitch’s ambition crashes into Morrie’s Buddhism

In an opening scene, Mitch, a graduating music student, promises to visit. He doesn’t. For 16-years. Until he sees his former mentor featured on Ted Koppel’s TV show, being interviewed because of how he’s handling his diagnosis with Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

When he finally returns to Morrie’s home, Mitch has given up composing music for the pursuit of his career in sports journalism. He never turns down an assignment, which renders him too busy for a romantic relationship (for a while, at least). He presumes that he’s living a rich, full and important life. Morrie is gently skeptical. Mitch figures, at first, that he’ll pay homage for a short visit, do his duty, assuage his conscience. For reasons he himself doesn’t initially comprehend, he commits to weekly Tuesday visits, eventually cancelling Tuesday interview assignments, and thereby willingly jeopardizing his career. In this play’s frame, that would be called growth. In early visits, he’s too squeamish even to touch the dying man. That squeamishness melts away, along with Morrie’s probing questions: “Are you at peace with yourself?” “Are you being as human as you can be?”

These may sound like rhetorical New Age platitudes, yet this play has aged well. Addressing such questions is, perhaps, the key not just to sanity, individual and collective, but a source of salvation, individual and collective.

As you learn how to die, Morrie says, you learn how to live. People equate aging with decay, he adds, blind to how aging is also a process of growth. “Leaves are most colorful just before they die.”

Miguel Delegado‘s production follows the play’s woodgrain, thereby indulging rather than rebuffing a tilt into the maudlin. Nonetheless, the performances are skillful and, yes, authentic. Valencia is particularly adept in capturing Morrie’s harrowing muscular-neurological degeneration — the agonizing, futile attempt to drink from a cup by himself, or to eat without assistance.

César Retana-Holguín’s lean, functional set, subtly laced with Mexican motifs, includes an onstage keyboard, played by the former music student in juxtaposition to the action. Gabrielle Maldonado composed the original music.

I might have found this play so affecting because of how our era has exposed the depths of gleeful hatred among some of those now in power. The theme here is an assertion of the opposite. I suspect I would have found it superficial in times gone by. But these are not times gone by, and this play’s theme of generosity and empathy has become urgent.

“What’s the point in loving?” Mitch snaps in a moment of personal torment.

“There is no point in loving,” Morrie replies. “Loving is the point. We must love one another, or die”

It’s as though, from 1997, Albom was writing for 2025.

Casa 0101, 2102 East First St., East LA. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 3 pm; thru May 11. Running time: 100 minutes, including intermission. www.casa0101.org