Downey resident directs new play at LA Theatre Center
Left to right: Glenn Stanton (Cherokee), Rainbow Dickerso (Thai, Rappahannock), Katie Anvil Rich (Cherokee, Chickasaw), and Carolyn Dunn (Cherokee, Mvskoke Creek, French Creole, and Tunica/Choctaw Biloxi descent).
LOS ANGELES – Theater fans still have this weekend to see the world premiere of “Desert Stories for Lost Girls” now playing at the Los Angeles Theatre Center through Sunday, October 16.
This play by Lily Rushing, about family, identity, and colonialism in the Southwest, is presented through the collaboration of the Latino Theatre Company and Native Voices at the Autry.
The director is Sylvia Cervantes Blush, a Downey resident and frequent participant in the local southeast area arts scene.
Rushing drew on her own family history to tackle an aspect of colonialism and Southwest history that is gaining more exposure – the indentured servitude of indigenous individuals who subsequently lost all family and tribal connections.
The disparate group of survivors, mostly from tribes of Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Navajo, Pawnee, and Ute, became known as Genízaro.
“It’s an important piece of the story of the American Southwest that needs to be heard,” affirms Cervantes Blush. “I think the playwright has done an incredible job of creating a piece about a very haunting past in a beautiful, poetic way.”
The practice of purchasing war captives from local indigenous tribes was exploited by Spanish colonizers who used those captured to work in households, herd livestock, and serve in the frontier Spanish militia. The Spanish, and later American, colonizers also engaged in direct abduction. While the captives were allowed to earn their freedom and settle in local towns, the violent and abusive experiences left deep scars.
Fallout from this servitude passed through generations as connection with family and ancestors was severed. The victims of such injustice and violence often did not want to share painful memories with their own children and grandchildren.
Rushing discovered this legacy within her family when she and her mother began researching census reports. The women were able to trace familial ties back to Rushing’s great-great-grandmother who had been enslaved as a young girl and forced to give up a child to adoptive parents.
In Rushing’s play, eighteen-year-old Carrie comes up against such family mysteries when she moves in with her grandmother Rosa, who seems to be suffering from dementia.
The family’s story unfolds for the audience through dream-like visitations, Rosa’s efforts to explain her memories, and the appearance of Plácida—Carrie’s great-great-grandmother, an unsettled spirit who was raped and forced to give up her son. This layered storytelling is well-served by Cervantes Blush’s talent for evocative, theatrical staging.
While Rushing’s play is rooted in the particular historical events of colonialism, there is a universality to its themes. Women everywhere are uniquely targeted as men wage war and seek to subjugate one another. Children who are abducted and lose their families are left with profound questions of identity. The trauma of violent events often becomes generational. Given the current charged political climate throughout this country, and the world, these questions are, sadly, deeply relevant today.
Cervantes Blush grew up in nearby Bell Gardens and says she was immediately captivated by the performance arts after a class in high school. She majored in theater as an undergraduate, attending Cerritos Community College and Cal State Long Beach, and earned an MFA from UCLA.
Her myriad directorial credits include two productions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, and a unique, collaborative production by the South Coast Repertory staged at the Santa Ana Civic Center, The Long Road Today/El Largo Camino de Hoy.
Cervantes Blush’s professional work ranges from comedy to tragedy. Of all her projects, she recounts that the most impactful ones for her were two she did with family and friends.
The first was a series of one-act plays written by her husband Bill Blush, Bill’s Shorts, and produced with actors in a 99-seat theater format at the local Epic Lounge.
“Bill’s Shorts (both Part One and Two) was a lot of work in a short amount of time with people I respect and admire as artists,” says Cervantes Blush, “and to do it here locally was great.”
Theater During the Pandemic
Her other highlighted project was a virtual theater experience produced with family and friends, including children, during the pandemic: S.H.E.L. Silverstein News, a 30-minute video that can be seen on YouTube.
“It was a project to connect with people,” explains Cervantes Blush, “to bring a little joy during the height of the pandemic when everything was so scary. How do we say Hi to our neighbors?”
Cervantes Blush explains that she herself was feeling the depressive effects when everything was almost totally shut down in 2020.
“I was reminded about a play I did 10 years ago when I was teaching and I decided to reach out. I ended up collaborating with 27 households that included over 40 individuals, many of them children.” Some of the participants had no experience as performers.
The group started in July 2020 with the idea of presenting some of Silverstein’s popular poems as humorous news stories with pseudo news dialogue in between the poems.
Her process involved a month of rehearsing individually with all of the participants online.
“Then I walked them through how to film themselves and they sent me footage and I edited it. We had families videoing each other. It was so much fun to watch the kids grow in that short amount of time.”
For various reasons, the editing took almost a year to finalize. “I didn’t realize how much footage I had,” she recounts, “and I was learning how to edit because I had to make it seem that these people were in the same room.” She also found herself devoting more time to other projects as groups developed ways to continue their core work online.
A virtual red carpet, with cast members being interviewed, was held on Zoom before the completed video was aired online.
In January Cervantes Blush will be in Dallas to direct a production of Native Gardens by Karen Zacarías at the Dallas Theatre Center. She is optimistic about the resumption of live theater and reports that some preview performances in Dallas have already been sold out.
She is glad to be participating in live theater once again. “The video project during the pandemic showed me how resilient we can be, and it really affirmed for me how much the arts have saved my life time and time again. And in the end, sharing it with the kids, we made a little tiny movie, and it was joyful, and good.”
Cervantes Blush’s current play, Desert Stories for Lost Girls, will finish it’s three-week run this weekend. Performances are:
Thursday, Oct. 13, Friday, Oct. 14, Saturday, Oct. 15 at 8 pm, and Sunday, Oct. 16 at 4 pm.
Tickets range from $22-$48
To purchase tickets and for more information, including up-to-date Covid safety protocols on the day of each performance, call (213) 489-0994. Online information and purchasing is at www.latinotheatreco.org/desert-stories-for-lost-girls.
LA Theatre Center (LATC) is at 514 S. Spring St. Parking is available for $5 with box office validation at Joe’s Parking structure, 530 W. Spring St.