Guillermo Reyes
with an Introduction by David William Foster
and
Jorge Huerta's thoughts on casting the DIVAS

Published in GESTOS
No. 27 (Abril, 1999)
Price: US $ 12.50

Deporting the Divas, produced in 1996 by Celebration Theater in Los Angeles and then across the country, tells the story of a young Mexican-American border patrolman who crosses the line into sexual and ethnic ambiguity when he has an affair with an undocumented young man

Order your copy from:
GESTOS
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of California
Irvine, CA 92697
Fax: (949) 552-4820 Tel. (949) 824-7171. gestos@uci.edu

From David W. Foster's "Guillermo Reyes's Deporting the Divas " (GESTOS, 27 [April, 1999]):

On Guillermo Reyes

"The Chicano/Latino theater of Guillermo Reyes (Chile, 1962; raised in Los Angeles since 1971) exemplifies the attempt to undertake a queer project, on both the level of the dramatic text and on the level of its theatrical embodiment, to the extent that he is both an award-winning dramatist and a highly skilled director. All of his texts deal with U.S. Hispanic issues, with a special focus on gay men. Perhaps Reyes's most cited text is Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown, a series of nine monologues that depict different forms of gay Hispanic identity."

On Deporting the Divas

"Constructed basically as a fugue, Divas eschews the drama of interpersonal conflict as it might exist in terms of a narrative of problem solving: there is no central dramatic action demonstrated through character interaction and no specific resolution of conflict to be sought. Rather, the structure of Divas involves the chaining together of circumstances and incidents that allow for the fragmentary exposition of queer perceptions of same-sex desires and relations. Reyes is a very witty writer, and there is much about his dramatic texts that evoke the image of high-energy gay repartee with a good measure of bitchy dishiness thrown in. From a dramatic point of view, he sets up opportunities for individuals to clash over differing ways of feeling about and understanding gay life, and in the course of his dialogues, a very irreverent attitude emerges in regard to both the pieties of patriarchal straightness and what have come to be the hallowed assumptions of an activist gay culture.

Reyes's humor serves to open up the assumptions of homoerotic relations via the dynamics of laughter. Playing off of the shared participation of the theatrical event, the sharing that takes places between the spectator and the actors and among spectators, Reyes artfully constructs situations of dramatic irony that, when perceived, provoke laughter from the spectator, who is challenged to accept the provocation in the company of other spectators. This is an especially important point from the perspective of a queer theater, since the degree to which the spectator is the "in the know," the degree to which one is willing to reveal of an understanding the nonstraight point being made, the degree to which such a manifestation can be shared publicly with other spectators, and even the particular form of laughter (an uneasy one vs. a sardonic one) tells the actors a lot about how the audience is reacting to queer material."