ABSTRACT

Why begin the study of American drama with the early Shakespeare performances, the bowdlerized versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or the founding of the Provincetown Players? After an intense look at Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit (1992), a different approach suggests itself. Why not connect theater back to the very first theatrical performances in the United States in 1598 (Don Juan de Oñate), then on to the pastorelas, heroic dramas, amateur and professional theaters (Kanellos 1983: 17) operating continuously in the Southwest, California, and Texas right up to the present? Let’s teach by tracing American theater back to its Spanish and Latino/a origins as

well as to the rituals of Aztlán and the drama associated with the church. William Worthen argues that

Chicana/o theatre is a deeply hybridized theatre, drawing on a wide variety of formal traditions: Aztec ritual; Spanish and colonial drama; Mexican drama; pastorelas and other Church drama; the popular carpa and zarzuela shows operating in Mexico and the Southwest from the turn of the century through the 1950s; genres like the novela drawn from Mexican film and television; and forms derived from European and Euro-American drama, both a realism echoing Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams and an insistent reworking of formal and ideological “alienation” in the Brechtian mode.