ZOOT SUIT is one of my favorite plays and its author, Luis Valdez, is one of our greatest Chicano playwrights, and arguably the first. As others have posted, there is a film version that is almost a literal filming of the play, starring the playwright's brother Danny, Edward James Olmos (who also starred on stage in LA and NYC), and Tyne Daly. Character actor Luis Guzmán also has a significant part.
I taught the play for many, many years and my students loved it.
It was a huge hit by LA standards: it enjoyed two limited runs at the Taper in 1978 and then moved to the Aquarius Theater (now called the Henry Fonda) where it ran for over a year, I believe.
I'm embarrassed to say I didn't see it in New York, although I lived there at the time of its brief run. I didn't know what a "zoot suit" was and found the TV commercial very confusing. (You kids don't know how we suffered before Wikipedia.)
I'm not sure Director's post is quite accurate: ZOOT SUIT is no more political than ANGELS IN AMERICA or THE NORMAL HEART. And the Taper has sent quite a few successful plays to Broadway: in addition to ANGELS, plays like CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD, THE SHADOW BOX and THE KENTUCKY CYCLE.
But in another way, Director is right: unlike the other plays listed above, ZOOT SUIT was heavily advertised in NYC as a "musical". And it IS a musical in the Brechtian sense; Edward James Olmos played an allegorical character who frequently interrupted the action with song and dance. But the play has as much to do with OKLAHOMA! or MY FAIR LADY as MOTHER COURAGE does. It really isn't surprising that the show closed quickly. The rest of the potential audience was as confused as I, I suspect.
(And I shouldn't have to add that not all Latinos are the same; Puertoriqueños and Cuban-Americans, who were much more numerous when I lived in NYC in the 1970s, simply may not have been as interested in events involving Mexican-Americans. Valdez has had many successful plays on the West Coast that proved to be of little interest in the East.)
But don't let its "politics" put you off. In the first place, Valdez knows he has to keep his audience entertained while he educates. In the second, the play conflates two events from WWII-era LA: the Sleepy Lagoon Murder and subsequent trial (which give the play a "film noir" feel), and the Zoot Suit Riots (several days when the city ran amok as WWII servicemen attacked anyone with long hair or "funny" clothes, especially apparel associated with Latinos, in the mistaken belief that minorities were "draft dodgers"
. Valdez plays a little fast and loose with these events, but neither is distorted irreparably, and Valdez' purpose is to dramatize the reality of being Chicano in America, not to get us to memorize facts about the 1940s.
Updated On: 7/20/16 at 09:13 AM
