American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose

During Wednesday's class, as we discussed breaking down the border between binary oppositions, there was a phrase that I couldn't get out of my head even though I have only ever seen it once before.  But particularly in the context of Anzaldua's article about mestiza consciousness, I thought it was appropriate.  "LAS FRONTERAS SON CICATRICES EN LA TIERRA" : Borders are scars on the land.

This phrase, scrawled in graffiti on the back wall of the set, is the prelude to American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose, a play I saw at Oregon Shakespeare Festival last summer.  American Night is the first of 37 (equal to the number of Shakespeare shows in rotation) plays commissioned by the festival meant to commemorate exceptional events in American history.  It was created by L.A. native Richard Montoya and the improv group Culture Clash.  And also of note, in my opinion, is the fact that it is the first show that OSF has ever had to add performances of in order to satisfy ticket demand.  Considering that the show is running the same season as what everyone I know (who saw it) considers the best performance of Hamlet they have ever seen, this is no mean feat.

American Night focuses on the struggles of character Juan Jose, a Mexican immigrant and permanent legal alien, as he studies on the eve of his U.S. citizenship exam.  Despite his best efforts, he falls asleep in the wee hours of the morning.  With this premise, he falls into dreams of the highest and lowest moments of America, from the Treaty of Guadalupe, to Lewis and Clark, to Woody Guthrie and the Great Depression, culminating in a Town Hall meeting and wildly strange Japanese game show.  Moving and irreverent and completely un-politically correct, the play offers an earnest look at America's past and present, and a form of patriotism unlike any other shines through.

One of the many traits I admired about the play, and one particularly relevant to the breaking down of boundaries, was its unwillingness to treat any of the groups it portrayed in an unfair light.  Nobody was made a laughingstock.  Certainly there were laughable characters, but still, they were treated fairly.  In attending a post-play talk with Richard Montoya, this was a point he stressed, specifically citing the two Mormons who come to help Juan Jose study at the beginning of the play.  I remember Montoya was adamant that they not come off as a joke, and they did not.  Nor for that matter did the hippies at Woodstock or the tea baggers at the Town Hall meeting.  Absurd though they might be, their humanity was not compromised.

Though I don't think Montoya is much of a social constructionist, and the phrase "Las fronteras son cicatrices en la tierra" (at the end of the play, it has been translated, as the graffiti is actually a lighting effect) clearly refers more to physical borders between countries, specifically to America and Mexico, than it does to metaphorical/theoretical boundaries, American Night clearly demonstrates a desire to treat people not as blacks, whites, Mexicans, males, females, etc., but as people.  And in a basic way, this is what dissolving binary oppositions is about: seeing people on the basis of who they are, not what they are.  Another poignant moment in the play, Juan's visit to a Japanese internment camp, also illustrates  this idea.  Along with the Japanese-Americans, Juan Jose finds a hispanic teenager who went along to the camp on the grounds that he is no more or less American than those contained there, so if the Japanese are to be sent to camps, you might as well send him as well.  And along with him, there is a middle class white woman who went along because she was unable to stand the fact that no educational services had been provided for the youth of the camp by the government.  Voluntarily, she teaches them herself.  The solidarity exhibited by these individuals and others in the play crosses borders of race, gender, religion, and political ideology to show that none of these things defines whether or not you are an American and, in a larger context, a human being.

Anyway, here is a review of the play, and here is some information on it from OSF's own site.  If you're really interested, can afford it, and have the time (as if, we're all college students) the show plays till the end of October.  (More realistically, being that Culture Clash is an L.A. based group, they may perform it here some time in the future, so this is their website).