Theatre’s Place in Times of Crisis: A Conversation
ATHE 2014 featured a keynote conversation between playwright, performer, and activist-artist Luis Alfaro and interlocutor Tiffany Ana Lopez, professor of theatre, film, and digital production and Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Lopez has been following Alfaro’s work for close to thirty years. The two first met in the early 1990s, flying from Phoenix to Flagstaff for a conference where Lopez presented for the first time on Alfaro’s work. They have been in conversation ever since, as Alfaro’s career has moved from solo performing, to co-directing the Latino Theater Initiative at the Mark Taper Forum with Diane Rodriguez (where he helped commission over 150 new plays), to his current work as a community-based artist, professor at the University of Southern California, and resident playwright with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Professors Lopez and Alfaro structured the conversation to think through theatre’s place in times of crisis, with specific reference to the idea of the citizen-artist. The following are excerpts from their hour-long conversation, which was staged against a backdrop of production stills from Alfaro’s work. Alfaro commenced the conversation with his own archival intervention—a Facebook Selfie with the ATHE audience—before proceeding to address a number of topics introduced by Lopez.