Edit Villarreal Biography

playwright. Edit Emili Villarreal was born on September 7, 1944, in the U.S.–Mexican border town of Brownsville, Texas. Elba Cortinas, her mother, a third generation Mexican American, worked as a registered nurse and married Emilio Villarreal, a Mexican from Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Emilio served in the U.S. Army Air Corps and died in November 1944 during World War II. The eldest of four children, Edit Villarreal was raised by her grandmother, Marta Garza, a refugee who was exiled during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Her grandmother is brought to life as a fearlessly bold and creative matriarchal force in Villarreal's best-known and most widely produced play, My Visits with MGM (My Grandmother Marta). In 1992, Arte Público Press, a prestigious Houston-based publisher of Hispanic literature and poetry, published My Visits with MGM. Since then the play has been continuously produced with wide popular success in theaters across the United States.

Villarreal constructs her characters from her rich ancestral history as well as from her own personal literary passions. Developing a strong love for books, she had read major works of the European and American literature already by the age of twelve. Her love for reading not only gave her the educational basis to complete her ambitious pursuits but also most importantly seeded the aspiration to become a writer herself. Seeking to improve their economic opportunities, the Villarreal family moved to Los Angeles, California. After graduating in 1962 from Arroyo High School in El Monte, Villarreal completed a BA in 1967 at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1981, New One Act Theatre of San Francisco commissioned Villarreal to write her first play, Going Back. That same year, under the direction of the influential dramatist María Irene Fornes, she moved to New York City to participate in the Hispanic Playwrights Laboratory at the International Arts Relations Theatre (INTAR). It was during this residency that Villarreal experienced a critical turning point in her artistic life. She found her playwriting voice and committed fully to developing her craft. She was admitted to the Yale School of Drama and in 1986 completed her MFA in playwriting.

Prior to her graduation, her play Crazy from the Heart was produced by the Yale School of Drama and by the Yale Repertory Theatre. These productions brought Villarreal recognition, and she was nominated by Lloyd Richards and the Yale Repertory Theatre for a Susan Smith Blackburn Award. After graduating and accepting a teaching position at the University of California–Los Angeles in September 1988, Villarreal married the Los Angeles–born writer Bennett Cohen. The couple had no children. Since 1986, Villarreal has taught at the UCLA School of Theatre, Film, and Television, where she has headed the graduate playwriting program.

By 2004, Villarreal had written eight full-length plays: Pictures (1982), A Spanish Story (1985), Crazy from the Heart (1985), My Visits with MGM (1989), The Language of Flowers (1991), Chicago Milagro (1996), Marriage Is Forever (1996), and ICE (2001). Her smaller pieces include a ten-minute play titled Unforgettable Love/Amor Eterno; and two one-act plays: Going Back and Alone in the Water. On June 12, 1983, she created her only performance piece, The Fat Man Likes Poached Eggs, produced by the Theatre for the New City and part of the “Arts for Life Festival” at Central Park, New York City. She has cowritten several teleplays for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and Independent Television Service (ITVS) with Carlos Avila and Bennett Cohen. Foto-Novelas, Part I and II, The Fix, Mangas, and La Carpa were all nationally aired and nominated for awards. La Carpa was screened in 1993 at the Sundance Film Festival. Besides scripts, Villarreal has written children's fiction books and theater criticism.

Work

Villarreal differs from other Latina and Latino playwrights in that her work, driven by the psychology of the characters, seems less overtly political. The sociopolitical terms serve the playwright as a structural context to counterpoint her own perspective. For example, in Chicago Milagro, by setting the play in a racially divided Chicago at the turn of the nineteenth century, Villarreal reminds the spectator that the Mexican immigrant was present. Utilizing the heroic associations with the European immigrant experience that constituted the backbone of the U.S. economy, Villarreal reminds us that Mexicans also took part in building the country and remain vital to its core. In Chicago Milagro, Horacio, an upper-class Mexican intellectual, ministers to the poor, sickly European immigrants. He is welcomed and respected as a leighis, Gaelic for healer. In an underhanded manner, by inverting the typical ethnic roles in regard to power relations, Villarreal smiles at the ironic possibility of privileged mainstream white America being consoled and healed by the mercy of an educated Latino. At a time when the World Exhibition in Chicago displays subjects from “primitive” nations, Horacio is a curandero, a healer seeking to raise the confidence of a local community enduring poverty, filth, and pollution.

Villarreal offers the spectator relief from Latina and Latino clichés with inventive plots and characterizations, while simultaneously posing honest and critical questions regarding the assimilation into an American Dream that negates Latina and Latino historical and cultural ancestry. In The Language of Flowers, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Villarreal proposes not a family feud, but a feud within la raza, the Chicano race. Unlike that of the star-crossed lovers, the Latina and Latino conflict is not due to fate; its roots grow deep and have a complex history, which has fostered hatred and tragedy. Villarreal displays a full spectrum of prejudices held by a disjointed raza constantly reminded of its “illegal” status while wishing to merit validation. In the play, Julian Bosquet prefers to cut off the connection to the old culture in order to provide a better future for his daughter Juliet. He is not aware that she has already sealed her return to the “old life” with her union to Romeo, an illegal Mexican from Tijuana. Drawing from a calavera corridista instead of a chorus, Villarreal offers the couple a Mexican posthumous space-time continuum—with bodies made of flower and song, “fed by the sun and cooled by the wind.”

Similarly, in her other plays, Villarreal draws from the Mexican popular styles to transform physical into magical realities. In My Visits with MGM, evoking the metaphysical serves to explore the relationship between generations. Third-generation Marta Feliz, who has lost the impetus to work and rather envisions a “glamorous job” before getting pregnant, is continually visited by her grandmother even after her death. Marta Grande guides her granddaughter into discovering the strength that comes with immigration: “Ni modo m'ija. The past is over. Only the future keeps repeating itself. Immigrate, m'ija. Just like your Tía and me. Immigrate. You deserve it.” In this stirring play, Villarreal posits that each generation must rediscover what it means to immigrate and earn its life.

In Marriage Is Forever, Pati and Paul both have glamorous jobs, but the Chicana surgeon and the Chicano marine biologist face a crisis of relationship as they prepare their cyber-wedding over the Internet and become embroiled in a fantastical scenario, a fiesta of the dead among the living, in which the playwright mixes modern technology and supernatural intuition in a funny and profound way. The play is a bilingual burlesque comedy with many fantastical characters, which modernizes the carpa tradition of Mexican folklore in surprising ways, offering relief from unquestioned clichés and opening up bold possibilities.

Assessment

Villarreal's writing, as in Crazy from the Heart, which uses a Native American setting to confront a white couple with the loss of meaning in their materialistic relationship, searches for positions that allow us to see ourselves in complex, contradictory cultural environments. The spectator is called upon to rediscover a relationship both to the roots that may disappear and the law of the land to which he or she has moved. Villarreal's work has a passion for nonconformity and change, filled with the clear understanding that Latinas and Latinos face important emotional challenges and choices for the growth of their culture in the United States.

Bibliography and More Information about Edit Villarreal

• Avila, Kat. “The Genesis of Edit Villarreal's MGM.” Ollantay 4, no. 1 (1996): 52–57.
• Huerta, Jorge. “Professionalizing Teatro: An Overview of Chicano Dramaturgy since Zoot Suit.” Ollantay 4, no. 1 (1996): 91–102.
• Lomelí, Francisco A., and Carl R. Shirley, eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers. 3rd ser. Vol. 209. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Group, 1999.
• Mason, Susan. “Romeo and Juliet in East L.A.” Theatre 23 (Spring 1992): 88–92.
• Poyen, Jennifer. “Breaking Ground: San Diego Rep Upholds Its Commitment to Latino Plays with Premiere.” San Diego Union—Tribune, April 1, 1999: 4–5.
• Villarreal, Edit. “Catching the Next Play: The Joys and Perils of Playwriting.” In Puro Teatro, a Latina Anthology, edited by Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, 330–333. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.

See also Playwrights and Performing Arts and Theater.

María Angeles Romero