♪♪ Welcome to "The First Twenty."

I'm James King.

In 2003, Pregones Theater launched a pioneering project bringing together LGBTQIA+ artists and communities.

Structured as a national competition, the Asunción Playwrights Project grew roots at the company's home venue in the South Bronx.

Led and created by Associate Artistic Director Jorge B. Merced, Asunción showcased the work of Latine playwrights exploring the issues of difference and transformation at the limits of queer identity.

Through readings, workshop productions, and main-stage engagements, over 40 playwrights and their works blossomed and found an audience in Asunción.

In this episode, you'll hear from some of the winning playwrights as they share anecdotes about their experience with the project, how they felt it provided a unique platform to grow their works, and what it means to be part of the dynamic legacy of what is now Pregones Puerto Rican Traveling Theater.

♪♪ [ Mid-tempo rock music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Merced: You know, I think artists, we do not function separately from society.

We are influenced by the same forces or events that influence everybody else.

In my case, I'm the product of a colonial upbringing.

One of the -- I believe the oldest colony in the world is still Puerto Rico, and what that does to an artist is sometimes it creates a sense of, "I'm not necessarily complete."

When I first arrived at Pregones in 1987, again, I was carrying that sense of, "I'm going to go in a place where I'm going to create art that has history."

From the beginning of the company, the founders of the company, with Rosalba Rolón, Luis Melendez, it was a very queer, inclusive group that gave birth to this company.

So when I came in, there was a road that had been already paved.

And I felt like it was my responsibility to then take it to the next level without forgetting who those people were.

To me, I felt like I had a responsibility of always questioning the work that we were doing and the art that we were doing from a queer perspective, from a gay perspective.

Jorge began to work with us, you know, as a young actor.

And it was pretty soon after he joined that we began to experience the HIV crisis in the city.

At that time, we were learning more and more how we needed to really go hands-in and be strong in support of our friends.

We were losing friends every day, and then we saw a larger mission for us.

We kept challenging our audience and bringing them into the conversation, especially young people, because of course, the discrimination and the rejection was mounting, and we wanted to play a role in that.

And Jorge was in the middle of that conversation, leading that conversation.

You know, the place that Asunción had in this company had a lot to do with who makes up the company.

The presence of queer people from the beginning, the presence of queer people on staff, but also a real connection with community.

This is a company that invested long years in putting women in the center, helping look at gender as a real factor that deserves to be recognized.

The commitment to opening queer spaces and to program for queer community, right?

So it's not just the artists but the audience that comes to participate.

That is absolutely part of what we're here to do.

Merced: The name Asunción comes from a song that I used to listen to when I was a child that went ♪ Asunción, asunción ♪ ♪ Ese hijo va a ser marinero ♪ Meaning, "Asunción, your son is going to be queer."

The townspeople talking about the way that he walks -- that's a bad sign.

And for a young queer kid growing up listening to that on the radio and people laughing about it, it leaves an impact on you.

What about that son -- the sons of Asunción?

How would they feel, you know?

And about that mother, because they never asked her how she felt.

And I felt, "Well, we're going to do a project called Los Hijos de Asunción -- The Children of Asunción."

And that's where Asunción comes from, just to take back that which was meant to hurt us and to turn it into a badge of honor so that we can come back to our community stronger and say, "Let's talk about this."

Rolón: Asunción adds to the chorus of voices about what is needed on stage, and the content of the place was so broad, you know.

And on the one hand, yes, it dealt with identity.

But in addition to that, it was just about a world view that needed to be shared on stage, and the beauty of it, when you think about some of the writers that that we presented and we produced throughout the life of Asunción, like Charles Rice González, like Vicky Grise.

I mean, we have a South Bronx and Chicana artist and other being Puerto Rican, Pablo García Gámez.

I mean, a roster of voices that, when you put them all together, is an amazing quilt.

Merced: Asunción is a project that gathered playwrights, artists, community members who were interested in exploring issues of transformation and the limits of queer identity, particularly works that explore what it means to be a man or a woman, or challenged normative notions of gender and the performance of gender.

I wanted to do a project that looked beyond the coming-out stories or being in the closet or not being in the closet.

I felt like there was a lot more that could be said about the spectrum of sexuality in our communities, and I just opened an invitation for artists to submit works that challenged those notions.

You know, it's wonderful when you see a lovely play about a little white boy losing his virginity.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

That's wonderful.

It's a heartbreaking play.

Guess what.

We have a different journey.

We also have one of survival.

One of the things that we bring that is really unique is, through that survival, through how hard it is sometimes, we also bring humor.

[ Upbeat dance music plays ] [ Audience laughs ] Rodríguez: There's an authenticity, a sense of community and love that we also bring.

Because of our own experiences, we are sometimes forced to be away from our blood families and create our own communities and go and create the family that we choose, right?

Because we are not able to sort of handle certain things or they are not able to handle certain things as a family from blood.

So we are forced into creating our own community.

So we are community builders, as well.

There's always been a significant need for this voice to be staged and recognized, and there's always going to be a reason for representation.

So that's a value that doesn't end.

It's an open circle.

The perspectives we bring are perspectives that are important to complete the dialogue of the experience of being an American.

That's what I think.

That the story is incomplete without queer stories, without Latino stories, without black stories.

It's just not the whole story.

We have always created space as queer people, even when space wasn't given to us.

We've created space.

We created ritual and celebration inside of bars without windows, in basements, in cities all over the United States and the world.

We've turned those spaces into cabaret spaces and performance spaces and drag shows, and we have carved out and created those spaces together as a community.

And I think that there's something to be learned from that.

How do we make something uniquely our own?

For us to be presented to us by us in a place of joy and conflama and drama and ratchet-ness.

I want all of that to be how we make work.

Another reason why I think our stories are important -- me as a black person, as a Latino person, as a queer person, as a person from the Bronx -- is that all of those things are valuable.

And a lot of times I experience art -- and sometimes art by, like, white artists -- that maybe don't have the same kind of challenges, right?

That they can just -- you know, maybe there's an issue that affects them and maybe there's something they feel passionate about.

But this intersection, right?

These different levels of oppression create space for us or a need for us to explode out.

These are the voices that need to be heard.

Everybody needs to be heard.

But these are the voices of people of color, of queer people.

And it's important for us to hear them and understand them and give them that opportunity to present their work on stage.

Merced: The first Festival of Asunción took place in 2002.

2003 was when we were forming it and getting it together, and it lasted for 10 years of continuous works being selected every year, new playwrights coming in.

Over the span of Asunción, more than 40 playwrights submitted 40 different works.

And those were so lively.

They were so full of that hunger.

"I want to talk more about this, and why did you do it?

Why did that character say that?

Why did this person do that?"

Or, "This reminded me of a story of my friend or my father or my sister or my brother."

And those dialogues were really dynamite and provided the artist with insight as to how an audience in the Bronx was receiving their plays.

The appeal became national, and we had playwrights from all over submitting their plays to be considered for Asunción.

Rodríguez: I had this experience working with Jorge Merced, who did direct the stage reading of "La Luz."

When we were rehearsing for the stage reading, I still didn't know if this was working, and I remember, we were rehearsing, and he was sitting sort of a ways, and I was sitting a ways, and the actors are up there doing their thing.

And all of a sudden, I start hearing something, and I'm going, "What's that noise?"

And I look over, and Jorge is in tears.

And I freaked out.

I really freaked out.

I thought something had happened, like somebody told him bad news or, you know, something happened with an actor or he's in pain -- like, physical pain.

And I just went, "Jorge, are you okay?"

And he turns to me and he goes, "You don't understand.

I know that woman.

The mother?

I know her.

And the words that she's saying are touching my heart."

And when he said that in tears, I knew the play was going to work.

Back in 2007, with "Las Facultades," that was the first time we actually worked with digital scenery on stage for a production.

Working in Asunción was very important for me because I was more involved in the creative process.

I was just not a stage manager, you know, doing different things.

It was just like me being there, me designing sound, sometimes me designing lights, designing projections.

[ Laughing ] Valencia: I was part of Asunción as an actor initially and then as a writer.

I got a phone call to do this beautiful one-person show called "Tiembla."

Merced: The first winner of Asunción was Gonzalo Aburto's "Tiembla."

And that was a spectacular work to open the series.

It was about this Mexican young man, and he doesn't realize he's dead.

And at the end of the play, he understands, "I am no longer here, but my voice is still here."

And what the panel and myself, when I read it, felt was so relevant is that it spoke so clearly to what we experienced when -- the AIDS epidemic and the notion of history and the memories that are told to us from people that have passed on, and where do they live?

And I felt that was, like, a really crucial play to open up the series.

The first judging panel was amazing.

It included luminaries like the revered queer scholar, playwright, and author Dr. Alberto Sandoval Sanchez.

He also wrote one of the first academic papers on the project, opening the door for several seminal articles by scholars like Dr. Larry La Fountain-Stokes and many, many more.

We also had acclaimed playwright, the fierce Edwin Sánchez join that first panel.

My role in Asunción was one of the judges, one of the panelists.

That experience was seeing new voices, new plays, and characters that I hadn't seen before.

There's something really exciting about being at the birth of a play.

It doesn't have to be perfect, but you're hearing a voice and the uniqueness of that voice.

I know what it's like.

So when you're sitting there and watching actors bring something you've written to life, it's very exciting.

It's very exciting because they live outside of you.

And these characters that you created in your head or that you've seen in your family or whatever, you get to see them on stage, on their own, outside of you.

And that's special.

The comments from the audience of Asunción influenced it tremendously.

You have to understand, I had never myself experienced -- I don't know if it had happened here before, but I had never experienced a Dominican-American play written in Spanish the way we talk authentically, the way we talk -- the rhythms, the broken words, the refranes, you know, the little phrases that we say.

I didn't know what was going to happen when we first did it, I really didn't.

I didn't know how the audience was going to receive it.

I really didn't know.

All I knew was that there was a lot of heart in this and a lot of love, that it was beyond the funding, even though the funding was in there.

And I was hoping that they would connect with it, and boy, did they.

So the comments -- what I kept hearing was, "That's my family.

That's my tía -- my aunt.

Thank you for representing us, even though we're not Dominican, because I know this person.

I know this story.

I know these people."

And people crying.

It was a bit overwhelming but also satisfying to see that it connected with a diverse audience, but also that it connected, period.

There was no sort of dismissal of it as, "Oh, it's one of those lowbrow type of plays."

That it was accepted.

It had value.

Grise: I often say that I've never arrived anywhere in a straight line, and so that's both the way that I write and it's both the way that I make work.

The work that I've been doing is deeply rooted in movement.

And so when I talk about movement, it's the physical.

So actually waking up every morning -- waking up every morning and being in the physical body, but also movement in terms of movements and social movements and what are we creating together?

And I very much believe that that's what theater is.

It's an opportunity for us to come together as a people, imagine a world, build it, and invite other people into that world.

Vicky brought this play called "Rasgos Asiaticos," which completely opened up our minds to understand her story and her family's history as a Mexican-Chinese family and how a lesbian couple is trying to reconnect with that past and with that story in order to make sense of where they are and who they are.

Vicky, again, was another playwright that truly believed in Asunción and was part of the staging process and exploring how we can translate that story to a Caribbean East Coast audience and completely surrender to the process and to the community that was being created by Asunción.

"Rasgos Asiaticos" is a performance about my Chinese-Mexican family.

It really was an autoethnography project of looking at my own family's history, and that's what I submitted to Pregones for the Asunción Award.

Since then, I received the Asunción Award in 2011, and interestingly enough, we just had the very first initiation of what I'm calling an ongoing project, because what "Rasgos Asiaticos" has evolved into is an ongoing project to trace and look at Chinese-Mexican influences on the U.S.-Mexico side of the border.

A lot of what I'm doing with "Rasgos" right now is taking what was once a play and kind of tearing it up and looking at what are the lessons and how do I want to stage those lessons as an actual performance?

One of the things I cherish most, looking back at Asunción, is the contribution of our Southwest and West Coast queer writers of color, right?

There's such a distinguished, rich, and complex Latinx tradition, right?

It's just very multiple.

And there are especially deeply rooted sense of queer activism coming out of the Southwest and coming out of the West Coast that connect to the history of Mexicans in the United States, in the Chicano movement.

Merced: Charles Rice González' "I Just Love Andy Gibb" was a very special project for Asunción in that Charles is a Bronx-born artist, and here he is, he wins the Asunción playwrights competition with a play that is science-fiction with queer issues and in a way that only Charles can write.

And it's a story that it was so beautiful to see it on stage.

To see a playwright dealing with these issues with such freedom and such ease, providing us a space to understand race and sexuality from a queer perspective, that was really precious and really a joy to direct.

I write for my people.

That's all I write for.

And by my people I mean, you know, other people of color, specifically Latino people.

I write for queer people.

Sometimes I've been asked, do I feel pigeonholed by that?

And I steal a line from James Baldwin to say, "No, I thought I hit the jackpot that I could write about being queer, black, poor, Latino, etcetera."

Ultimately, it was Mr. Jorge Merced that kept telling me, "When are you going to apply?"

It got me to think, and I came up with this idea.

I was sweeping the floor, and suddenly I just imagined the character of Roy.

There's so many things that were amazing about the process of Asunción.

I loved when you were saying, "We have to find black actors," and then seeing the words come to life.

Really, it was like seeing your direction.

Walking in and seeing the stage and seeing an interpretation.

And that's one of the things I love about theater.

That's one of things I learned to love about theater is that, you know, the writer can write something and can have an idea, and then the director comes in and gives it life and gives it shape.

And so in a way, I'm involved and I'm a spectator.

And for me, I think that was it.

Seeing the actors come together, seeing the interpretation of the text, and honestly feeling so freaking proud at every step of the moment because it was the community, it was us, and this professional group of artists, from the director to the tech people to the costume person.

It was really, really a beautiful gift to be able to not only work on a play but to see it realized in that way.

López: What was most moving about the Asunción Project was the range of representations and forms of living in the world as queer people that we saw that were new, you know, that were -- in some cases, they were presented in an experimental fashion, and in some cases, they were naturalistic.

But what I cherish the most is the range of perspectives that was put on offer.

Merced: In 2013, we paused the Asunción competition in order to work on another major queer production for our company.

It was titled "Neon Baby," and it was about the life of Juanito Extravaganza from the Amazing House of Extravaganza.

Afterwards, we continued with another production called "The Marchers."

It had a section inspired by a poem from Yara Liceaga that summed up so much of the memories and the trajectory of Asunción.

The first time I heard Yara Liceaga's poem, "No es el final, yet" I felt it really captured the legacy of Asunción, of wanting to ask, "I wish my skin was more than my skin, that I was not just a gender, a man, a woman, a queer man, a gay man, a butch, a femme, but something more than what I am appearing to other people and to connect to humanity in a whole different level, in a way that only a poet can do."

So we turned it into a song, and I feel like it pays tribute to all those years of all those dialogues right here and the Boogie Down Bronx talking about queer issues.

And here comes this poem that kind of really captures it and summarizes it.

So when we closed Asunción a couple of years later, we had the opportunity to include that in a show called "The Marchers," and I was honored to compose the music for that as a tribute to this incredible trajectory of LGBTQ+ works here in this company.

[ Singing in Spanish ] Having queer stars in the Bronx is so important, right?

And it's important because, first, people don't expect it, right?

When you think of Latinos, when you think of the Bronx, we think of like macho culture.

They don't expect it, and at the same time, it's just highlighting what is there, right?

Because a lot of times, when we do surveys and all that, it's amazing to see that Latino people are so embracing of of ourselves, you know, of our neighbors, of our children.

You know, it's a journey.

But there's more acceptance than there is rejection.

So I think it's important because two things -- one, it highlights the truth of who we are and, two, we are still, in this day, in a learning curve about who we are as queer people, who we are as queer Latino people.

And I think one of the beautiful things about Asunción is that it really allowed a lot of -- or invited a lot of writers to talk about that expansively.

As a queer Puerto Rican man, to have contributed towards creating this platform that opened up, that really honored the fact that our experience as queer people is multi-voiced, and I am proud that this theater company insists in doing that.

And I hope that we continue to challenge ourselves to do it better.

I mentioned earlier that I'm aware that things have changed, you know, in the last few years, and I think this is also a moment that's especially interesting to revisit the history of Asunción, to revisit other ways in which LGBTQ+ identities are represented in our two theaters, and striving for more.

Sánchez: I feel very hopeful for the upcoming playwrights or, like, next playwrights.

I'm older, so I don't want to be left out.

I'll be real honest.

I don't want to be left out.

And when I look at the upcoming playwrights, I want to say, you know, "I helped build the bridge we're all walking on, just like playwrights before me did, like Eddie Machado."

We still want to cross the bridge with you.

I'm totally your cheerleader, and I want you to keep moving forward.

But don't forget, I'm on the bridge with you.

Merced: There was so much joy in Asunción.

We laughed so much.

We established community with each other.

We learned from each other.

We made mistakes together.

And that space that Asunción created was one where the sense of family, the sense of history collided and merged in a way that allowed us to dream and to create new things.

And I always have the fondest memories of, each year, the cast coming together and saying, "Here we are, opening up another chapter, another book, another universe that can inform who we are and that our audiences here in the Bronx can participate from that and can contribute to that notion of, we are talking about our sons, our daughters, our families, our neighbors."

And all of us together make that amazing fabric that it's the community here in the South Bronx, in the Bronx, and the people that choose to come to this theater.

So Asunción provided that space and that dialogue.

It wasn't the only one, but it was a space that felt safe.

And people came here to see those shows, and they felt safe in this house.

And I think that invitation is one that continues here in our company.

I am grateful that there's a legacy now that we can look back and say, "Yes, we had really intelligent and important conversations about gender and sexuality in this company and with our audience in a way that continues the work of those artists and expands and allows those works and those artists to connect with audiences in a whole different way."

So I'm really proud that this took place.

I'm looking forward to the next iteration of Asunción as we move forward.

I love the fact that there's so many other programs happening right now.

Back then, we were the only ones or one of the few.

And now we have so many different programs, like, where it's a fest, theater festival and film festival and many initiatives throughout the nation.

And I'm glad that these conversations are happening, and I'm really proud.

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