Rey Lucas’ mother was born in France, and his father fled the Dominican Republic to escape the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in 1960. Romi Dias’ dad was born in Brazil, her mom in Portugal. They immigrated to New Jersey in 1972, leaving three kids behind, in search of a better economy. Gabriella Cavallero’s parents are Argentine musicians who came to New York to find work in 1964 during the reign of Juan Perón.
All three actors are appearing in the Denver Center Theatre Company’s season-opening “Living Out,” a gentle family comedy with a serious social undercurrent that’s as inescapable as today’s raging debate on immigration in America.
Two of the actors are first-generation Americans. Cavallero was born in the Bahamas and moved to New York from Puerto Rico when she was 8.
They can’t help but wonder: What makes the thousands coming into this country today any different from their now-American parents a generation ago? Or, for that matter, from the millions of Americans who – since our country’s founding – have come here seeking a better life?
“If you go back far enough,” Lucas said, “everyone has an amazing bloodline.”
If her mother had stayed in Argentina, Cavallero is certain she would have met a bad end. “My mom was such a total fighter, she probably would have just disappeared,” she said, “because any artist who spoke up against Perón was the first one gone.”
Dias was born in the U.S., but her siblings were not. “My mom was the eldest of nine kids, eight of whom were female,” she said. “My grandparents could not afford them, so my mom and her sisters were all swept under the rug and into lives of servitude while they were still children. So it was time to get out.”
Dias’ parents worked and saved for three years, then sent for the children they left behind in Portugal. They bought a house in New Jersey, where Dias was born.
Dias says her mom is a lot like the women in Lisa Loomer’s “Living Out.” After the jewelry manufacturer she worked for went bankrupt, she became a nanny. “All of a sudden, all these Portuguese women were out of work,” Dias said. “They didn’t speak the language and they didn’t have the schooling they needed here, so what did they do? They became domestics.”
Dias plays Ana Hernandez, one of three Latino nannies whose L.A. stories are intertwined with their affluent Anglo employers. It’s about lower- class domestics who are forced to leave their kids at home to care for upper-class kids whose mothers can’t.
Ana, an immigrant mother of a 6-year-old, desperately wants to send for the 11-year-old son she left behind. She lands a job as a nanny only after lying that both of her kids are back in El Salvador, where they won’t interfere with her work. Her interviews with prospective employers reveal varying attitudes about immigration, but Loomer has put at the forefront two mothers – one rich and white, the other poor and Latino, both struggling to do the best they can. That’s what keeps this very personal story from turning into an “issues” play.
“It’s a human play,” said Dias. “It’s about just trying to be a parent. It’s about living and working in this country and just maybe successfully raising a child in the meantime.”
When Dias was growing up, her extended family was her village. “But there is no village anymore,” she said. “It seems to me that now, everyone is trying to keep climbing that ladder and forgetting what’s really going on inside their own four walls.”
Lucas, who plays Ana’s husband, said “Living Out” is first a universal story “because parenting might be the strongest and most universal human instinct,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where you grew up, or of you have money, or if you grew up in a stable political country – everyone in the world who is a parent can relate to that sense of trying to do the best you can for your kids.”
But immigration is such a hot-button issue right now, Lucas added, it will be impossible for audiences to ignore. And if the play helps present the issue in a different context, great.
“How we look at art is always relative to what’s going on in the political landscape at the time, so what people take away from this play will depend on where they are coming into it to begin with,” Lucas said. “‘Death and the Maiden’ would look very different to audiences after Abu Ghraib, now that torture has become much more of an issue.”
Dias believes immigration “might be a more of a personal issue than a political issue by the time they leave the theater.” Added Lucas: “This play is a chance to put a face to the issue, whatever side of the issue you are on. I mean, when you think about it, how bad does your situation have to be that you want to leave your home in fear of your safety?”
Like the play, the conversation always returns to parenting. Cavallero, a 15-year veteran of the DCTC, is pregnant. Lucas has dedicated his performance to his parents … “and for their dreams…”
And this play, Dias predicts, “is going to make you want to call your mom.”
Now that’s universal.
“Living Out”
COMEDY|Denver Center Theatre Company|Written by Lisa Loomer|Directed by Wendy C. Goldberg|Starring Romi Dias, Rey Lucas and Christopher Burns|Space Theatre at the Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets|THROUGH OCT. 28| Previews through Thursday, then 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 1:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays|$36-$46|303- 893-4100, 866-464-2626, all King Soopers or denvercenter.org; 800-641-1222 outside Denver
