El Centro Su Teatro’s “The Day Ricardo Falcón Died” is a pretty good play – once it finally gets to the day Ricardo Falcón died. Regrettably, it’s a long time coming.
I learned more about Falcón chatting with affable writer and director Anthony J. Garcia after a recent performance than I had during it.
Garcia, leader of Denver’s only Chicano theater company, has written dozens of plays for Su Teatro, the best of which tell amazing and largely untold tales from the Chicano movement. His accessible writing is marked by healthy doses of comedy, music and activism that work together to promote unity and raise social consciousness.
Garcia has both lived and learned from the many injustices done to those who have sought justice and equality over the past 50 years, from icons like Cesar Chavez to more anonymous migrants. Garcia’s invaluable canon will preserve their stories for generations to come.
But “The Day Ricardo Falcón Died” is not one of his better plays. It was written in 1983, and seeing it today only demonstrates just how much Garcia’s writing has grown in the interim. The play follows a writer struggling for inspiration until he finally recalls that 1972 day when his boyhood hero was shot on his way to the Raza Unida Convention in El Paso, Texas.
This production plays out on dual sets. On one, we see how self-destructive a writer named Miguel (Arthur Martinez) has become. It’s 1992, and his girlfriend is leaving him. He’s nearing rock bottom. On the other, the stories he tries to bring to life fizzle out. It’s a clever if not original device, but Garcia’s story is uncharacteristically slight, his characters either too vague, too obvious or too uninteresting.
By intermission, there’s no mention of Ricardo Falcón. Perhaps others in the audience were like me – wondering if Su Teatro had possibly changed to another play.
There can’t be a more worthy candidate for preservation than Falcón. The unheralded Chicano activist’s name brings up fewer than 1,000 hits on a Google search. Paris Hilton, meanwhile, draws 21 million. Why must he be remembered? Falcón is considered the first martyr of the Colorado Chicano movement. As Garcia glumly says, he would not be the last.
Falcón grew up in Fort Lupton and fought for fairness all across the state, from rural northeastern farms to college campuses. On Aug. 30, 1972, he was driving to the Texas rally at which he was slated to speak when his car overheated in the New Mexico desert.
Falcón stopped at a gas station owned by Perry Brunson, a member of the American Independent Party founded by segregationist George Wallace. Brunson reportedly called Falcón derogatory names, and the fight that ensued left Falcón dead from two gunshot wounds. Brunson was tried not for murder but manslaughter – and acquitted.
Back to the fiction: When this memory finally dislodges Miguel’s writer’s block, we are transported for a few brief, compelling minutes to the day when Miguel was too young to join his pals to hear their hero speak. Falcón was their JFK, their Martin Luther King Jr. This was the day their innocence and idealism died.
The play would have been much stronger had it fully and seriously explored this moment and its ramifications, rather than the hour of unnecessary preamble. It seems inconceivable that it would take any sort of catharsis for Miguel to realize Falcón’s story needed to be written.
After his play, Garcia had me in rapt attention explaining how one of Falcón’s pals who saw him die would be killed himself in Boulder just two years later. Freddie Granados was one of six activists killed in two car bombings over 48 hours in 1974. They became known as “Los Seis de Boulder.”
I’m just a white kid from Arvada, so you can bet my teachers never told me the tales of Falcón and Granados. So no offense to the fictional Miguel, but theirs are the stories I’d rather be seeing on stage now.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“The Day Ricardo Falcón Died” | ** RATING
DRAMA|El Centro Su Teatro, 4725 High St.|Written and directed by Anthony J. Garcia|Starring Arthur Martinez and Magally Rizo Antuna|THROUGH NOV. 18|8:05 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays|1 hour, 35 minutes|$10-$13|303-296-0219
