STAGE : Voice for a Silent Minority : Performance artist Luis Alfaro finds stage doors opening for his provocative works meshing Latino and gay experiences

Grapes mean a lot in Luis Alfaro’s family. His mother, a United Farm Workers member from Delano, Calif., has often told the story of the time his grandmother sent down a crate of grapes to his dying aunt. It was to help her remember--the stooped backs, the weathered hands and her people.

Standing on a bare stage in a small circle of light, Alfaro recalls his aunt and how she was too far gone to understand. Then he describes how, magically, the grapes wend their way to his home. He opens the cherished crate, and he and his boyfriend take off all their clothes and smash the fruit all over their bodies.

Gayness. Latino culture. Family. Los Angeles. That’s what performance artist and writer Alfaro is about. With no apologies. His solos, peopled with the denizens of downtown L.A., are among the most humanistic and lyrical stage pieces to emerge from the local talent pool in the last few years.

“He’s a wonderful actor and I support his agenda, the political and sexual content of his work and his openness,” says stage director David Schweizer. “Luis does a beautiful job of synthesizing personal experience, structuring and filtering it so that it transcends itself and becomes little parables for all of us. There’s nothing compromised in what he says.”

“The more Luis deals with his Latino issues, his gay issues, the more universal his work is,” says performer Michael Kearns, with whom Alfaro has studied. “I would not identify it as either gay or Latino. I would identify it as human.”

Identify it also as a success. After a couple of busy years of touring and local performing, Alfaro makes his first main-stage, major-venue appearance as one of the three soloists of “True Lies,” opening this week at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. It’s a new kind of gig for Alfaro, and a major step in a career that has likely just started to take off.

Known primarily for his performance art, Alfaro is also a poet and actor. He was a founding member of the performance collective Dark Horses and has appeared in the casts of such provocative productions as the Dennis Cooper/Ishmael Houston-Jones/Peter Brosius “The Undead,” at the Taper, Too, the Los Angeles Festival and elsewhere.

Don’t look for Alfaro to give up his day job though. He is--and has long been--both an artist and a social worker, currently employed at an AIDS drop-in center in South- Central and involved with VIVA, a lesbian and gay Latino arts organization.

“I work to make art,” says Alfaro, who was an organizer for the Local 99 school employees union before he came to the drop-in center. “How else do you stay connected? To write about the life, you have to be in it.”

That edge of worldliness is what lends Alfaro’s stories their non-didactic brand of activism. “I’ve never thought of myself as a political artist, but by virtue of who I am, I think I am political,” Alfaro says. “I write my life stories, and some of the stuff is highly charged. It’s disturbing to religious people; it’s disturbing to people in my community.

“The Chicano community is familia ,” Alfaro continues. “There’s this very protective thing around it: You can’t see it, but it’s there. When you break the mold--by being gay and brown and Catholic--it makes people uneasy.”

It also makes great fodder for yarn-spinning. Best known for his multi-character monologues, Alfaro employs a gestural, poetic style that seduces the viewer into the world of the men and women of the streets.

Often the tales are autobiographical--like “Smiley and Other Homeboys Like Me”--and often they stem from a particular incident with which Alfaro has been involved, such as “Federal Building,” about the March, 1990, artist chain-gang protest against censorship issues relating to the National Endowment for the Arts.

The work for which Alfaro is best known is “Downtown,” shaped with frequent collaborator Tom Dennison, versions of which have been seen locally at the Taper, Too, Highways and East-West Players, as well as in San Diego, Washington and Houston.

Currently boasting six characters plus a prologue in which Alfaro plays himself, it will be a version of “Downtown”--”shredded to bits and pieces by David Schweizer,” says the artist--that is Alfaro’s segment of “True Lies.”

It is a work born of Alfaro’s longstanding affection for his old neighborhood. “Downtown is this beautiful woman that reaches out to you, and it’s also these buildings choking you,” he says.

The two most prominent figures in the LATC version of “Downtown” are a junkie and Lupe, a garment industry seamstress who goes out on a Saturday night. “One day I was walking down Santee and 7th,” Alfaro says, recalling how he first came up with Lupe. “You look in the windows and these women are sewing. This woman looked out at me and she looks brown, dark like my father.”

In another “Downtown” moment, Alfaro conjures his childhood days spent playing roller derby at the Olympic Auditorium on Grand Avenue. The deal was, Alfaro recalls, that every time you lost, you had to run into the wall behind the Vons next door.

That cruel ritual reappears onstage as Alfaro, with skates on, hurtles himself repeatedly forward and down, his fluid movements at once vulnerable and frenetic, as he asks questions in Spanish to his unseen father. Alfaro keeps on falling and asking questions until the gesture becomes a dance--a kind of conga of abuse.

That Mexican-born father often crops up in Alfaro’s tales, although the family--with whom he is close--seems to have settled whatever tensions once existed. “I have a pretty progressive family, so (my being gay) has never been an issue,” says Alfaro, whose parents left downtown two years ago for what the artist calls “a big ‘Partridge Family’ house in Orange County.”

“If they didn’t have my older brother, who’s a sports jock, it would have been more of a problem.”

Alfaro, now 29, grew up just two houses from the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Union Avenue, behind Lucy’s Taco Stand. At 16, he ran away to Echo Park, and he’s lived in the downtown/Eastside environs since, except for a year at Park La Brea.

A self-described “major druggie and total neighborhood kid” who killed time watching blaxploitation films in Broadway movie houses, Alfaro happened into a federally financed job program that turned his life around just after high school. He was paid $100 every two weeks to attend dance and theater classes at the Inner City Cultural Center.

After two years, Alfaro dropped out, taking a variety of jobs, including working in a carburetor factory. “It was interesting to be around these guys who were married and would (talk) over steak and beer on Friday nights at Kay’s at 15th and Central,” he recalls. “I had a really different take on things, being gay.”

Alfaro soon hooked up with theater director-teacher Scott Kelman and his downtown Factory Place, Wallenboyd and Boyd Street theaters--all now defunct. He studied with Kelman for years, and a piece they developed--”True Stories From the Corner of Pico and Union”--eventually took first place in the Inner City annual short play competition.

That win garnered Alfaro his only brush with the entertainment industry, a spot as an intern writer at Warner Bros. “I went to work on ‘Head of the Class,’ and it was a miserable, horrible experience,” Alfaro recalls. “They said, ‘Here, you’re an urban guy, a Latino. We have this Puerto Rican character. Why don’t you write a plot for him?’

“So I go to lunch with this actor who plays the Puerto Rican guy, but he is not a ghetto child either. And we’re sitting there trying to ghettoize ourselves. I became increasingly bitter and depressed, and one day I just didn’t go back.

“On the one hand, it was paying the rent. On the other hand, you lose your voice. I didn’t get what they were aiming for culturally, other than they needed to fill the brown slot. Why have all these different cultures (in the cast), if you’re not going to address them in any way? Because it looks interesting?”

The Warner Bros. episode was not the only time Alfaro has resisted compromise and engendered controversy. When Alfaro read on a bill at the Los Angeles Festival--the only openly gay writer among 40--a man in the crowd got up and interrupted his reading by shouting gay slurs.

The very next week, Alfaro was performing “Downtown” at the East-West Players, when a woman stormed out of his performance, calling it “disgusting.”

During post-show discussions for a run of performances Alfaro did at San Diego’s Sushi gallery, three people on three separate nights took him to task for his riff on the Virgin Mary.

In each case, the offense stemmed from Alfaro’s incendiary wont to mix images of both his cultural and sexual identities. Like falling in love with a guy because he has a Virgin Mary doll that lights up. Or the crate of grapes story.

“I talk about being Latino and being gay in the same piece, and that really disturbs people,” Alfaro says. “They could take me doing a piece about sex or a piece about religion separately, but when you mix those together, it’s dangerous.”

“Luis makes the gay people deal with the Latino and the Latino people deal with the gay stuff,” says fellow performance artist Tim Miller, who is also co-director of Highways. “That’s courageous. There’s pressure on people with multiple communities to soft-pedal what they have to say. He doesn’t.”

That’s no mean feat, given the traditionalism sometimes associated with mainstream Latino institutions in Los Angeles and the influence of the church. Yet Alfaro feels that in recent years there’s an increased acceptance of his own gay bent and of non-traditional forms of performance.

“You know, we’re not all doing ‘Zoot Suit,’ we’re not all on that side of the bridge,” he says. “It’s not another little Teatro Campesino acto. The experience encompasses so much more.”

Still, expectations and assumptions from many quarters plague Alfaro. Although he took an active role in the National Endowment for the Arts controversy, he recalls with annoyance being questioned about why people of color were not at the forefront of those protests.

“I asked people in VIVA and they said, ‘It’s because it’s an Americano kind of thing and we don’t even qualify for those funds,’ ” Alfaro says. “There is this ignorant resistance to it. But there’s this other viewpoint, my idea, which is that before you can be censored, you have to be heard.

“I’m still dealing with just getting out there, and we’re still dealing with that as a community. Let’s face it. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important what happened to Tim (Miller) and Holly (Hughes),” he said, referring to two of the four performance artists who were a focal point of last year’s NEA censorship debate.

“But really, our issues are so simple: We’re still dealing with la raza accepting us, with our own people. Asking about the NEA is so far away from where we are. I’m one of the few Latino gay performance artists working out there right now. That’s one of the reasons I get to tour so much: I’m that kind of novelty act. Everybody needs to fill that slot.”

The tape recorder is off, the conversation winding up, when there’s a loud rap on Alfaro’s door. In troop poet Roberto Bedoya, former director of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and visiting San Francisco performance artist Brian Freeman.

Bedoya lives across the courtyard from Alfaro, as does High Performance magazine’s Eric Gutierrez, all in this tan apartment complex near Vermont Avenue and 3rd Street that is affectionately called “Gay Latino Acres.”

The moniker is a joke, but it also says how much community means to Alfaro and how it feeds him. “I feel like it’s my responsibility to my community, to get artists in there with me,” he says. “I’m trying to get six performance artists out of VIVA to the next level.

“It all goes back to the idea of family. Those are my people. There’s a Latino community, and then there’s a Latino gay community which is really invisible.”

That invisibility has to do with the content of the art.

“People are not used to listening to voices that come from oppressed communities, because they’re afraid of the potential anger,” says Roland Palencia, co-founder of VIVA. “If he was to do Shakespeare, he would have no problem. It is the subject matter, not the person, that is being censored.”

Alfaro, however, is changing that.

“I got invited to a Chicano poets and playwrights festival at East L.A. College that for years I’ve wanted to do,” he says. “It’s one of those things, where the families go and the Chicano crowd goes. It’s a brown experience. I wanted to be part of this, and I could never get in because they never had queer artists. Then last year I did it, and this year they have seven VIVA people. You don’t know how long I badgered them to be a part of that. And all of a sudden, it’s OK.

“There’s more going on in this city than ever before. Five years ago I didn’t think there was a lot of support, but now doors are open.”

A case in point is Alfaro’s participation in the Taper’s mentor program for emerging playwrights.

“I’ve been writing a play that’s solely about a Mexican-American experience, and they’re open to it,” he says. “Where once you were a novelty, now you’re a theatrical product. They’re not only accepting performance art, but they’re also taking this Latino bent and not (reshaping) it.”

It is not, Alfaro acknowledges, a bit of progress that comes without cost.

“I’m disturbed that sometimes people try too hard to reach that sort of ‘60s vision that we have,” he says. “This playwrights group has a Korean woman, a Japanese woman, a Chinese woman, a black woman, a black man, a Latino, a Latina. So we have all the groups represented.

“I think at the expense of creating that rainbow, there were people who submitted work that was brilliant that didn’t get selected. I’m positive of it,” Alfaro says. “Is that good or is it bad? I think it’s a trade-off that needs to be made.”