The classics belong to all of us

For this week’s episode of Living Untitled, I sat down with Elisa Bocanegra, a Puerto Rican-American actress, a Fullbright Scholar, a director, a curator, an environmentalist and the founder of Hero Theatre, a social and environmental justice theater company in Los Angeles. She invites audiences ‘to envision and experience America as we do’ which has profound meaning. It reminds the artists she works with everyday of their power, and of the responsibility that comes with the power of their voices. And it also asks audiences to see and hear differently, to either see themselves represented for the first time, or to see people who are often unseen, silent and silenced in our culture.

She was inspired by actress Olympia Dukakis, who became her mentor, to start Hero Theatre, because she wanted to create space for actors who had a voice, an experience and a perspective to share, though it was going unseen by most theater companies, and audiences.?

‘Hero’ is a big word. To Elisa, it means emboldening her community to speak up, take up some space and live, seen and heard. Hero Theatre does more than create theater, it’s a community that renews, revives and re-envisions the ‘classics’ on stage, taking them from exclusively anglo-European productions to the inclusivity of who we are and where we live.?

Communities need theater to see and hear themselves, and Elisa is dedicated to bringing this love-in every form it manifests itself-to community theater. Her experience–in which she feels the community she grew up with, every day-is about celebrating the healthy love we all want and need. We need these stories today, and healthy love is inclusive love, available to everyone.?

Love doesn’t care what color our skin is, how much money we have or how easy or challenging our childhoods may have been. Her past is her present, as it is for so many of us, as we carry what we’ve been through on our journey in search of healthy love today.?

Our America today is really complicated and Elisa sees through a lot of this complexity to hear the melody of what actually matters: love. Belonging. Community. Family. This is what theater offers us, regardless of how messy and unequal our lives may be here. Her work shines the light of reality-and love-on what’s right next to us here, especially in Los Angeles, where rich and poor share space in this diverse city, even when the rich people in our midst aren’t often aware of how unequal this city and this country really is.?

Elisa knows that the ‘classics’ belong to all of us. They’re not one kind of person or experience, they speak to every one of us, no matter where we come from, or how long we’ve called the United States home–if it is indeed the country that you call home. This moves the dial and advances us socially and culturally, making the social capital of our diversity of experience and background available to more actors and larger audiences-audiences that are representative of everyone, for everyone and about everyone.

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