you guys: i wanted to share something pretty special. i am very lucky to be friends with Mandy Riesco, an incredibly talented actor, thoughtful collaborator and artist, and one of the most generous (and hilarious) friends. as many of you know, for the past few years, along with work on film and tv and other stage projects, Armando Riesco has been tackling the role of elliot in quira hudes pulitzer prize winning trilogy (a soldiers fugue, water by the spoonful, and the happiest song plays last). recently, armando spoke in front of the NEA about his experience and i thought his speech was beautiful and thought-provoking and wanted to share it with you all here. very proud to be friends with this guy and hope that the work continues in this direction! Hello, my name is Armando Riesco, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, don’t let the red hair and freckles fool you. I came to the mainland 18 years ago to pursue my dream of becoming an actor. I have been told that if you can’t dream it, if you can’t visualize it then it can’t come true. It’s like “The Secret”, you have to manifest it. Luckily for me I have had a few experiences that have proved that theory false. When I met my wife 12 years ago I remember thinking there was no way that I could have dreamed up a better woman. She is still proving that true every single day. As for being an actor, I never dreamed I would one day play a lead Latino role, a role with the depth of a Hamlet and the humor of Richard Pryor. I never dreamed that I would play this role in 3 different plays, in 3 different cities… and I definitely never dreamed that at the center of the trilogy would be my homeland of Puerto Rico, its music, its traditions, its fried food and accompanying food comas… basically my heart and soul One of the main reasons I could have never imagined any of this is because I had never seen anything like it, and to me, if I hadn’t seen it, it did not exist. I had seen Puerto Ricans before on screen, but they were gingerly sashaying with switchblades in their hands. I am here to tell you, that is not how a gang fight goes down in Puerto Rico. We generally twirl. Elliot is a Puerto Rican character at the center of an American story, a character very much based on a real person, who goes to war, twice, who sheds blood, both the enemy’s and his own in the name of freedom, who battles addiction, who falls in love…he starts the trilogy as a child and ends up a man…an evolution that I experienced simultaneously as the actor playing the role. When we did the first installment in a basement on Bleecker Street, Elliot was a dapper, self-assured young man, much like myself in 2006. By the end of the trilogy, Elliot emerges as a self-aware man, accepting his flaws and lack of definitive answers to life’s biggest questions, yet hopeful for the future with his first child on the way. I have a child on the way now as well, and I am also self-aware that I have no idea how to change a diaper. But I am hopeful. I’ll Google it. Wish me luck. One of the biggest thrills of these last seven years has been seeing young Latino audience members; kids just like me 18 years ago, coming to see these plays, at an important American venue like 2nd Stage, smack in the middle of Manhattan. These young Latino kids saw their own stories come to life. Kids from our communities were cheering and laughing and crying. They were also texting, but we will ignore that for the sake of this speech. I knew that something inside them was lit. It was a joy for all the cast members to experience and witness in them this awakening. These stories that might seem foreign to certain audience members are the everyday experiences of these kids. Their lingo, their corners, the stories their parents tell them every day at the dinner table. The essence of where they come from. When you see something like that on the stage, when you see it in a movie, or hear it on the radio…you matter. This is not a feeling or experience that should be taken for granted. I still remember when I was 19 years old and I studied Latin American films and I watched for the 1st time people speaking my mother tongue on screen every day, in stories sometimes dramatic and sometimes mundane… and realizing that without knowing it I had been silently oppressed my whole life. Despite being educated at the best Jesuit schools and then at Northwestern University I had never realized that I had never seen myself or my people on screen or stage. We were present, but certainly not in any way that seemed to reflect the reality around me. We were, in some way, invisible. I loved the Three Amigos, but none of friends were terrorizing small Mexican villages. In the last seven years, I feel proud to have been a part of a project that says we are here. We matter. We are an essential part of the fabric of society. We are crucial. We are just like the English and Dutch and Africans that came over in the 17th century; we are just like the Irish and Jews and Germans that came in the 19th century. We are here to seek our dreams and to join all the other groups that have done the same before us. We are an integral part of the United States of America. I am done with the trilogy. Finally. I want to thank 2nd Stage for bravely producing these 2 beautiful plays, and the NEA for helping to fund this kind of work. I hope the plays get done all over the nation and other Latino actors get to have similar experiences to mine…I hope they grow as actors and relish in the opportunity to play this wonderful, deep, flawed, hilarious character. More than anything I hope that this door opening, this unimagined dream of mine which came true, means that more playwrights and more theaters and more plays start treating us like what we are. Equals.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 19:28:54 +0000
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