Christopher Rivas is a playwright, author, podcaster, and actor.
In his memoir, “Brown Enough,” which he subsequently turned into a podcast, he explores the performative nature of race, gender, and American identity.
His theater work often mines similar territory. Earlier this year, he wrote and performed a play called “The Real James Bond Was Dominican,” which blends Rivas’s personal history with the story of Porfirio Rubirosa — a real-life diplomat, race-car driver, and spy, whose biography Ian Fleming mined when he created the character of 007.
Rivas is spending this year as an artist in residence at ASU Gammage, developing another theater piece called “How We Get Free.” Rivas joined The Show to discuss how the production is inspired, in part, by three Greek myths: Narcissus, Tantalus, and Sisyphus.
Full conversation
CHRISTOPHER RIVAS: Sisyphus is the one that most people know. Sisyphus is cursed to push a boulder up a hill over and over again for eternity. And Zeus says if the boulder stays at the top, you will be free from your curse. And the boulder never stays at the top and Camus, so I read that right, Camus says in the myth of Sisyphus, we must imagine Sisyphus happy, no one is so much of a fool to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome. And I said, whoa, I am Sisyphus.
And so the way I explore that is in relationship and someone's inability to get over a relationship. And they just play the memories over and over and over again thinking what happened, where did it go wrong and, and …
SAM DINGMAN: This, I am familiar with.
RIVAS: You know, we all are, we just like we just play them over and over again. And so what does it look like to stop pushing the boulder up the hill over and over and over again?
Tantalus, Tantalus was this king, who was really loved by the gods. He was really funny and so they would invite him to dinner with them on Mount Olympus all the time. They would give him everything but godly food and godly drink, and he was like, this is messed up. You keep inviting me here, but you don't give me this. So he stole it and he brought it back to the people. Zeus doesn't like this. You do not steal from Zeus, so he punishes him to an eternity of hunger, and thirst. And he puts him in a pool of water, but every time he reaches for it to drink, it moves out of the way, and he puts these grapes by him, and every time he reaches for them, they go out of the way.
And so I compare that Tantalus, that's where we get tantalized from, to be tantalized, from any body of culture who's had been invited to the table but never given the dessert or the wine.
DINGMAN: I think I know what you mean, but when you say bodies of culture, yeah, I don't like to use bodies of color.
RIVAS: I like to use the term bodies of culture, which comes from a beautiful thinker named Resmaa Menakem. And we use bodies of culture because whiteness doesn't want our color, actually. It's never wanted our color. What it wants is our culture. We commodify the culture, we make money off the culture, and so I like to say bodies of culture because our wealth is in our culture, not in our color. And so what does it look like to stop reaching for the fruit that was, that was never ours?
Narcissist. Narcissists loved his image. He was, he loved his reflection so much, he drowned himself in his own reflection, trying to get closer to himself. I make the case that we are all a little narcissistic in order to order from Amazon while the Amazon burns. In order to watch “Chef's Table” while there is a hungry person outside. In this world, there is a little bit of self-d drowning, we all have to do on a daily basis in order to move on.
DINGMAN: Yeah. And you're an artist who frequently, your own personal story is often interwoven into the bigger message that you're telling. Tell me a little bit about that. Why is that important to you?
RIVAS: It's how my heart and brain seem to have met. Like I, I'm a man, a young man who read James Baldwin and my life was changed, you know, I read Eldridge Cleaver and my life was changed. I read these essays of these men speaking about themselves, and yet I saw myself and I saw the world. And that was really impactful to me.
I spent a lot of time as a young artist trying to make things that people like and not creating art that I think I even enjoyed or could see myself in or could explore myself in, and I like to think that if I can honestly speak about myself, maybe you will have the courage to see yourself.
DINGMAN: Uh-huh. So if I'm hearing you right, that the lesson you took from Baldwin and Cleaver is kind of use yourself as a way into a bigger conversation.
RIVAS: 100%. I think my show, “The Real James Bond was Dominican.” Like I was telling this story about myself, about my father, about this man, Porfirio Rubirosa, and people of all types after the show, I mean, it's not just like Latin people, like white people, old people, young people saying, I pretend too. I do whatever I can to fit in. You know, I know you're not talking about me, but like I really have always been trying to be accepted. Like I get this message over and over and over again. And to me that is exactly what it's about. Art is the thing that I truly believe can wake us up, can galvanize us to use our voices.
DINGMAN: Tell me a little bit about what you mean by art galvanizing people on a grander scale.
RIVAS: I know what my book has done. I know what my plays have done. I know what even the podcast has done. To heal people in small ways like when I get a message that someone says I've stopped straightening my hair because I listened to this. I broke up with my partner because of this. I get a ton of messages of people, you know, taking the steps to enact change. For their own healing, their own joy, their own freedom.
And so when I imagine on a larger collective scale, if someone in Arizona comes to see “How to Get Free in November,” I imagine a room full of people leaving the space different than when they came in with a little more spaciousness inside them to see their actual place in the world and to see other people. And maybe they care for other people more. And I do believe if you care for someone else a little bit more, if you let someone else into your life a little bit more, that has a ripple effect.
DINGMAN: Thank you for sharing that. I feel like that is such a lovely specific example that doesn't get talked about enough when we talk about the potential for art to create change. I think skeptics of that sometimes look at that as oh what somebody's gonna go see a play or listen to a protest song or something, and then what, call their congressperson and sure, maybe they'll do that.
But it seems to me it's so much more about what you're describing that someone has a very personal reaction to something that they see in art. And all of a sudden, they make a fundamental change.
RIVAS: And art is so cool because If you go to therapy because you want to be happier, you have to be prepared to do the work. But art, and you can walk into a museum, be bored out of your mind, look at a painting, and start crying. You don't know why. Art can find the cracks in you in between the armor that you didn't know existed and make them wider.
DINGMAN: Right? It like plucks a string you didn't even know was on your …
RIVAS: 100%.
DINGMAN: Yeah. So, you're an artist also who has been doing this kind of work, both personal and political, for a long time. Does it feel different to you to do it in this moment?
RIVAS: Yeah.
DINGMAN: And can you, can you give me like a tangible sense of what that difference feels like?
RIVAS: After I wrote “Brown Enough,” I kind of didn't want to make more work about race and identity. And so I was like, you know what, I'm just going to make art that's not about Latinos being Latinos, but just people being people, right? When “Harry met Sally,” but they just happened to be brown. But we never have to talk about it.
And then this political climate has started to shift in a direction where erasure like I said, is taking place. This literal active erasure towards DEI towards bodies of culture, towards people of color, and then I think to myself, you don't know, I think this work is really, I do have to keep it about race and identity because if I don't, they win. Art that is about identity, unrepresented stories, diversity, whatever words you want to use, it doesn't have to be heavy, and I need to make that emphasis as well. Like to be a revolutionary is also to tell a story of joy. And that's maybe what I'm trying to get at here. It doesn't always have to be woe is me, but yay is us.
