This ASU professor is retiring. What he's learned from his 30-year career in Phoenix theater scene

Guillermo Reyes has been a part of the Phoenix theater world for three decades. He first came to the Valley in 1996 to head up the Masters of Fine Arts dramatic writing program at Arizona State University.

In 2000, he founded Teatro Bravo with Trino Sandoval and Daniel Enrique Perez. They put on shows in both English and Spanish at a time when no one else was doing it here.

A Chilean immigrant, Reyes’ plays have tackled gender, sexuality, immigration and more from "Men on the Verge of an His Panic Breakdown," which tells the story of Frederico, "The Gay Little Immigrant That Could" to "That Day in Tucson," which tells the story of Daniel Hernandez Jr. when he was an intern for Congresswoman Gabby Giffords on the day she was shot.

Now, Reyes is retiring from ASU after 30 years. But as he told The Show, he’s not retiring from the theater. The Show spoke with him more about his career, his take on Phoenix’s theater scene and how his own immigrant story has shown up in his work throughout his career.

Full conversation

GUILLERMO REYES: Well, it definitely has shaped some of the stories that I tell. I just think that as a family, well, maybe all families are theatrical at a certain point, and it’s just a matter of capturing the drama, knowing how to do that — in other words, learning how to do it. But I felt that there were a lot of stories in our family.

My mother was a great storyteller, I believe, because she always had a story to tell about her childhood or about our grandmother or something like that. So stories came naturally to me, I think, you know, so it was just a matter of being theatrical with them, how does an actor play this character? You know, that was on the back of my mind always, it seems, since since I was a child.

LAUREN GILGER: So did you always want to be in the theater or was that something you kind of came to as a student or later on?

GUILLERMO REYES: I think I always wanted something theatrical because I think I wanted to be an actor first, you know, but then I —

LAUREN GILGER: Lots of kids do. Fair enough.

GUILLERMO REYES: Yeah, yeah. I thought I was going to follow in that path, but then I found myself writing it down, you know, like I want to write it down, you know. I mean, I remember being 8 years old after I had seen the movie version of “Romeo and Juliet.” I went back home, you know, there were all these kids visiting and so forth, and I told them, "You know what, you just stand still, I’m going to — we’re going to put on 'Romeo and Juliet.'"

LAUREN GILGER: You directed it.

GUILLERMO REYES: That was the very first time that I had an instinct that I needed to write it down. But why did I need to write down "Romeo and Juliet" at that point? It was already written, but I didn’t know that as an eight-year-old. I thought I could just write my own, you know.

LAUREN GILGER: Just need to write your own Romeo and Juliet. Direct all the kids to do it. That’s the best. I want to talk about Teatro Bravo, which you founded in 2000 with some other folks in town because it sounds like at the time in Phoenix there was this big Latino population here, but no Latino theater company, right?

GUILLERMO REYES: Well, you know, similar to what I just described, the instinct of an 8-year-old of saying, "Let’s just do it," because because there wasn’t a lot of theater. We had, you know, people who spoke Spanish for instance so we could do plays in Spanish; that was one instinct.

But the other, because we’re bilingual also, the two partners that I was working with were all bilingual, we would do plays in English and in Spanish because we wanted to reach both communities at the same time. In actually there were three communities we found out, you know, there were those who spoke English, those who spoke Spanish, and then there were people who are bilingual who go to both, you know. So we felt that that’s a good way of reaching out to everybody.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And the goal, it sounds like from the very beginning, was to tap into those communities but to do it in a bilingual way?

GUILLERMO REYES: Right, right. And there were some people trying to do Latino plays but in translation or, I mean, if they were coming from, let’s say, Mexican place or other Latin American place, but there weren’t a lot of people doing it in a bilingual manner. So definitely trying to find the right place that that could be maybe translated or vice versa, translating into one or the other language. Or sometimes just writing it, right? ’Cause that was my own instinct: "Let’s, let’s write the play." So.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, that’s been around for a long time, it’s still around now, although in a different kind of fashion under someone new. But I wonder, you know, what do you think the impact of that has been? Like do you think today there are, you know, more Latinos in theater here doing this kind of stuff and and stressing the importance of doing it in both languages?

GUILLERMO REYES: I don’t know, that’s one thing that I’ve noticed is I feel that there haven’t been enough of those productions. Occasionally you hear somebody, you know, putting on a play that would be bilingual. But it seems like the community is out there, but our theatrical makers, the actors, directors, get an opportunity to do one and then they go away. And if you’re not doing it consistently, it seems like, you know, people go on with their lives and do other things. It takes, it takes a lot of effort, you know, to do that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I know you’ve written many plays that have addressed sort of political issues, immigration issues often, but others as well, kind of cross those lines, pushed into that realm in the past, many comedies, some dramas, right? Like on all sides. Where do you think the role of theater is when it comes to activism?

GUILLERMO REYES: Well, I mean, great question because I think we have dealt with this from the very beginning. Whenever I meet artistic directors both here and in other places, a lot of them, you know, want to be safe, you know, like they’ll do a play that could be controversial like “Angels in America,” which is playing right now.

LAUREN GILGER: Yes, it is.

GUILLERMO REYES: And, you know, they might do that. It won the Pulitzer, it’s, you know, was done as a movie, it to me it’s safer because of that. But if they want to do a play about immigration, that might be too much. I’ve been told about “That Day in Tucson” that, you know, it has gun issues and the community might not feel comfortable discussing that in the theater, you know, I’ve been told those things through the years.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. This is the play you wrote about Daniel Hernandez Jr., right, who was there when Gabby Giffords was shot.

GUILLERMO REYES: Right, right. So you know there’s that element of safety among a lot of artistic directors. Now, I don’t blame them; they get corporate funding, that type of thing, and to me that, it’s understandable because they want to pay their actors and so forth; they got to stay afloat.

But in a small theater like this one, you do plays that maybe some people won’t like. I mean, when we did the play “Los Illegals,” it sounds, you know, precisely what it sounds like, right. It was a play that was done in L.A. about day laborers and then we brought it here, I mean we did our own version of it, and that’s a play that I don’t think anybody else would have touched.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, do you think that that’s a missed opportunity in the theater world? Like do you think that if people were quote-unquote more brave, they’d draw more attention, make more money?

GUILLERMO REYES: Right, right. You know, our biggest hit at Teatro Bravo was a play about the femicide that was going on at Juarez at the time in the early 2000s, you know, all these women who were disappearing and their bodies were found in the desert. Really tough stuff. When we looked at the play, we thought, "Is anybody going to come see this? It sounds depressing."

But when we did it, I tell you, people came out of everywhere. So it just tells me that sometimes people are not afraid of these tough subject matter. So, you know, I get the feeling that it is a missed opportunity for some of the more mainstream theaters because they want to put on happy musicals a lot, in are afraid of this other subject matter.

LAUREN GILGER: I wonder. So I mean, like, tell me about a moment in your long career in which you feel like the theater, whether it was a show you brought in or wrote, when it when you felt like it was the voice of the community, when it when you felt like it was effective and cut through.

GUILLERMO REYES: I mean, in terms of my career, I would say the play “Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown” has had the most productions of my plays. So I’ve seen it in many different ways. You know, that did well and I think that play because it had an unusual take, I think, on immigration and all of those things. So it had its effect and it had great reviews and it was published and then was done across the country by other people. I didn’t get a chance to see all of them. I did have a chance to see one very peculiar production.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell me about it. Let’s hear it.

GUILLERMO REYES: Well, in Miami I went to see it and I went on opening night and the artistic director picked me up at the airport and we were headed directly to the theater. He surprised me later when we arrived there, he said, "But tonight is — the show is sold out to the gay nudists of Miami."

LAUREN GILGER: Oh wow.

GUILLERMO REYES: So when I walked into the theater, everybody was naked.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s amazing.

GUILLERMO REYES: And a gentleman who saw me walk in and say, "Why are you dressed?" And you know, it’s like, "I’m just here to watch the show, I’m not one of you." Anyways.

LAUREN GILGER: The places a play can go after you write it, right?

GUILLERMO REYES: Exactly. It was a very interesting interesting production.

LAUREN GILGER: Guillermo Reyes, a playwright and ASU professor of theater joining us to talk about his long and storied career in theater here in Phoenix and across the country. Reyes is retiring after 30 years at ASU, though not from the theater.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

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