Almost anything can happen in the world of Jose Rivera’s plays. Maidens have prophetic dreams; flowers bloom as long-separated lovers kiss; a man “waters” his garden with his own blood; a handsome young poet is murdered by the magic dance of a chicken.
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“I was invited by the Sundance Institute to take part in a workshop with Marquez,” says Rivera. “Robert Redford [the institute’s founder] had been lobbying to get Marquez into the country.” Marquez, most famous for his novel 100 Years of Solitude, is an unabashed supporter of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his communist policies. “Marquez runs an institute for film in Cuba where young filmmakers can meet professionals from around the world,” says Rivera. “Redford had gone there, and he and Marquez met and liked each other.” After considerable effort, Redford engineered Marquez’s entry into the U.S. on a temporary visa. Then his institute invited a half dozen writers of Latin descent to study with Marquez in a ten-day intensive workshop. “We’d spend four hours a day with him,” Rivera remembers. “They’d lock the doors–there was considerable attention to security because of his reputation–and then he would sit with us from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon and just talk.”
Part of the purpose of the workshops, Rivera says, was for the American writers to help Marquez develop a dramatic anthology series for Mexican television. Appropriately, Rivera’s professional credits include the TV series a.k.a. Pablo, a situation comedy developed by All in the Family producer Norman Lear. “It was the first all-Hispanic comedy series on TV,” says Rivera. “It starred Hector Elizondo and Paul Rodriguez. Unfortunately, it only lasted six episodes. But I had signed a three-year contract with Lear, so I stayed around and developed shows for him.”
Rivera’s conscious decision to explore Latin surrealism was, he says, “a big break” from the way he’d been trained. At Denison University in Ohio, where he took his BFA in writing, “all my literature classes were based on Western, North American, European literature and culture. Like, if you learn mythology, you learn Homer, not the gods of the Aztecs. Yet they’re just as valid, and as beautiful.”
