Abstract
When Zoot Suit premiered on April 20, 1978 as part of the Mark Taper Forum’s “New Theatre for Now” 1977–1978 season, the set featured a blow-up of the front page of the Los Angeles Herald Express, dated Thursday, June 3, 1943.1 The biggest headline described action on the war front: “AMERICAN BOMBER VICTIM OF JAP RAIDER.” Other headlines included news of a coal strike, a report on the irregularity of New York stocks, and the national weather report. Local events were represented as well: “Death awakens Sleepy Lagoon: L.A. Shaken by Lurid ‘Kid’ Murder” and “Grand Jury to Act in Zoot Suit War.” At first glance none but historians might notice the chronological inconsistencies, although perhaps the older Los Angelenos, particularly the Mexican Americans who flocked to see this play in great numbers, would have recognized that this realistic-looking front page was actually a composite of reported events that took place over a couple years during the first half of the 1940s.
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Notes
Dan Sullivan, “Zoot Suit at Taper Forum,” Los Angeles Times (April 24, 1978), section 4:1.
William B. Worthen, “Staging America: The Subject of History in Chicano/a Theatre,” Theatre Journal 49.2 (1997): 101. For my argument I use “history” to describe those documentary elements and materials that appear in draft or production versions of the story. Since they are often letters, newspaper articles, and other documents that express personal opinions and viewpoints, I do not treat them as “objective”; however, I do contrast them with the fictional elements of Zoot Suit that were created by Valdez.
Brendan Gill, “Borrowings,” The New Yorker (April 2, 1979), 94.
Clive Barnes, “Zoot Suit Proves Moot,” New York Post (March 26, 1979), 36.
For details on the story of the Jose Diaz murder and its aftermath as well as the violent encounters thereafter known as the Zoot Suit Riots, see Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1984).
Daniel Davy, “The Enigmatic God: Mask and Myth in Zoot Suit,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 15.1 (Winter 2003): 71–87.
Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Zoot Suit: The Return to the Beginning,” in John King, John King, Ana M. López and Manuel Alvarado, eds., Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas (London: British Film Institute, 1993): 273.
Attilio Favorini, ed., “Introduction,” Voicings: Ten Plays from the Documentary Theater (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995), xxx.
Derek Paget, True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen and Stage, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 61.
Luis Valdez, “Zoot Suit,” in Zoot Suit and Other Plays, (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1992), Act 1, Scene 4, 30.
See Yolanda Broyies-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), 177–178, for further details about how Valdez came to be interested in the Sleepy Lagoon case and the arrangements he made with the Mark Taper Forum to write and direct the play.
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© 2007 William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer
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O’Connor, J. (2007). Facts on Trial: Documentary Theatre and Zoot Suit. In: Demastes, W.W., Fischer, I.S. (eds) Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100787_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100787_12
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