Cafecito with Patricia Zamora: Balancing Art and Motherhood

October 8, 2020 - San Antonio

By Jade Esteban Estrada - Cafecito Columnist, San Antonio Sentinel

When actress and playwright Patricia Zamora appears on my screen, her skin is aglow from the rays of the afternoon sun. “Hi, Jade! How are you?” she asks from underneath a large lilac and white sun hat. This elegant headgear, with its inherent nod to old Hollywood glamour, seems befitting of the woman making a name for herself as one of San Antonio’s rising solo theatre stars.

I ask her where she’s spending this first Saturday in September. 

"We take an annual vacation every Labor Day to a resort in between Hunt and Ingram, Texas called Roddy Tree Ranch," she replies. Because the resort has always afforded physical distancing from other families, it was an easy tradition to keep as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. 

"So here we are," she says, looking at her children, Xander and Chloe, tubing in the lake behind her. "Do you see them?"

I do. They’re joined by Zamora's husband, Rick, whom I’ve also come to know over the past several years. 

The children are in their second week of virtual learning, and she and Rick both have demanding day jobs, so this weekend getaway is a much-needed respite.

I ask her what the hardest thing has been about the pandemic for her and her family. 

"Well, it’s been a journey," she begins, tilting her head slightly as she ponders the question. "I would say the hardest thing has been dealing with [the quarantine] and acknowledging emotion."

She expounds by taking me through her family's timeline.

"So in the beginning of March, when everyone was sent home and we knew of this [virus], it was like, ‘Well, OK, our hectic lives are put on hold,' - but they weren’t,” she says.

The initial March quarantine promised time for self-reflection, but the enthusiastic rush of those meditative goals was short-lived.

“And then there came - very quickly - this crash of, 'I’m tired of this! I miss my friends. I miss my family. I miss eating in restaurants. I miss all the things that I used to do!’" she recounts. 

That was her family’s first few months of the pandemic. “Now, we’ve gone through all these little valleys of emotions, and each one of us is in a different place at a different time,” she explains.

She says it’s taken some time for her and her family to be able to acknowledge and accept where each person is on the new-normal spectrum. “But I think we’re there," she says, glancing once again toward her children. "I really do."

RELATED: Curanderas and Chocolate: Cuentos of a Latina Life transcends boundaries, explores culture

Zamora feels that her artistry has made her a better mother, though coming to this realization was a journey in itself.

Until she became pregnant with her first child, she was deeply involved in theatre projects She remembers announcing to her husband and her family: “I’m never doing theatre again, I’m going to be a mother.”

One of the reasons she felt determined to make this decision was because of what she had observed behind the scenes in the theatre community. “I had seen other mothers that were still involved in the arts sacrificing time with their little one, and it hurt me to see that,” she says. “I was like, 'How selfish of them.’”

“Que selfish!” I say jokingly, echoing a line from Las Nuevas Tamaleras, a show she’s been involved with for five years now.

She acknowledges the line with a smile. "Que selfish eres!" she says. 

Though Zamora was determined to fully dedicate herself to the experience of being a mother, as the years passed, she felt that something was missing in her life.

“I just felt this longing, this incomplete [feeling], and I knew that I wasn’t the best for my children,” she explains. She even shared these revelations in her blog. 

“There was always this - and I’ll be really honest - there was this little bit of resentment, like I was giving up something to be a mother,” she says. “So I made the decision to go back to the art.”

When she did, she immediately began to feel more complete.

“It made me healthier, and I think I was able to model for my children that you don’t have to give up what you love,” she says. “It was a learning experience for me.” 

Her self-development also helped her to be less judgmental of other parent-artists navigating through similar struggles. 

“I think we need to [recognize that] everyone’s journey is their own and they should do what they have to do,” she says.

Zamora and her daughter, Chloe, have both participated in my acting program for many years now. Each time I see them in a creative environment, I’m reminded of how seldom I see actresses, who are mother and daughter, working together in such a balanced state; Chloe getting her budding experience and education, while not at all diminishing Zamora’s more advanced work. It is indeed a rare sight.

Zamora smiles appreciatively.

“Well, when we were going to face-to-face class with you, before we would enter that space, I would tell her, ‘I’m no longer your mother. You’re on your own. You’re a student, so if you’re asked a question or asked to do something, I’m not going to be there to catch you,’” she says. 

Though at times she was tempted to do so.

“You know, I’ll lend her a pencil, as I would do for someone else, for her note taking, but when it comes to the real work, she’s got to do it herself and I think it’s been very helpful,” she says. 

Chloe has also had the privilege of watching her mother create her highly acclaimed solo show Curanderas and Chocolate: Cuentos of a Latina Life, a show Zamora is ramping up for a virtual run at the Public Theatre in San Antonio.

RELATED: ‘Curanderas and Chocolate’ Brings Culture During Pandemic

Some production history: In April 2019, the one-act made its San Antonio premiere at The Overtime Theater. In August, it had a one-weekend run at the Historic Guadalupe Theater. I had the pleasure of consulting the Overtime run, and I proudly directed the show at the Guadalupe. Needless to say, I’m familiar with the work and this magnificent performer.

This time around, the show is being produced by Teatro Audaz and the Public Theatre. Laura T. Garza is directing.

Since March, Zamora says she’s experienced artistic growth but because of the shared frustration brought on by Covid-19, it happened differently than she had envisioned.

“I think that every person, not only artists, at the beginning of this…and I’ll say fucking pandemic stage...you can edit that out if you want, but it really is that…[many people] felt a lot of pressure to, ‘I’m gonna learn to cook! I’m gonna bake! I can read all of these books!’ and it just never happened,” she says. As a result, she started to feel disappointed that she wasn’t meeting her own quarantine expectations to write and be creative.

“I felt like a failure,” she admits. After this first week of rehearsals, however, she now feels like her thriving self again, and is ready to share the message of her uplifting show. 

At this point, all of her rehearsals with Garza have been exclusively online, which is an unusual setting for most actors.

“Wow!” she says with a slow shake of her head. “How different it is to rehearse online.” The show will be livestreamed, not pre-recorded, and it’s presently unclear how many cameras will be capturing her performance during the actual run. 

“You know me, when I‘m in a show, I think about the marketing and technical aspects of things,” she says. “I just sort of had to rein myself in and think about developing my characters. It’s fascinating to me [that] I wrote these stories, but I’m still making discoveries about them.”

I have asked you this before but you’re a completely different person in a completely different place. Do you have a favorite character in your show?

“Hmm. Wow,” she replies. After a moment, she compares my question to asking a mother if they have a favorite child.

“I love them all the same,” she says with resignation. “Right now, there’s not a favorite.” Though she owns up to embracing what she calls the “wonderful sub characters” in her show, the characters that connect one scene to the next.

“They’re all so different,” she says. “There’s the Viejita. There’s the Child. I love the Modern-Day Curandera. The Cholo. The endearing 30s Girl, who I can totally relate to, and La Chismosa, [who is] fascinating but also heartbreaking...the Riot Girl…”

Ah, the prophetic Riot Girl. Zamora originally wrote this monologue in honor of the real-life Chicano and Chicana human rights activists who peacefully protested in the past. She offers the Chicano Power movement, the Cesar Chavez-led demonstrations, and more recently, the DACA protestors as just a few examples of the inspirations behind the character.

“Now we’re beyond that with Black Lives Matter,” she says. “I still want to honor [the Chicano movement] but we’re moving beyond that, and [BLM] is so relevant right now that it scares me, but I’m excited about it.”

So what I’m hearing is that you’re open to changing your show as the times change?

“Yes,” she says. “Absolutely. Maybe like a year and a half ago, I may not have been as open to that. I consider myself [to be] a flexible person, but I’m also pretty rigid in some ways.”

We both burst into laughter. 

Last year, Zamora attended a performance of Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves at the Public Theatre. She says that a few of the cast members shared with her that López had made some changes to the script, which originally premiered in 1990.

“I thought to myself, ‘OK, you can do that as a playwright. You can make those changes and adapt it to your current reality,’” she says. She’s now much more comfortable making tweaks to her play as the times rapidly change.

I share with her a similar fork in the road that I encountered with my solo musical comedy ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol 1, which, when it opened in 2002, was critical of the Bush Administration. As the show continued to tour after President Barack Obama was in the White House, I needed to ask myself if I was willing to change the script. Like Zamora, I, too, can be rigid when it comes to my art.

Not that the government shouldn’t be criticized, but I was talking about another president entirely, I tell her. So I had to decide, is my script a time capsule or is it a living document?

“Right, right,” she says thoughtfully.

In many ways, Curanderas is a time capsule of the Latino experience. As we discuss the topic further, I ask her where she thinks the limits would be in regards to changing the script if a show has already opened.

“I don’t think that you change the script, just like I don’t think Josefina López drastically changed the script,” she says. In a perfect world, she’d prefer to not make any changes to the text. 

So this becomes an artistic difference between two words: changing and tweaking.

Last summer, after her run at the Guadalupe, she recalls a conversation she had with her husband about her wanting to “get back to the script” and possibly make some tweaks. 

“He was like, ‘Don’t change too much. It’s pretty good the way it is!’ she recalls him saying. This gave her pause. “I think that the story and the script stays the same. You can make some little tweaks for relevancy, but the main idea is the same,” she says finally.

She adds that the show can also change when a new director makes changes to the show’s staging. 

I agree, and look forward to seeing Garza’s work.

I must say, however, I continue to be so proud of how we used the space at the Guadalupe. 

“Me, too,” she says. 

That’s the beauty of touring and playing in different spaces. I once did ICONS on a 2 x 2 stage in Asbury Park, New Jersey - and then I’ve done it in a stadium. Sometimes, you just never know what the usable space will look like until tech rehearsal. Flexibility is key in the world of solo theatre.

Zamora nods her head in agreement. She remembers when she first wrote the show. She workshopped it in class, and had landed her first show date for a South Texas school district. 

“I had all my components for the staging, and I remember hearing your voice: ‘OK, just be ready because you’re going to have to be flexible. You might be in a library. You might be here you might be there,’” she says.

I laugh because I remember saying that. 

“Well, I was happy to hear that I was going to be on a proscenium stage.”

She continues: “But when I got there, they had set up for graduation so all the chairs were set up [on the stage]. I was only playing on the proscenium - and that was it!”

To complicate matters, the tech items she brought to run her show weren’t compatible with the school’s equipment. 

“It was just me,” she says. “I ran my own music.”

That’s fabulous. 

“I was backstage. I had a speaker. I played my music, I faded it out, and then I put my phone down and then I entered as the first character,” she recalls. And this would forever be the bona fide world premiere of Curanderas.

What a great showbiz story. 

“That was the very first time that I had ever performed it for an audience,” she says. “I was so nervous, but I’ll always remember that, in terms of flexibility, [the performing circumstances] could be anything.”

A significant part of her story would include her supportive husband Rick, who was so proud of her during both the Overtime and Guadalupe runs. 

What’s it like having such a encouraging partner? I ask.

“It’s been great. In the very, very beginning of our relationship, he was a little bit of a theatre widow,” she says, meaning that she was often in rehearsal in the evenings and performing on the weekends. “He has never missed a single performance of mine. If he were to hear that I needed a certain prop, all of a sudden Amazon had delivered it to our door. So he’s on it.”

She pauses for a moment, then says, “He is my husband, and I love him, but I also consider him to be my investor,” she says with a smile.

We burst into laughter.

“You know, my investor, my producer, because - I’ll say - when I start touring [Curanderas] around the United States, he’s going to be invested in that,” she says.

Zamora thinks it’s a good thing that her partner in crime hasn’t expressed an interest in acting himself. 

“One time, when we were first married, I was directing a show and I needed someone to run lights,” she says, remembering how she told him how much fun it would be for him to be a part of the action. “He did not enjoy it.” 

RELATED: Cafecito with Azul Barrientos: Searching for the Limit

As our conversation unfolds, I share with her a few stories of my experiences dating men who were involved in the theatre. At times, there was certainly a degree of competition there. 

“No, there is another side of it,” she concurs. “I’ve dated men in the theatre. I’ll never forget one of my first experiences with a boyfriend, I think we were engaged at the time. I was playing - oh, what was that role? God, I can’t remember the name of that wonderful musical - but I had the lead in it and after the show, he wanted to sit me down for notes.”

I gasp audibly. Oh, my goodness! Are you serious?

She nods with absolute certitude.

“He’d actually come in from out of town to watch the show and to ‘support me’ - and he actually sat me down for notes,” she recounts. “And I was like, ‘Wait. Wha-wha-wha-what!?’ 

Her friends who had also come to support her were in the next room during this post-show brow-raiser. “They were ready to bust in and tell him off,” she recalls. “So yeah, that stuck....it really stuck.”

Of course, I have my own views, but why do you think you felt that way when he pulled out those notes? 

“I felt like I was in shock because I [thought] he was there to celebrate me, and support me, and hold me up, and to give me notes was...I mean, I didn’t ask for notes. I mean, as artists, when we want notes, we ask for them,” she says. 

I’m pretty sure I just heard a mic drop at Roddy Tree Ranch.

“Oh,” she says quickly, “And it was Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes. So it was my first big role in a musical in a university setting.”

Oh, cool. I love Anything Goes. 

She continues: “So when a friend comes to see your show or someone you love comes to see your show, they are there to support you. In terms of it being inappropriate, I mean, you just have to stay in your lane. ‘Today, I’m going to the show to see my girlfriend, and I’m just gonna support her and tell her all the things she did great, tell her what I loved about it, and [say] ‘Congratulations,’” she says. “Stay in that lane.” 

Right. I think for closet teachers, closet directors, closet performers, and certainly performers who are out of work, it’s difficult for them to not contribute in some way. 

“Yeah,” she says. “You know, we can think it. It’s OK to think, ‘Well, I would have made a different choice’ or ‘I would have done it differently,’ - but that’s not what we need to hear as performers after a show, after we’ve stripped off all of our armor. As solo artists or any artist in a show, [after we] perform, our vulnerability is at 100 or 1,000 percent, so you just don’t do that,” she concludes.

That’s a great way to describe it. 

“It’s like poking a stick at someone whose skin is already cut open.” 

Zamora channels a total of 15 characters in her fascinating 90-minute solo show. It is playing at The Public Theatre in San Antonio through October 10.

If you tune in:

Time: 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday October 9-10, 2020

Platform: Virtual via The Public Theatre

Cost: $20—$25

Jade Esteban Estrada is a solo theatre artist and the founder of the Acting Masterclass Series. He’s also the Cafecito Columnist at the San Antonio Sentinel. He can be reached at jade@sasentinel.com.