“Empanada” Returns to Public Theater San Antonio
March 10, 2021 - San Antonio
“Empanada”, from playwright Anel Flores is described as the story of a Lesbiana en probaditas. The emotional story presents the difficult challenges a Mexican-American is faced with when family, religion, cultura, and her inner truth come together. Courtesy Image: Facebook.
By: Ricardo Delgado - Staff Intern, San Antonio Sentinel
“Empanada”, a play about understanding sensuality, sexuality, body image, religion, family, food and the inseparable links between all of them and more, returns to the stage for the first time in a decade and a half as an online experience by the Public Theater of San Antonio.
Anel Flores, artist, writer and Empanada’s playwright, created the production as a reflection over her experiences with all of the aforementioned elements in her past and hopes her story can spark an audience member to discover themselves. The play also depicts the experiences of the loved ones around Flores, telling some of the stories they never got to tell.
“It’s somewhat of a coming of age for a young lesbiana,” Flores said. “As I progressed writing the play I started to really open up the experiences, mostly, yes, close to my own life, but I was able to weave in tales that I heard from, especially, my grandmother and my family members, my friends, close relatives of mine. The queer experience is definitely sourced from my heart.”
Transcribing her complex and sometimes painful formation of her identity as a queer, south Texan Chicana proved to be a more intense experience than anticipated for Flores, but she came out the other side able to embrace the trials which forged her.
“Writing "Empanada" required me to have solace,” Flores says. “It required me to eliminate the world around me. It required me to open up. It required me to walk into places that I didn't want to see or didn't want to even know that I believed in.”
The introspection extended to her close family and her relationships with them, especially when factoring in Flores’ difficulty in coming out and expressing taboo ideas to potentially unaccepting loved ones. The reception to Flores’ inner demons was positive, which the playwright attributes to the common issues faced within the unique play.
In general, it's not only for women but for anybody who's been silenced, or anybody who's holding a secret, or anybody who's holding a desire that they don't speak aloud. Anyone who's holding a lust or love, they don't speak aloud or a loss that they don't speak aloud. For AnaLisa Leos-Garcia (one of the original ensemble members within the production), she returns to bring the story back to life from a backstage role as the play’s production director. Flores says the current version of the play is ”everything it was supposed to be 20 years ago”.
“Empanada” last graced a live audience over 15 years ago in San Jose, California. Since then, Leos-Garcia’s life has evolved in a myriad of ways. Now a theater director, a wife and a mother, the production takes on new meanings in new contexts.
“It was interesting because the script stayed the same, but it took on a whole different meaning reading it from my early 20s [to] reading it and now in my 40s,” Leos-Garcia said. “I'm now an educator. I teach high school students, so having work like this come out for students who are young and queer definitely strikes a different chord.”
“Empanada” is immune to the passage of time’s wiles, capturing those close and far away from the protagonist’s age and ideologies.
“One time I had an older woman, almost an 80-year-old woman, [come] up to me after the play and [say] ‘ I don’t know if I want to eat or have sex after this,” Flores said.
Flores’ return to the stage is not her only act of inspirational advocacy for underrepresented communities, Leos-Garcia said.
“She's, for the last 20 years, has held and attended so many writing groups to inspire queer youth, queer elders, everybody PoC to just write and tell their stories, somehow, someway,” Leos-Garcia says.
Flores constantly challenges her to find more voices and more representation within groups she promotes, citing the importance of seeing a reflection of one’s self in art as a powerful force. Many of the stories deliberately depict interaction many young, queer lesbianas could have with their families. Flores’ acceptance from her family came gradually, yet she still drew her strength from the strong women in her life who once struggled to understand her identity.
From her grandmother, she reconciles two seemingly unrelated themes in the production: hunger and lust. Flores recalls the unfinished beginnings of stories spoken in between the silence and smells of the kitchen. In tackling repression and embracing sensuality, Flores hopes to share some of the passion with her audience many of the women in her life were unable to talk about aloud, not even before they passed away.
“Writing "Empanada" required me to have solace. It required me to eliminate the world around me. It required me to open up. It required me to walk into places that I didn't want to see or didn't want to even know that I believed in.” - Anel Flores
Artist, playwright, and author Anel Flores brings her work to the Public Theater of San Antonio after nearly a decade and a half. Her play gives an understanding of sensuality, sexuality, body image, religion, family, food and the inseparable links between all of them and more. Courtesy Image: Facebook.
“[My grandmother] would just randomly tell me a story,” Flores recalled. “It'd be quiet for like 30 minutes and then she'd be like, ‘¿Sabes que mija? [Tenia un novio...],’
“I’m like, ‘What?! You had a boyfriend?’ Then I would hear two sentences and someone would walk in and no more story. [...] Writing [“Empanada”] was really just like imagining how bad she wanted to tell that story and how she had all these years, inside of her body, 83 years, just rattling around, and she couldn't share them, those stories that were anything other than my grandfather, not to discount him in any way. But for a woman to have 83 years of life and not live passionately and share passion... I watched her put that passion in her food, and in the mouth of our body. Like, 'here's my passion,' and she would just be thrilled when you took a bite, and I would be thrilled to eat it. So, that was how I made those connections.”
Despite the challenges of telling stories meant for a live audience in a pandemic, the need to tell the story persisted, so the production adapted. No audience. No playing to the crowd. Just a woman, a live stream and a camera — and some beats.
Satya Chavez, who plays the protagonist of “Empanada” — who she refers to as “La mujer” — also plays music in the show with a live looper while she performs, adding a new layer to the production, even improvising a specific piece of music during the show according to her “feel” in the moment.
“It's kind of just like a musical, harmonious, cacophony,” Chavez says. “I might be adding an extra act to the show just with that piece alone — not really!”
The lack of a crowd to play off creates a more vulnerable, simmering experience Chavez thinks. Leos-Garcia agrees, praising Chavez’s willingness to open up from a distance on stage and for weeks on end in her own home while preparing for the performances.
“Most of us, we don't do that within our house,” Leos-Garcia said. “We get to go to a theater and a stage and sit there and be vulnerable to an audience, and it's a very process-oriented sort of thing, so this was completely different for her, and I thought she thought she did a brilliant job doing that.”
Although planned around the limitations of a virtual stage, Leos-Garcia thinks the show would triumph just as well under normal circumstances and still has room to grow within its current confines. To better encapsulate the feeling of a live performance, the live stream utilizes two cameras, a technological risk for the show at first, Chavez says, but the results validated the gamble.
Chavez knew, as soon as she read the script, she wanted in on “Empanada”.
“I feel like this play is still ahead of its time, and it was written 20 years ago, Chavez said.”
The play, while ahead of its time, is likely received better now than before, think Flores, Chavez and Leos-Garcia. Crowds, in general, are more open to messages regarding disenfranchised and underrepresented communities, as well as messages openly dealing with cultural taboos — all at the heart of “Empanada”.
Chavez thinks the play invites some of the closed-off members of the very identities celebrated in the work, namely, closed-minded Latinx viewers, can learn to accept fellow disenfranchised members of their community. The main focus, though, is still on lifting the voices of the marginalized over tolerating hatred.
“This play is a call out, and in moments a call-in to those people,” Chavez says. “I hope that our interpretation of it welcomes them into this conversation, but this place is definitely intended to support and lift the voices of the marginalized before it is intended to hold the space for oppressive beliefs.”
The road ahead is not necessarily easier, though.
“I think the queer community will always struggle,” Leos-Garcia says. “I don't like to say that I think they have an easier time, because they're not in the clear and the queer youth suicide rates are still skyrocket-high. So I don't want to say that they have it easier. I just think it's a different time. [...] Things are getting great and it's going to get better, right? But there's always going to be that undertone that makes people of color, women, queer individuals have to work just a little bit harder to obtain what it is that they want.”
Just because the message is more widely accepted means it is widely accepted, Chavez says. The hatred toward the identities celebrated within “Empanada” still exists — it just blends in better.
“I think our world and our society has progressed a lot, even in the past 20 years,” Chavez says “So absolutely, this plays probably far more well accepted and with open arms and it never has been. That is not to say that the struggles to carry all of these identities is not alive and well, because it is, especially as the racism people experience becomes more nuanced and harder to see, but it's still being experienced full-on. It's almost harder to convince people in its existence.”
Top Image: Satya Chavez, who plays the protagonist of “Empanada”, also plays music in the show with a live looper while she performs, adding a new layer to the production, even improvising a specific piece of music during the show according to her “feel” in the moment. Courtesy Image: Facebook. Bottom Image: AnaLisa Leos-Garcia (one of the original ensemble members within the production), returns to bring the work back to life from a backstage role as the play’s former production director. Courtesy Image: Facebook.
Leos-Garcia says it is rare to see a performer who looks like her with a platform, despite being an actor, director and performer herself. There, she delineates the queer youth of her time from today’s.
“The difference between when I was young and them is that they're starting to create their own,” Leos-Garcia says. “We’ve got TikTok now, Instagram, [YouTube]. I think that’s really powerful and amazing.”’
Chavez herself stars in another one-woman-show about Latinx people and their history and identity struggles in “Where Did We Sit on The Bus?”
The experience is not limited to queer, Latinx women, but open to all who have something buried inside and need to exercise or embrace it.
“I hope everybody gets a chance to see it — I'm putting in the universe now that it should tour,” Flores says. “They're doing a damn good job.”
The Public Theater of San Antonio will present this virtual show from March 4 -14, 2021. To purchase individual tickets to “Empanada”, please visit http://bit.ly/2Yez58g.
Ricardo Delgado transferred to Texas State University at San Marcos to study journalism and minor in political science. He expects to graduate in the spring of 2021. Email him at reporter@sasentinel.com