Nicholas Barnard Women's Playwrights: Heroes and Saints May 22, 2002
1. The character of Cerezita is defiantly one of the most unique characters to meet the stage.
First of all I believe the box in which she is placed, is dually a metaphor and a staging device. Cerezita is born without limbs, placing the character within the box is fundamentally important to making the character playable, without doing this any actress and production team would be stressed very much trying to create the character.
Metaphorically the box is further representative of the box in which Cerezita has been placed into by Dolores. Dolores would much rather that her daughter just be dead, as evidenced by her statement that she asked the doctors to kill her, but they couldn't stand the screams. Cerezita has been placed into a box of intellectuality, because her brain is her major organ that is functional, but within her community it is unfortunately not respected, as her community is founded on manual labor.
Cerezita's relationship with Juan is one of the flesh. Juan has denied by him being a priest, sexual impulses, those impulses that Cerezita is denied as a matter of her being placed within the box of her raite, and the box of her home. The sexual scene is the release and realization that boxes, voluntarily entered into or born into, will be and must be broken.
2. The forces that are pulling this community apart are from multiple different directions. The most fundamentally obvious one is the pesticides that are being sprayed. But I think this is a fundamentally simple representation of a larger threat to the Latino community of nationalism and globalism. One of the threats of larger and larger communities is that small communities especially ones built on strong families, like the Latino community are torn apart by the needs of capitalism. People, especially will move out and search for new opportunities and will be exposed to new and different cultures and perhaps forsake their Latino roots. The cancer caused by the pesticides directly kills children from cancer and breaks up the family. While, the threats of capitalism are insidious and laced with “opportunity” that will not kill the children, but will restructure their outlook in life and remove them from their family in the name of doing moving up. While I every family must cope with children moving out of the parent's households, I think it is important to realize that I think Latino communities are built on strong family identification with several generations living within close contact of each other.
I also see a very internal threat of Mario's coming to terms with his homoattractedness. I think this is a level of nature pulling the family and community apart because of a lack of acceptance for men who are sexually penetrated by other men. (Note about gay Latino sexuality: Within Latino cultures it is perfectly socially acceptable for men to have sex with other men as long as they are the ones doing the penetration, and not the ones being penetrated. This mirrors Greek sexuality, as well as the sexuality of mice (yes, I have my sources.)) I think Mario shows a man lacking strength, whereas the other characters in the community have strength, and presumably make Mario feel uncomfortable. Mario as a result seeks refuge in outside of his community, forcing him to live two lives, that within his Latino community and one within a gay community that is not shown. We are shown in the play that Mario must ultimately make a choice and he telegraphs that he is going to choose to live within the gay community.
3. a. I think the rituals within the play are very much in keeping with a sense of realism. Latino communities are generally strongly catholic, and as such have a great influence on Latino's functional lives. I think the display of rituals ground this play into the reality of its communities, and as such more strongly ties it to those actual lived experiences, making the play more realistic.
b. I think within the author's message the rituals are to show how people must be adaptive of rituals, and fit the rituals to serve their purposes. This fits within the larger theme of the Latino community seeking to find its place within the larger community that they exist in, thus showing how to take the old and important and meld it with the future and those things around you.