Caption: Enrique Urueta, author of The Danger of Bleeding Brown, at the 2006 Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

“Good Latinas don’t eat cunt.” Enrique Urueta explained to me this ethical standard he sees in Latin American culture and how this causes conflict for Hanná, the protagonist of his play Learn to Be Latina. Although he grew up in south Virginia and attended The College of William and Mary, he has the ethnic background to speak authoritatively on this culture. His parents are both immigrants from Colombia, and he considers himself Colombian-American.

In Latina, an Arab woman seeks representation by a talent agency. The trio of interviewers assesses her qualities, and they like her. When they discover she is Lebanese, they spin their responses and decide that she is not marketable. Still, they see possibilities, so they call in their ‘ethnic consultant’ to rebrand her as a Latina. This first scene of Learn to Be Latina was presented as part of Golden Thread Productions’ 2005 festival at the Magic Theatre and exhibited a skillful use of humor as well as staging to make thought-provoking social observations. Now Enrique has received funding from Theatre Bay Area to extend this to a full-length play, to be presented at the 2006 National Queer Arts Festival. And in the full-length version, Hanná kisses “the office bitch” and has a “queer turn,” where she starts questioning her own sexuality.

As we sat in a side-street coffee bar in the Castro, Enrique talked about his newest play, The Danger of Bleeding Brown (part of the 2006 Bay Area Playwrights Festival). He said it is an “ensemble play” with five actors playing seven parts. The two major characters are Marco and Peter. Marco has a female roomie and a drag queen friend named Dulce de Leche. While a student at Cal, Marco meets a professor of German, but not academically — they hook up through Craig’s List. Marco has “creative sexual skills,” and Professor Peter wants to experiment. Enrique describes Marco as a “pushy bottom” who “likes his play a certain way.” This is not a dominant/submissive relationship, but Marco wants to take it to a more extreme level. “Kink gets into the relationship,” Enrique explained, and the sex becomes non-consensual. There is hint of a breakup. The play has ‘drag numbers’ with lip sync. And he describes it all as “a queer disco tragedy with semi-occasional levity.”
“I don’t believe there is one specific way to receive a play,” he replied when I asked him how the audience will feel at the end. “I never met a gay man who didn’t have intimacy issues,” he said. They can take your fist inside them and still not open up to you. He describes Marco as being emotionally reserved, but Enrique believes in an “ethical responsibility to provide hope on some level.” He explores themes of race and the dynamics of sex. And he said there is a tension between the ideas of ethnic identity versus putting people into niches.

Enrique uses the drag numbers to tell stories, “to create startling moments in very simple ways.” Much of his inspiration for this came from his trips to the Trannyshack, a midnight drag show at the Stud bar. Watching it “changed the way I write,” Enrique said. He claims to have learned more about theatre in those shows than he did in five years of college.

“I can’t imagine at this point writing a play without humor,” he said when I asked if Bleeding Brown would contain the same sort of incisive wit and sarcastic parody as Latina. After talking with him for over an hour, I found him to be a very serious, straightforward man. Having seen Latina, I suspect Bleeding Brown will effectively use laughter to illuminate very important themes.

The Danger of Bleeding Brown plays on July 29 and Aug. 6 as part of the 2006 Bay Area Playwrights Festival at the Magic Theatre. Tickets/Info, call (415) 626-0453, extension 110 or go to www.playwrightsfoundation.org