Garces' Los Illegals Opens Teatro Bravo Season in AZ

Teatro Bravo will open its 9th season with Los Illegals, a play written by Los Angeles-based playwright, Michael John Garces, and to be directed by Andres Alcala.

In Garces' play, immigrants at a day labor center fight for the right to seek work while a swirl of controversy around them gets anti-immigrant advocates calling for the closing of the center. When one of the workers gets arrested for an unrelated charge, the closing is imminent until the workers rally around the right to keep the center open.

Garces is the Artistic Director of the L.A.-based Cornerstone Theater where he developed the play using actual members of the community of immigrant, mostly Spanish-speaking workers as well as professional actors. He was inspired by the classic Spanish play, Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega, in which a small town rises against the tyranny of a local lord.

Los Illegals is written in a unique blend of English and Spanish, and it will be a fully bilingual production, which will be directed by Andres Alcala who starred in past Teatro Bravo productions such as Places to Touch Him and Men on the Verge 2. Alcala is an artistic associate with Childsplay where he’s doing a two-year residence thanks to the prestigious NEA/TCG Grant for Directors.

Teatro Bravo will produce two additional plays through the season, Blood Wedding (in Spanish) by Federico Garcia Lorca in April 2009, and a world premiere comedy, Little Queen, by Artistic Director Guillermo Reyes, in June 2009.

Los Illegals will run September 5-14 in Phoenix, Arizona. For further information, visit: www.teatrobravo.org.