"Yo soy." I am. To be able to make that simple statement, actor Rene Rivera had to embark on a long, stormy, soul-wrenching journey that began in a San Antonio barrio and ended up on a Broadway stage. Rivera has fashioned an impassioned one-man show out of his Mexican-American experiences, The King of the Desert.
Written by his wife Stacey Martino and directed by Valentino Ferreira (all three are Actors Studio stalwarts), Rivera's monologue dramatizes the various challenges, both professional and personal, that he has faced in his relatively young but quite unique life.
Identity is the over-riding theme explored here -- the quest for authentic self in an always-contradictory society. Rivera's family was poor: father an itinerant musician, mother a farm-worker; yet the talk at home was always of their noble Aztec and Mayan ancestors, regal beings, proud and brave warriors. The mythology took root in Rivera's soul, only to be undermined by the racism and oppression he encountered while growing up.
His innate talent as an actor saved him from the fate that befell his brother, Jose -- drugs, crime, prison -- but even so, even as he won a scholarship to Juilliard and then began to find film and TV work, Rivera could never find his true self. He loved Shakespeare, especially Hamlet with its all-important "to be or not to be" solilioquy (which spoke to his own personal dilemma), yet found himself playing cliche Latino roles as either cop or crook. Demeaned, feeling he was selling out, he turned to booze and drugs and found himself unable to connect deeply to another human being.
How he fought off all these demons and, at long last, became whole, became himself, is played out vividly and powerfully by Rivera, whose solo performance is one of the best I've ever seen.
