"Create your own realism."
Biography
Rivera was born on March 24, 1955 in San Juan, Puerto Rico and moved to Long Island, NY with his family when he was five years old.
He attended Denison College in Ohio where he majored in Theater and English. He produced four of his own plays during his four years there.
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He then moved to New York City and worked odd jobs from a warehouse to a bookstore and eventually landed as a copywriter at a publishing company. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to write and study in London and then returned to the United States and began to write full time for both theater and film in California.
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He now lives in Hollywood, California with his wife and daughter.
"But you can also talk about here by inventing there."
Developing Marisol
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Marisol was initially commissioned by Intar Theater of New York on a Rockefeller foundation grant.When Rivera finished the play, their artistic director did not "get it" so he took it to the Humana Festival instead.
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Rivera grew up in the storm of collapsing urban centers and he acknowledges that the rhetoric of revolution in the air globally with the fall of the Soviet Union affected his content and style while writing Marisol.
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He wrote the first act of Marisol in New York City while he was commuting from the Bronx to Manhattan for his 9 to 5 job in a publishing house. He wrote the second act in England as he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in London at the Royal Court Theatre, which, at the time, was hugely political on the London scene.
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One of his uncles died homeless in San Diego, which fueled his frustration with the lack of visibility and concern with homelessness.
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The name of the play and the titular character, Marisol, is a conflation of the Spanish words for sea (mar) and (y) sun (sol), which makes her an ideal source of and host for transformation.
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The role of Marisol was originally written for actress Cordelia Gonzalez who inspired many of Rivera's female heroines early in his writing career.
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He is more interest in Marisol as “abstract, poetic, and theatrical” than “gritty and urban-textured” but sees value in both production styles.
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The New York Times described a production by noting: “The broad apocalyptic canvas in Marisol has its portion of metaphysical meddling.”
Magic Realism
Magic or Magical Realism
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is a literary genre or style associated especially with Latin America that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction.
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The term originated when Franz Roh used it to describe the objectivists breaking from the heightened content of German expressionism in the 19th century. The importance was moved from emotion to the “the power than an everyday object could possess." Magic Realism was later used in the 1940s to describe Latin American literature that differentiated itself from the perceived “phony” European surrealism.
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There are supported arguments from critics such as Jon Rossini that Marisol is not an example of magic realism because the play has its "own logic, but that logic is operating in an altered universe where events that might seem improbably, mythical, or dreamlike have the same material status as events audiences more regularly encounter.”
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Whether or not critics see Marisol in this category, Rivera finds it useful so it is important to consider when reading the play and considering its history.
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Rivera uses magic realism as a way of connecting to his cultural roots.
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Much, if not all, of the dramatic content of Marisol is pulled from real-world experiences throughout Rivera's life:
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The concept for Marisol originated from a conversation he had with his mother about her friend named Marisol who claimed she was visited by an angel.
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Rivera experienced a man throwing an ice cream cone into a woman’s face on the streets of New York City.
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Rivera also recalls ruminating on a news story he heard about a cemetery for AIDS babies which found its way into the play at the end of act two.
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Influences on Rivera's Writing
Gabriel García Márquez
Visual Art
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As Rivera wrote the second act of Marisol in London, he spent hours in the Visual Art section of the Kensington Library and visited the art of Francis Bacon at the Tate Gallery.
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Rivera: "I would go to the Kensington Library and sit in the Art Department. I would just go to the shelf and pull out any random book, mostly on surrealists. But almost any kind of art book. And I would just sit at the table and have the five books right in front of me to different pages, and I would write. And then I would flip through these incredible images and write some more."
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"Art is definitely a big part of my process...I like to surround myself with things to look at that are striking and beautiful."
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This connection to imagery is apparent in the shift from Act One to Act Two of Marisol.
Triptych August 1972, Francis Bacon
Caryl Churchill & Sam Shepard
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José Rivera has cited many playwrights as inspirations to his creative work, but the two he repeats often are:
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Caryl Churchill: "I respect what she is doing on so many levels... I think she deals with many ways people are cruel to each other, sometimes how that cruelty is related to class and wealth... I just think she's wildly original... Just on the level of language and the mythology"
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Sam Shepard: “I’ve always been fascinated with the theatre as a form of almost religious ritual… I think writers like Sam Shepard who can turn the kitchen sink into a temple or a shrine or a burial ground perform wonderful tricks of alchemy”
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He creates this effect in Marisol with the description of the man genuflecting at a fire hydrant.
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