This document summarizes the development of Hispanic, Asian American, and LGBTQ theatre in the United States since 1970. It identifies key playwrights, theatre companies, and plays for the primary forms of Chicano/Mexican, Puerto Rican/Nuyorican, Cuban, Asian American, and LGBTQ theatre. Some of the major playwrights and companies mentioned include Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino for Chicano/Mexican theatre, Miguel Piñero and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe for Puerto Rican/Nuyorican theatre, and Tony Kushner and his landmark play Angels in America for LGBTQ theatre.

1. Hispanic Theatre

2. 3 Primary Forms since 1970
Chicano/Mexican
Puerto Rican/
Nuyorican
Cuban

3. Chicano/Mexican-American Theatre
Writers
Luis Valdez
Jorge Huerta
Milcha Sanchez‐Scott
Estela Portillo
Companies
Teatro Campesino
Teatro Vision (formerly Teatro
de la Gente)
Gente de Teatro
Teatro de la Esperanza
National Aztlán Theatre

4. El Teatro Campesino
El Teatro Campesino
("farmworkers' theater“) is a
theatrical troupe founded in
1965 as the cultural arm of the
United Farm Workers. The
original actors were all
farmworkers, and El Teatro
Campesino enacted events
inspired by the lives of their
audience.
http://www.elteatrocampesino.com/home.html

5. Luis Valdez
From the migrant labor fields to
Broadway, Luis Valdez remains
true to his original vision...
performance that addresses the
Chicano experience in America
in a context meaningful to all
Americans. Founder and artistic
director of the internationally
renowned El Teatro Campesino,
he continues to
work and mentor a new
generation of theatre artists at
the Playhouse.

6. Teatro Vision (San Jose, California)
Originally named Teatro Huipil,
Teatro Visión was founded in
1984 by members of Women in
Teatro, a statewide network of
Chicano theaters. Based in San
José, California, we have
produced over 54 plays
attended by more than 107,000
people, with performances
presented in both English and
Spanish languages. We are
proud to be playing a leading
role in the evolution of
Chicano/Latino Theater by
presenting classics, newer
works and world premieres by
leading Latino playwrights.
http://teatrovision.org/teatrohome/

7. Teatro de la Esperanza (San Francisco)
El Teatro de la Esperanza was
formed in 1970 by a group of
UC Santa Barbara students
interested in seeing their
experiences and viewpoints
represented on the stage.
The pieces El Teatro de la
Esperanza stages are written by
a range of authors but,
generally, are new works
written specifically for the
company and are usually by a
Chicano or Latino playwright.

8. Gente de Teatro (Houston)
Founded in 1994, Gente de
Teatro is a non-profit
organization and its members
share a common passion, to
bring Spanish theater to the
Houston Hispanic community.
Our mission is simple: to keep
the flame alive, to quench the
thirst, to experience and share
the miracle of theater with
Hispanic audiences in the
greater Houston area and in
Texas.
http://www.gentedeteatro.org/

9. Josefina López
Josefina López is best known for
authoring the play and
coauthoring the film Real
Women Have Curves, a coming-
of-age story about Ana, a first-
generation Chicana torn
between pursuing her college
ambitions, a personal goal, and
securing employment, which is
a family expectation. Although
Real Women Have Curves is
López’s most recognized work, it
is only one of many literary
works she has created since she
began her writing career, at
seventeen. Her first novel
Hungry Woman in Paris was
released on March 9, 2009.

10. Cuban-American Theatre
Writers
Maria Irene Fornes
Iván Acosta
Nilo Cruz
Manuel Martín
Mario Peña
Dolores Prida
Omar Torres

11. Maria Irene Fornes
(born May 14, 1930, Havana,
Cuba) Her family moved to the
U.S. in 1945, and she became a
painter before beginning to
write plays in the early 1960s.
She wrote some 35 stage works
and directed her own works as
well as classic drama. Her
innovative dramas have made
her one of the most successful
and frequently produced of Off
Broadway playwrights. Her best-
known play, Fefu and Her
Friends (1977), explores
women's relationships with one
another.

12. Fefu and Her Friends
These women come together in the
first act for a college reunion at Fefu’s
house. There is a realistic set. Then in
second act, the audience is divided
into four groups and led to three
other sets in the backstage area and
then the scenes take place in each of
these areas as well as in the living
room simultaneously, performed four
times until each audience group has
seen all four scenes. And the scenes
are of the same length so that each
audience group is ready to move at
the same time. And you see
characters leave the room
occasionally and go into the scene of
another room while that other scene
is actually taking place.

13. Nilo Cruz
Nilo Cruz (born 1960) is an
Cuban-American playwright and
pedagogue. With his award of
the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for
Drama for his play, Anna in the
Tropics, he became the first
Latino so honored.[

14. Puerto Rican Theatre
Writers
Miguel Piñero
Juan Shamsul Alam
Edward Gallardo
Federico Fraguada
Richard Irizarry
Yvette Ramírez
Candido Tirado

15. Miguel Piñero
Miguel Piñero (19 December
1946 – 18 June 1988) was a
Puerto Rican playwright, actor,
and co-founder of the
Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

16. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Founded circa 1973, The
Nuyorican Poets Cafe presents
groundbreaking works of
literature, music, theater,
performance art, poetry slam,
hip hop, visual art and
champions established as well
as rising artists from every
background imaginable.
http://www.nuyorican.org/

17. Puerto Rican Travelling Theatre
The Puerto Rican Traveling
Theatre (PRTT) was founded in
1967. The PRTT's lasting impact
is felt in 39 years of continued
theater programming and
audience development,
including the introduction of
new and significant Hispanic
voices to the professional
theater mainstream.
http://www.prtt.org/

18. Jose Rivera
José Rivera (born in 1955) is a
playwright and the first Puerto
Rican screenwriter to be
nominated for an Oscar.

19. Repertorio Español
In 1968 Gilberto Zaldívar and René
Buch founded this company in
order to present new and classic
works from various
Spanish‐language drama traditions.
The troupe performs in Spanish but
the Latin American, Hispanic,
Puerto Rican, and Cuban
productions include simultaneous
translations via an infrared system
so its audience base is quite
diverse. The company spent much
of its early years touring but since
1972 is headquartered at the
Grammercy Arts Theatre where it
has programs encouraging new
Hispanic‐American playwrights and
offering English‐language works in
translation.
http://www.repertorio.org/

20. Asian-American Theatre
Frank Chin – Playwright (The
Chickencoop Chinaman)
Dennis Dun – Actor (The Last
Emperor)
Philip Kan Gotanda – Playwright
(Yankee Dawg You Die)
David Henry Hwang –
Playwright (M. Butterfly)
Amy Hill – Actor (All-American
Girl)
R.A. Shiomi – Playwright (Yellow
Fever)
Lydia Tanji – Costume Designer
(The Joy Luck Club)
Wakako Yamauchi – Playwright
(And the Soul Shall Dance)
http://www.aatrevue.com/AATR-1.html

21. David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang (born
August 11, 1957) is a
contemporary American
playwright who has risen to
prominence as the preeminent
Asian American dramatist in the
U.S. He was born in Los Angeles,
California and was educated at
the Yale School of Drama and
Stanford University.

22. Asian American Theatre Company
AATC was founded in 1973 as a
playwrights’ workshop by
playwright Frank Chin and was
sponsored by the American
Conservatory Theater. In 1975,
the workshop was incorporated
as a 501(c)(3) non-profit
organization and became a
professional theater company
dedicated to producing plays by
Asian American dramatists and
supporting Asian American
actors, designers and
technicians.
http://www.asianamericantheater.org/

23. East West Players
East West Players is an Asian
American theatre organization
in Los Angeles, founded in 1965.
As one of the nation’s first Asian
American theatre organizations,
East West Players today
continues to produce works and
educational programs that give
voice to the Asian Pacific
American experience.
http://www.eastwestplayers.org/

24. Pan Asian Repertory Theatre
Founded in 1977 and led by
Artistic Producing director Tisa
Chang, the Pan Asian Repertory
Theater is a New York based
theatre group that explores the
Asian American experience. Pan
Asian Rep provides professional
opportunities for Asian
American artists to collaborate
and create unique works where
quality and excellence are key
criteria.

25. Ma-Yi Theatre Company
Founded in 1989, Ma-Yi
Theater Company is an Obie
Award-winning, not-for-profit
501(3)(c) organization whose
primary mission is to develop
new plays and performance
works that essay Asian
American experiences.
http://www.ma-yitheatre.org/hme.html

26. GLBTQ Theatre
Gay
Lesbian
Bisexual
Transgendered
Queer/Questioning

27. Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour
The Children's Hour is a 1934
stage play written by Lillian
Hellman. It is a drama set in an
all-girls boarding school run by
two women, Karen Wright and
Martha Dobie. An angry
student, Mary Tilford, runs away
from the school and to avoid
being sent back she tells her
grandmother that the two
headmistresses are having a
lesbian affair. The accusation
proceeds to destroy the
women's careers, relationships
and lives. The play was first
staged on Broadway at Maxine
Elliott's Theatre in 1934, where
it ran for over 2 years.

28. Matt Crowley’s Boys in the Band
In 1968, an Off-Broadway play
about a birthday party attended
by a group of homosexual men
made theatrical history by
becoming the first play to deal
honestly with gay urban life.
The party brings together a
group of misfits that have
become clichés -- the self-
loathing alcoholic, the bitchy
queen, the flamboyant sissy, the
stud-for-hire - for an evening of
truth-telling.

29. Harvey Fierstein
Harvey Forbes Fierstein (born
June 6, 1952) is an American
actor and playwright, noted for
the early (1982) distinction of
winning Tony Awards for both
writing and playing the lead role
in his long-running play Torch
Song Trilogy, about a gay drag-
performer and his quest for true
love and family.

30. Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner (born July 16,
1956) is an American playwright
and screenwriter. He received
the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in
1992 for his play, Angels in
America: A Gay Fantasia on
National Themes, and co-
authored with Eric Roth the
screenplay for the 2005 film,
Munich.

31. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
The play debuted on Broadway
at the Walter Kerr Theatre in
1993, directed by George C.
Wolfe, with Millennium
Approaches being performed in
May and Perestroika joining it in
repertory in November.

32. The Laramie Project
The Laramie Project is a play by
Moisés Kaufman and members
of the Tectonic Theater Project
about the reaction to the 1998
murder of University of
Wyoming gay student Matthew
Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming.
The play draws on hundreds of
interviews conducted by the
theatre company with
inhabitants of the town,
company members' own journal
entries and published news
reports. It is divided into three
acts, and eight actors portray
more than sixty characters in a
series of short scenes.

33. Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi
Corpus Christi is a passion play
by Terrence McNally
dramatizing the story of Jesus
and the Apostles. It depicts
Jesus and the Apostles as gay
men living in modern-day Texas.
In this version, Judas betrays
Jesus because of sexual
jealousy. Playwright Terrence
McNally, a gay man, received
death threats when it was
played in the United States. It
was directed in New York City by
Joe Mantello, opening on the 13
October 1998.

34. Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out
Take Me Out is a 2002 play by
American playwright Richard
Greenberg originally staged by
Donmar Warehouse, London
with The Public Theater. It
premiered off-Broadway at on
05 September 2002 Joseph
Papp Public Theater, and made
Its Broadway debut on 27
February 2003 at the Walter
Kerr Theatre where it ran 355
performances. Much of the play
is set in the locker room of a
professional baseball team, and
as such has an all-male cast and
explores themes of
homophobia, racism, class and
masculinity in sport.

35. The NEA Four
Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck,
and Holly Hughes, were performance
artists whose proposed grants from
the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA) were vetoed by John
Frohnmayer in June 1990. Grants
were overtly vetoed on the basis of
subject matter after the artists had
successfully passed through a peer
review process. The artists won their
case in court in 1993 and were
awarded amounts equal to the grant
money in question, though the case
would make its way to the United
States Supreme Court in National
Endowment for the Arts v. Finley. In
response, the NEA, under pressure
from Congress, stopped funding
individual artists.

36. Theatre Rhinoceros (San Francisco)
Theatre Rhinoceros or Theatre
Rhino was founded in the spring
of 1977 by Lanny Baugniet and
his partner Allan B. Estes, Jr. as a
non-profit theater company
dedicated to the production of
plays by and about gay and
lesbian people.
Theatre Rhinoceros is the first
gay theater company to employ
actors under a professional
seasonal agreement.
http://www.therhino.org/

37. Outward Spiral Theatre Company (Minneapolis)
Founded in 1995, Outward
Spiral Theatre Company is
dedicated to producing theatre
from a Queer point-of-view. We
strive to entertain, educate and
act as a catalyst for social
change through inclusive, multi-
cultural, provocative artistic
expression.
http://www.outwardspiral.org/

38. Diversionary Theatre (San Diego)
Diversionary Theatre was
founded in 1986 to provide
quality theatre for the lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender
communities. The mission of
the theatre is to produce plays
with gay, lesbian and bisexual
themes that portray characters
in their complexity and diversity
both historically and
contemporarily.
http://www.diversionary.org/

39. Celebration Theatre (Los Angeles)
The Celebration Theatre is a
non-profit theatre company in
Los Angeles, founded in 1982.
The company is located in West
Hollywood, on the west end of
Theatre Row, and specializes in
works representing the Gay and
Lesbian experience.
http://www.celebrationtheatre.com/

40. The Theatre Offensive (Boston)
The Theater Offensive is a
Boston-based theatrical
organization dedicated to the
production of queer works. It
was founded in 1989 by Abe
Rybeck and grew out of the
United Fruit Company, a gay
men's "guerilla theater group.”
http://www.thetheateroffensive.org/

41. Split Britches
Split Britches Lesbian Feminist
Theatre Company was founded
27 years ago by Peggy Shaw,
Lois Weaver and Deb Margolin.
Since 1980 they have
transformed the landscape of
queer performance with their
vaudevillian satirical gender-
bending performance.
http://www.splitbritches.com/