Alvaro Saar Rios’ Inspiration Behind ‘Luchadora!’

A spark that turns an emotion, an experience, a state of mind into a tangible, accessible piece of work is what every artist thrives on. Thus the story behind a brilliant canvas, a striking dance or a thoughtful script is incredibly interesting to those experiencing the art. In Milwaukee we are lucky to have frequent opportunities to meet artists such as playwright Alvaro Saar Rios and First Stage Artistic Director Jeff Frank, who offered to share their thoughts on the play Luchadora!, which debuts at First Stage April 10-26.

Inspiration for Luchadora! took root within Saar Rios’ creative soul when he was just a child. “I would sometimes watch wrestling when I was a kid with my grandmother,” he says. “Since I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized all the questions that I should have asked her, like ‘Why did you love wrestling?’ and ‘Why did you like watching it with me?’ When I am bouncing around play ideas in my head, I usually ask myself ‘What if?’ a lot. So I asked myself, ‘What if she was a masked wrestler and what if she never told that secret?’”

These recurring questions, combined with an interest in the Mulan Chinese folk tale, ignited Saar Rios’ desire to bring his thoughts to stage. “An idea will hit me and until I actually put pen to paper, it might be a few years,” he says. “This idea actually came to me while I was in graduate school in 2010; I just hadn’t touched it for a couple years until Jeff and I were working on Mole Hill Stories at First Stage. It’s one thing that I learned from one of my playwriting teachers, who basically said, ‘Don’t let a play out of your head too early or it will be that much harder to write.’ I felt like it was the right time. It actually took me just a couple of weeks to get my first rough draft, but the version that we see now is over two years of a lot of love and shaping.”

After having collaborated with Saar Rios on Mole Hill Stories, Frank said “Let’s do it!” when the playwright presented his new script. “I thought it was a really compelling story, a unique thing,” says Frank. Luchadora! is part of First Stage’s Wisconsin Cycle program, which develops and produces six new plays each year that celebrate the stories and various heritages of the people of Milwaukee. “This piece represents and reveals a lot of Mexican culture. But in part it’s Alvaro’s story too and the journey of so many families that migrated from Mexico, from Texas, to Milwaukee,” says Frank.

We are taken on a journey of a young girl who finds her grandmother’s wrestling mask and is trying to figure out the story behind it. Eventually she’s told the story and we’re transferred to 1968 Texas where the grandmother grew up. “She [the grandma] is a 16-year-old tomboy growing up in Texas with a father who I wouldn’t say is very protective, but has his ideas of what females should and shouldn’t do,” says Saar Rios. “Throughout spending summers at her father’s flower stand, she discovers that her father is a wrestler and has a match coming up. But he’s got a lot of back pain and there’s just no way he can do it anymore. So she decides to train in secret and that’s obviously where the complications come, because there’s no way her father would let her do it. She also has to keep it a secret from her own best friends, so it’s those complications of keeping secrets and still trying to achieve what she’s trying to do out of love for a family member, to save a family member.”

The mask connects to Mexican wrestling, luche libre, which Saar Rios explains is a unique culture in and of itself, but especially within Mexican culture. “For some people, luche libre is their way of life. And it’s such a life of secrecy,” he says. “Maybe they reveal it within their family, maybe they don’t. There are still women who have to wrestle secretly because their family would never support them doing that. What I really wanted to give viewers is a peek inside this world that you might not know about, this world of Mexican wrestling that continues today and is still very successful.”

Frank took his cue from this and made sure that both the set and the wrestling and boxing scenes are authentic as they can be. He and his wife partnered with a sixth grade class at Bruce-Guadalupe Middle School to create nearly 500 original pieces of Mexican paper art, papel pacado, which are featured in the lobby, throughout the set and in the theater space. For the boxing scenes, Frank connected with local female boxer Olivia Hendrickson. “The Hendrickson family was here recently giving us a demo on boxing,” he says. “Olivia had a chance to share what it’s like for her to be a female boxer, the prejudice that she deals with yet and the challenges that that presents. Then the family spent an hour and a half working with the two girls that play the main character.” Additionally, Frank got in touch with former wrestler Chris Multerer (who fought Hulk Hogan and other big names during his time) and he worked with the adults and young performers to craft the wrestling matches in the show.

“As we peek into this world,” says Frank, “we recognize at the same time the parallels to our world and the secrets that we keep or the secrets that our family members may have, the masks we choose to wear in different situations.”

Saar Rios agrees. “Still my mother will bring out stuff that I never, never knew,” he says. “It reminds me of those things that I will eventually tell my son. For example, most people don’t know that I was in a death metal band for five years and I was the singer. I think that definitely lends to why I got into theater. It’s the secrets that our own family members hold and some get shared and some never do. I love working with First Stage because I get to tell those stories I wish I had heard as a kid. Our parents, our grandparents, our family members hold all these amazing stories that you just have to ask them about at the right time.”

Luchadora! makes its world premiere April 10 and runs through the 26 at Todd Wehr Theater, 929 N. Water St. For tickets, call 414-267-2961 or visit firststage.org.