Victor I. Cazares on queering theater, one retro video game at a time
Victor I. Cazares declares over cups of Prosecco in the dressing room of New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW). Between sips, they explain it’s because linearity insists that: “we are all between just one point and another” and erases anyone who complicates state-sanctioned narratives.In another world, it would be impossible for Cazares to exist because they a walking swag-bag of complications: a Mexican-American, nonbinary, sex-positive, queer person living with HIV who writes plays that bounce across numerous timelines while fleshing out the hidden truths buried within any moment.Their latest work, the heartbreaking american (tele)visions — a multimedia ode to millennials who came of age at the onset of the internet and video game culture — opens this week at New York Theatre Workshop.Related: Angelica Ross on Her Broadway Debut, Tech Passion, and Reclaiming MusicalsThe play tells the story of a nuclear, undocumented Mexican family who immigrates to Texas for greater opportunities but finds themselves locked outside America’s dream.
Rather than follow Langston Hughes’ progression of a dream deferred, Cazares reveals how those collective yearnings mutate and take on a life of their own, especially when lived by young queer kids who refuse to accept the limitations of their elders.For people of Cazares’ generation, it is one of the first times they have been allowed to see themselves in their unabashedly peculiar glory onstage.
This goes beyond the trend established by Black and Brown theater artists, such as Robert O’Hara, Jackie Sibblies Dury, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Julian Jiménez, and Michael R.
