Bright lights. Roaring crowds. Inaudibly enthusiastic commentators. Fans painted every color of the rainbow. Men in tight pants. Chewing snuff. Vendors throwing undercooked hot dogs in stale buns through the stands. Peanut shells littering the concrete beneath your seat. Beer cans in the hands of their beer-filled humans.
This is a baseball stadium as we know it today.
When we sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” we think of our favorite player sliding into home plate, successfully earning that home run. We remember when our team won the World Series. Feelings of joy, celebration, admiration, camaraderie fill our hearts.
When we think of baseball, we don’t think of destruction. We don’t hear about violence, discrimination, or gentrification. But we should, and UC Berkeley’s theater, dance, and performance studies department (TDPS) reveals the underbelly of the multi-billion dollar beast in their production of “Chavez Ravine.”
Set in 1981, audiences are drawn into a Dodgers baseball game, with Valenzuela pitching on the mound. Strike one. Strike two. When he steps up for strike three, ghosts of the immigrant citizens who used to live on the lands materialize on the field around him. They tell them their story of life at Chavez Ravine. The community they shared, and the unity they prided themselves on. But then one day, a proponent for public housing in the Los Angeles area shows up with an offer many of the citizens cannot refuse: they would buy them out of their homes. Many agree, many stay behind and fight for their land and their homes. Drama ensues, and suddenly, many of the immigrants find themselves displaced in the LA area. The land now void of humanity becomes prime real estate for the new Dodgers stadium. After relentless protesting, the immigrants of Chavez Ravine lost to the state. Devastation ensues.
Based on the true story, this play feels as if you’re standing in the middle of the action, not sitting in the middle of Zellerbach Playhouse. The themes and the messages radiate throughout every aspect of the production. The strength of the immigrant and Mexican-American communities, for one, was prevalent through the fact that the ensemble was constantly together, sharing moments with each other, including emotional musical numbers. The ensemble never left the stage, either, which built a sense of community between them all. The audience could feel the familiarity, memories, and love shared between each member.
One of the play’s strengths was the use of technology on the stage. The background was a massive projected screen, with a smaller one in front. The set crew used these as resources to project names of characters to eradicate confusion and to give a sense of location in the Los Angeles area. This provided a unique depth to immersing the audience in the setting of the production. But more than set decoration, these screens provided clarity and truth to the pain that the victims of this gentrification felt. Pictures of displaced citizens, children moving amongst rubble lurked for the audience to witness and to feel the devastation and despair that these people felt. At one point, a video haunts the playhouse with the images of eviction and police brutality lingered over the audience like the fog on the bay.
The horror, disgust, fear, and sadness that the production evokes stays with you when you leave your seat. It stays with you because the “hipster gentrification,” as one character describes it, is far from over. The production does a fantastic job of portraying this issue as not only a past issue, but a crucial and often overlooked current one.
The play is sometimes hard to follow, and has its moments of confusion. Sometimes the play moves too quickly or you can’t quite tell what a character is up to. But what the play lacks in plot clarity, it makes up for in the strength and fervor in which it expresses its messages.
Discrimination, gentrification, racism, and hatred against the Mexican-American and other immigrant communities within the play manifest itself through small gestures like derogatory comments from the baseball broadcaster. It manifests itself through large gestures like standing up and fighting against these and other -isms and methods of hate used in the play and seen today in our own society.
But what stands out more, and proves more powerful than the hate speech and the hate crimes, is the love these citizens have for their community as they fight with strength, conviction, resilience, and perseverance. In the end, the underdogs failed, but it was with the dignity and the pride that they upheld their community that struck a moving cord amongst the audience. It wasn’t the idea of winning a battle, it was the idea of saving a treasured home that resonated.
TDPS continues to allow us as an audience to connect to a production on a deeper level. The characters provide more than surface observations and a few chuckles here and there. They give us an opportunity to feel what a whole community felt, and that experience is priceless. “Chavez Ravine” is one of the most powerful productions I have seen in the last year, so if you have to do anything this upcoming weekend, it better be at Zellerbach Playhouse. Because as one character says: “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.” Get on your feet, walk yourself to the box office, and live with your own convictions to end this gentrification.
Images: Alessandra Mello
Catch TDPS’s “Chavez Ravine” at Zellerbach Playhouse on March 6th or 13th at 2:00pm or March 11th or 12th at 8:00pm.
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