Maria Patrice Amon didn’t grow up deeply immersed in San Diego’s theater community.
The National City native says she did the occasional San Diego Junior Theatre production as a child, did a few student shows while attending Sweetwater High School and even wrote some theater reviews as a youth critic for The San Diego Union-Tribune. But like many Mexican Americans, she felt no emotional connection to the narratives, traditions and history of American theater.
Then in 2000, she attended the world premiere of seminal Mexican American playwright Luis Valdez’s “Mummified Deer” at San Diego Repertory Theatre, and it changed her life. The play starred actress Alma Martinez as “Mama Chu,” an elderly Sonoran woman who had endured extreme hardship and abuse before and after she immigrated to the U.S.
“When I was little, I loved theater but I never realized the stories were mine until I saw ‘Mummified Deer,’ and it was life-altering,” Amon said. “It changed my perspective of how people should treat my community. I was sitting between two White couples, watching them watching her (Martinez) with dignity. That wasn’t my normal. I hadn’t seen these communities look at women from my community with dignity. It showed me the possibilities of how this tool — theater — could do that.”
Today, Amon is one of San Diego County’s leading voices of Latinx theater. She’s the founder and director of the Latinx New Play Festival, which is now in residence at La Jolla Playhouse. She’s the co-founder and co-artistic director of TuYo Theatre, which focuses on telling Latinx stories. And she’s part of the national Latinx Theatre Commons Steering Committee.
She’s also an accomplished stage director whose latest immersive theater project, “Pásale Pásale,” will be presented next month at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival (WOW). It will be the third WOW show Amon has directed since 2022 that will creatively tell the stories of San Diego County’s hard-working immigrant and BIPOC communities.
One of Amon’s biggest local cheerleaders is prominent Latino theater director, educator and producer William “Bill” Virchis. He is co-founder and continues to serve as artistic director for 35-year-old Teatro Máscara Mágica. He also is a professor emeritus for Southwestern College, where he taught and served as artistic director for more than three decades; and was the founding director of visual and performing arts for the Sweetwater Union High School District.
Virchis was a pioneer of San Diego’s Latinx theater community. He sees Amon as that leader for the future because she respects and honors the grassroots traditions of community-based theatermaking, like Luis Valdez and his El Teatro Campesino did back in the 1960s.
“Patricia Amon is a gift to our community and is an exemplary woman who has taken this male-dominated business in the theater and has broken the glass ceiling to influence young people and their elders,” Virchis said. “She’s an intelligent, creative woman whose work as a director, producer, dramaturg, actress, professor, mentor and innovator has been loud and clear for all of us. She is a ball of energy and a very creative and positive force.”
“Since her days at the San Diego Repertory Theatre as the force for the Latinx New Play Festival, and now at the La Jolla Playhouse, her commitment to our community is unwavering,” Virchis said. “She has showcased young artists and new plays that speak to our ever-growing cultural artistic landscape. She is also a role model for the greatest example of how education, hard work, commitment, persistence, collaboration and the discovery process of stories that are relevant to all of us pays off in the long run of this play called life.”
Amon’s family came to National City from Mexico in 1922. In 1933, her great-grandmother’s sisters opened the Mexican restaurant Las Cuatro Milpas in Barrio Logan. Her grandmother ran a National City grocery story. Amon remembers being in fourth grade when she attended her father’s college graduation.
“I come from a family of hard workers,” said Amon, who recently purchased her first home in her hometown of National City.
When Amon was in high school, her brother suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was hit by a drunk driver. Determined to help other families avoid such needless tragedies, Amon said she decided to go to law school so she could “save the world.”
She followed through with that plan, earning her law degree from California Western School of Law in 2008. But while she was working toward that degree, her passion for the law cooled. As soon as she graduated from Cal Western, she immediately enrolled in the doctoral theater program at UC Irvine and realized immediately it was the right fit for her life and career.
“As soon as I got there, my stomach felt better. I was so happy with that choice,” she said.
In 2014, Amon completed her doctorate with emphases in critical theory and Chicano studies. Her dissertation pulled together all of the strands of her life and studies. It was titled “Little Girls and Legal Defendants: Theatricalization and Performances of Innocence in Modern American Culture.”
Today, besides the directing, producing and playwriting work she’s doing with TuYo, La Jolla Playhouse and other theater companies, Amon is a newly tenured associate professor of theater at Cal State San Marcos.
Amon said her law degree and doctorate have ended up being great tools for her life in theater.
“I think we accumulate our life experience and they all contribute to the things we do,” she said. “From law school, I am such an analytical thinker, and I love to problem solve. I use that skill in theater, too. Wild scenarios definitely come into play with an audience of four people. You learn to problem solve on the fly. And the Ph.D. has helps me bring the strengths I have for restructuring things when I work on a new plays.”
In 2016, Amon was hired as producer in residence at San Diego Rep, a longtime champion of Latinx playwrights. The following year, she launched the Latinx New Play Festival, with the goal of building a platform to introduce up-and-coming artists who write both for and about the Latinx community. Many of the new plays presented at the festival in years past have gone on to full productions at several local theaters. After San Diego Rep permanently closed in 2022, the festival found a new home at La Jolla Playhouse.
In 2017, Amon co-founded TuYo Theatre with Peter Cirino, Daniel Jáquez, Crystal Mercado, Bernardo Mazón and Evelyn Diaz Cruz. Most of these artists have moved on to other projects in the years since, but Amon and Cirino have carried on as co-artistic directors. Over the years, TuYo has produced more than a dozen theater pieces, including “On Her Shoulders We Stand,” presented in Logan Heights as part of the 2022 WOW Festival.
Amon wrote and directed the immersive, walk-through play that told the true stories of South Bay Latinas who contributed to the war effort in the 1940s. One of the characters was her own grandmother, Matilda Rodriguez, who worked as a riveter assembling B-24 bombers at the Consolidated Aircraft Factory in San Diego during World War II.
Amon also wrote and directed the 2022 WOW show “Las Cuatro Milpas,” an immersive play inspired by her great aunts’ restaurant in Barrio Logan.
She said immersive productions have become a great way to bring nontraditional theater audiences to the table.
“This site-specific, immersive work is a new discovery for us. It’s not something I saw growing up,” Amon said of the WOW shows. “It’s hard to convince our community to come out and see ‘Annie.’ But immersive theater allows us to break the boundaries and bring the audience into the room with us and connect with our community directly. I love it. There’s a very low threshold for engagement with immersive theater.”
Christopher Ashley, artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse and founder of the WOW festival praised Amon’s talent and versatility.
“Patrice wears many hats — writer, director, producer, dramaturg and professor — and it has been a joy working with her in nearly all of these capacities at the Playhouse, from artist-in-residence to producer of the Latinx New Play Festival to creator of TuYo’s WOW Festival productions. She brings an extraordinary vision to every project she works on, and we look forward to more collaborations in the future,” Ashley said.
For next month’s WOW festival, Amon is directing “Pásale Pásale,” a world premiere musical set at a swap meet like the ones Amon and her grandmother used to visit in National City and Spring Valley when she was a child. The phrase “pásale, pásale” is the hawker’s call that Spanish-speaking swap meet vendors use to encourage customers to “come on” closer to their booths.
Amon developed the concept for the musical, which will feature a book and lyrics by Mario Vega and music and lyrics by Eliza Vedar. “Pásale Pásale” will be presented as a workshop production at WOW. Then a full-length production will be presented at Sweetwater High School in the summer.
Amon said the South Bay’s vibrant swap meets are a hotbed for entrepreneurial Mexican and Filipino immigrant families who are working tirelessly to achieve their American dream.
“There’s such beauty in seeing a vendor who is scrabbling life together through their own self-determination. My community is often an community of lack, and they’re still resource-scarce. But places like the swap meet show us the abundance we have.”
La Jolla Playhouse will presents its 2024 WOW Festival on the campus of UC San Diego April 4 through 7. The artist lineup and schedules have not been announced. For updates, visit lajollaplayhouse.org/wowfestival.
La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival: ‘Pasale Pasale’
When: 11 a.m., 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. April 6; 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. April 7
Where: Mandell Weiss Theatre Lawn, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, UC San Diego campus, La Jolla
Admission: Free
Registration: wowfestival.org
pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com
