Straddling worlds: Latino Theatre Festival director embraces diversity

Chicago actor and director Henry Godinez has every reason to be proud. His brainchild, The Goodman Theatre's Latino Theatre Festival, is a success.

Founded in 2003, this year's fest marks the fifth time the Goodman Theatre has hosted this event, pulling together Latino theater groups from around the globe.

"We originally planned to do the festival annually," Godinez says. "But it was too much. So now it is every two years."

Godinez is also directing the first entry in the month-long festival, "The Sins of Sor Juana." And when he isn't performing his duties as the resident artistic associate at the Goodman Theatre, he teaches at Northwestern University.

But if Godinez is prideful, he doesn't show it. He's got an easy manner, and you couldn't even tell at the time of this interview he was in the middle of "tech" for "The Sins of Sor Juana," even though this is one of the highest stress moments in the production of a play.

"Tech" is that time when all of the technical elements of the show, including lighting and sound cues, are worked out - or not. When asked how tech is going, Godinez answers, with a confident laugh, "You know, it is going as well as these things go." And then he says nothing more.

About the festival itself, Godinez is more talkative. "This year is the hundredth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution," he says. "Because of that I wanted to make the theme of this year's festival revolution. Not just large revolutions, but all forms of revolution."

Which may be why Godinez invited the Cuban-based Teatro Buendía to perform at the festival.

The Cuban revolution looms large in Godinez's personal history. It was the revolution, after all, that sent his family packing in 1961, moving from Havana, where Godinez was born, to Dallas, Texas. There he found himself between worlds - at a school where the major division was between whites and people with Mexican origins. He spoke Spanish, like his Tejano and Mexican-American classmates, but his culture and experiences were as foreign to them as they were to his white classmates.

"It was pretty weird," Godinez says. "Sometimes I felt out of place. But it did teach me to appreciate diversity."

It also taught him to embrace many different cultures, both within the diverse world of Latinos, and in America at large.

This double vision has always informed Godinez's Latino Festival, which has from the start reached out to both Latino and non-Latino audiences - and contained a wide enough array of shows to offer something for almost anyone.

The play Godinez is directing, Karen Zacarías's "The Sins of Sor Juana," concerns the life and work of 17th century writer, Juana Inés de la Cruz. Considered by many to be Mexico's first great writer, this self-taught scholar and writer found, as a woman in New Spain, the most intellectual freedom as a nun. As a writer she challenged current views on the place and education of women, a position that led her to many clashes with the church hierarchy.

"She was a revolutionary, too, in her way," Godinez says.

• "The Sins of Sor Juana" runs through July 25 at Goodman's Albert Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, Chicago. For tickets call the box office at (312) 443-3800 or go to goodmantheatre.org.