Gay and Latino cultures collide in the Spanish adaptation of the boxing drama Blade to the Heat. Playwright Oliver Mayer explains why the new Filo Al Fuego packs the same punch.
Blade to the Heat lives again, even more sexy and caffeinated and Caribbean-accented than ever, reborn as Filo Al Fuego, which opened last week in Spanish at the Prometeo Theatre in Miami. It’s more than a translation of my original play, which received its world premiere at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in 1994 directed by George C. Wolfe, and which Madonna wanted to make into a movie (it hasn’t happened yet). Translated into street Spanish primarily by director Joann Maria Yarrow and the author, Filo is in many ways a new play altogether; now it’s set in 1962 Miami, just before the Bay of Pigs debacle, in the hothouse world of boxing that Muhammad Ali would soon make famous. It was a time when ethnicity and sexual identity were often sublimated, derided, and ignored. Long before Stonewall and AIDS, it was a time when a single accusatory epithet could set one man against another on a collision course between life and death.
Why did we undertake this massive labor of love? For one thing, it’s a helluva lot of fun. The play sounds hot in Spanish — particularly now in this crazy xenophobic American moment when entire states enact racial and linguistic profiling and when we debate "don't ask, don't tell" one more time. Miami is one of many cities in the United States where Spanish is unapologetically the first language and also where gays and straights live in long-standing harmony. However, in Miami and nearly everywhere else, the sexual divide among Latinos over homosexuality remains wide and dangerous. Perhaps this is why the play sounds so hot in Spanish: every word and gesture signifies and adds to the considerable drama that is already there in the DNA of the place.
Three Spanish words stand out in the original text and signify even more in the new version. Tacticas are the coached attitudes and moves the boxers use to get ahead, in and out of the ring. Teatro is the high-stakes moment of coming out, guard down, and exploiting the other man’s weakness, even while revealing one’s own underbelly. But Maricon is the single word that cuts through the muscle and gut of the Latino boxing brotherhood, putting every boxer’s touch and trainer’s whisper into a new and uncomfortable context. The unfortunate truth is that not much has changed in the ensuing 40 years — as an old Latino trainer once told me, his hands balled up into gnarled fists, “There are no gay boxers.”
Drama is best at posing problems, asking questions, but occasionally the time arises for a play to pose more than a problem and do more than simply ask why. Filo Al Fuego takes a word meant to damage and to destroy and turns it into an emotional experience that bashes through stereotype and demands a painful progress from the audience.
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—Oliver Mayer is the author of more than 20 plays and a professor at the University of Southern California.