Posted on Sat, Jul. 05, 2008

When Mario Ernesto Sánchez thinks about putting together another International Hispanic Theatre Festival -- this year's edition is his 23rd -- he thinks back to the mule that hauled garbage to the town dump in the years before he left Cuba at 15 on a Pedro Pan flight.

''When I was a kid, I was very bad,'' the animated Sánchez, 61, says with a grin over lunch at Little Havana's Las Tapas de Rosa. ``The mule that picked up garbage in my hometown of San Antonio de las Vegas had a huge cart. My friends and I would try to get her excited. We'd throw rocks, use slingshots, anything to try to get her to turn over the cart. But she didn't. She knew that once she'd delivered the garbage to the dump, she'd be free for the rest of the day. She had a mission.''

And when the going inevitably gets rough as Sánchez is dealing with artists and visas and funding each year, the memory of that mule keeps him going.

''The mission,'' he says, ``is the festival.''

The quality and variety of Spanish-language theater in South Florida have grown markedly better in the past few years, thanks to companies like the Hispanic Theatre Guild and Teatro in Miami. Still, Miami remains a festival-crazy place, and Sánchez knows that bringing first-rate productions of works by Hispanic and Latino playwrights here is a no-brainer. Last year, about 80 percent of the seats to each performance in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts and the Prometeo Theater space at Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus were filled.

But making the festival come together is never simple.

AN ANNUAL CRISIS

In financial terms, the XXIII International Hispanic Theatre Festival has only about half the funding of its recent predecessors ($250,000 vs. $500,000) in money and in-kind donations. Sánchez, however, has made it work, as he always does.

''Since the economy has tanked, private corporations and some foundations declined to support us this year,'' he says. ``If not for the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and [director] Michael Spring, I don't know what we would have done. They pushed for us. They're fighters.

``The situation has created a lot of anguish, but I have that every year. In other years, it would have been visas. This year, it was funding and support. I've learned, through all my crises, you have to have that mission and go for it.''

Spring, who worked with Mayor Carlos Alvarez, Miami-Dade's County Commission and the Cultural Affairs Council to maintain the level of county support for the festival this year, says, ``We've been supportive of the festival virtually since its inception. We recognize Mario Ernesto's vision, tenacity and taste. He has an incredible sense of what good theater can be, and he brings it here. . . . While he thinks deeply about the festival, he also thinks globally about the cultural community here. We can always count on his forceful, sensitive, passionate point of view on behalf of the arts community.''

Sánchez's longtime colleague, Lilliam Vega, who is directing Raquel Carrió's adaptation of Fernando de Rojas' La Celestina for this year's festival, concurs: ``Mario is a fighter, a leader but, above all, a true artist who will [take any] risk to defend his dreams.''

His dream and annual mission is to gather the best companies he can afford to bring to Miami for an international celebration of theater by Hispanic playwrights.

Most, but not all, of the productions are performed in Spanish; the Ljubljana City Theatre from Slovenia, for example, will present Spanish playwright José Sanchis Sinisterra's Ay, Carmela in Slovene, with projected Spanish supertitles. Trying to make the festival more appealing to those who understand little or no Spanish has always been a challenge for Sánchez, one he is addressing this year with a dance-theater piece (El llanto by Federico García Lorca and Enric Granados, presented by Barcelona's Octubre Teatral) and two Spanish-language productions with English supertitles (Jacinto Benavente's Los intereses creados by Miami's Prometeo Theatre and Carrió's adaptation of La Celestina by Sánchez's own company, Teatro Avante).

SALUTE TO SPAIN

The loose theme of this year's festival is a tribute to the country where Spanish-language drama was born.

In addition to Octubre Teatral, three other companies from Spain are participating: Murcia's Alquibla Teatro, performing Laila Ripoll's El día más feliz de nuestra vida; Madrid's Companía de Petro María Sanchez, performing Amar y ser amado, o la divina Filotea by Pedro Calderón de la Barca; Madrid's Metamorfosis Producciones Teatrales, performing Ñaque o de piojos y actores by Sinisterra and Carlos Martín. Sinisterra will be honored with the Life Achievement in the Performing Arts Award after the July 19 performance of Ñaque.

As always, the festival will include three free productions as part of International Children's Day July 12-13 (says Sánchez, ''That's our future audience!'') and an educational component (a conference on trends in Latino and Latin American performing arts on July 26, and a reading of Rafael de Acha's adaptation of Calderón de La Barca's Life Is a Dream [here titled Life's Dreaming] by De Acha's Theater by the Book company on July 27). From July 15 to Aug. 30, the lavish costume exhibition 100 Years of Dressing Calderón will be on display at Miami's Freedom Tower.

That's a huge amount of activity jammed into three carefully planned weeks. But the art isn't all that happens: There are parties, too, particularly when Bacardi comes through with a vital in-kind donation. The crafty Sánchez considers the festival's social aspect an important tool.

''I believe that if I can bring you in [to an event], you'll come back,'' he says. ``People learn there's a theater festival going on.''

Prometeo director Joann María Yarrow, who heads the Spanish-language theater training program at the Wolfson-based Florida Center for the Literary Arts, believes that what Sánchez and the festival bring to South Florida is culturally vital.

''What Mario is doing is absolutely essential,'' she says. ``He's an absolute workhorse, a perfectionist. This elevates us nationally and internationally, in the way Art Basel does.''

For most of each year, Sánchez stays busy acting in movies, leading Teatro Avante on tours to different countries, visiting other theater festivals and working (with one other person) on his own festival. He rarely gets discouraged: ''When I cry, I cry alone,'' he says, laughing.

Seriously, he adds, ``I think this is what I do best in life. Honestly, to me, it's not a job. It's like selling pots and pans. If you don't believe in the quality of the product, in what you're selling, do something else.''

Sánchez? He's still like that mule: stubborn, determined, devoted to his mission.