Zoot Suit and Other Plays by Luis Valdez

Rai is a Sikh man who wore the traditional turban and a fully-grown beard as is customary for Sikhs. citizen of Indian descent, was shot in the arm while working on his car outside his home near Seattle. For others, like it was for Henry Reyna, it is a matter of life and death.Ī stark reminder of all this came the very same weekend I saw the play.

Zoot Suit's re-staging has received an uproarious reception, which I believe speaks at least partly to the fact that all these years later, Americans still wrestle with some fundamental questions: What do assimilation and patriotism look like? What role do the clothes we wear play in signaling identity and belonging? Can they make us a target? For some people, it is a philosophical debate. Instead, he's unsure about where he stands as a member of his community, as an American, even as a dresser. 'Stand up to them with some style.' By the end of the play, Reyna's experience has left him far from the place he'd envisioned for himself. The Pachuco, a trickster-like character who doubles as something of a conscience for Reyna, tries to reassure him: 'Forget the war overseas, carnal. In the revival of 'Zoot Suit,' Demian Bichir plays The Pachucho, a kind of inner voice to Henry Reyna, played by Matias Ponce. 'Yet clothes like these are being worn by kids all over America.' 'You are trying to exploit the fact that these boys look foreign in appearance!' he says to the prosecutor. On their first day in court, their lawyer tries, unsuccessfully, to intervene. The 'zoot suits' they wear - high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed trousers with a baggy, broad-shouldered jacket - become central to the reason for their arrest and conviction.ĭuring their three months in jail awaiting trial, prosecutors deny them clean clothes or haircuts. In the play, set in 1942, a young Mexican-American man, Henry Reyna, and several of his friends, are arrested and tried for a murder they did not commit. 39 years after its debut there has been something of an event, partly because it is a foundational work in the canon of Chicano art, and also because its message is eerily prescient in our current political environment.

Over the weekend, I was in Los Angeles and attended a production of Zoot Suit, by the trailblazing Chicano playwright Luis Valdez. In this scene, the judge requires the men to go on trial in the clothes they were wearing when they were arrested. In the revival of Luis Valdez's 'Zoot Suit,' young pachucos go on trial for a murder they did not commit.

Zoot Suit and Other Plays by Luis Valdez