Marga Gomez's `Memory Tricks': A Witty Show About A Showy Family

If you're going to be a solo theater performer, it helps to have had a colorful, unorthodox childhood. And to hold off-kilter opinions on a variety of touchy subjects. Marga Gomez qualifies on both counts.

In her heralded one-woman show "Memory Tricks," Gomez considers her New York childhood in a family of Cuban-Puerto Rican showpeople with affection and amazement.

And in the extended stand-up comedy assemblage, "Marga Gomez is Pretty, Witty and Gay," she casts an irreverent light on life as a lesbian Latino entertainer - one who is not terribly comfortable with restrictive ethnic and sexual labels.

After a dozen years of performing solo, and six months after being "discovered" nationally via a highly successful run at New York's Public Theatre, Gomez brings both shows to Seattle's Broadway Performance Hall this week. The engagement runs tomorrow through Sunday; only one of the two shows is presented at each performance (for details, call 322-5423).

A personal piece

Chatting about her work by phone from her home in San Francisco, Gomez made it clear that "Memory Tricks" was the harder piece to create and the more deeply personal.

She conceived it, with help from several directors, as a kind of tough-love homage to her parents: her Cuban-born father, who died in 1983, and her Puerto Rican mother, an ex-dancer who is seriously ill with Alzheimer's disease. In Gomez's telling, their family life (her parents divorced when she was 12) sounds like a cross between "The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love" and a zany episode of "I Love Lucy."

"My parents worked in factories during the day, but at night they were big stars of Latino theater in New York, with all these flamboyant, eccentric friends," explained Gomez. "My father was a well-rounded artist, an impresario and comedian, and he wrote some songs that got produced all over the world, even on Muzak.

"In the '50s and '60s he got involved with these live variety shows. All the Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants would get dressed to the nines, go to the Mexican movies, and in between pictures there would be a live show my dad would emcee. That's how he met my mother. She wanted to be an actress, but was working as a dancer."

`Margo the Exotic'

With a nod to Maurice, Gomez's father used the French-sounding stage name Willie Chevalier. Her mother, a flashy dresser with a penchant for big jewelry and stiletto heels, was billed simply "Margo the Exotic." Remembers Gomez, "My mother was a babe. A lot of the funny stuff in `Memory Tricks' is about her doing her best to teach me how to be what she thought a lady was.

"She gave me lessons on how to carry a pocketbook, how to walk. She studied fashion magazines, and thought it was good to sleep with a bra on, because Marilyn Monroe did and she had such beautiful breasts."

With her thick Puerto Rican accent, manipulative personality and Charo-like affectations, it would be easy to caricature Margo. Yet Gomez - who plays herself, her parents and many other characters in "Memory Tricks" - swears she hasn't done that.

"The show is not a critique of her," Gomez stresses. "It's more about forgiving her and myself for some of the things we did to each other. I really hope people come away with an understanding and appreciation of my mother. I'm also aware of how little documentation there is of Latino artists and entertainers like my parents, so I hope the play offers some of that, too."

Her relationship with both parents suffered when they "figured out" Gomez was a lesbian. That happened when she was in her early 20s, and in 1979 she fled New York to settle in San Francisco. Once there she joined the rollicking feminist theater troupe Lilith. Later she turned to stand-up comedy and to membership in the top Latino comedy troupe Cultural Clash. To pay the bills during lean times, Gomez handed out towels at a Swedish hot tub concern. ("It was a great because it didn't take any brains at all!")

"Pretty, Witty and Gay" (the title spoofs the song "I Feel Pretty," from "West Side Story") allows Gomez to joke about the thicket of sexual and cultural confusions she faces.

"It's been hard to peg me because even in my stand-up act I don't just live, breathe and sleep lesbianism," Gomez says.

"I'm out there paying the rent and living a life, just like everyone else. A lot of my comedy really isn't gender-specific. I do have a lot of material about being Latin and gay. But I also have a lot to say about shopping."

Gomez looks forward to working on a film version of "Memory Tricks"; public television's "American Playhouse" has an option to develop it. A big question, she agrees, will be finding the right actress to play her mother.

"I'm always looking because hopefully I'll have a little influence. You know, Chita Rivera and Rita Moreno would have been great, but I need someone who is in her forties."

Though her mother is too ill now to be aware of the project, Gomez does treat her to impromptu mini-performances during frequent visits to New York. "In a funny way," she notes, "my mother and I are closer than we ever have been."