Seeing Angels -- `Marisol' Is Unlike That Other Big Play, Jose Rivera Says

----------------------------------------------------------------- Book reading

Jose Rivera reads from his play, "Cloud Tectonics," 7:30 p.m. Monday

at Elliott Bay Books. At 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, he'll sign copies of the "Marisol" script at the Group Theatre, Seattle Center. Details: 441-1299. -----------------------------------------------------------------

To Jose Rivera, there's nothing exotic about angels.

"When I was growing up, angel imagery was part of my everyday life," says the playwright, an ex-New Yorker now based in Los Angeles. "We had pictures of angels all around the house.

"I come from a very religious Puerto Rican, Roman Catholic family and guardian angels were just part of our reality. I think that's where `Marisol' comes from."

"Marisol," a much-discussed 1992 drama by Rivera, opens Wednesday at the Group Theatre under Tim Bond's direction. And the fact that an angel figures largely in this futuristic, phantasmagorical urban tale has caused Rivera some grief.

By a kink of scheduling, "Marisol" premiered Off Broadway in New York about the same time Tony Kushner's ballyhooed "Angels in America" arrived on Broadway.

And even though the battered guerrilla spirit in "Marisol" bears little resemblance to the white-robed, broad-winged angel hovering over Kushner's drama, critics couldn't resist contrasting the two - usually at Rivera's expense.

"The timing coincidence was really hard," sighs the writer. "Few critics understood that the two plays have very different agendas.

"Tony Kushner and I are roughly the same age" - Rivera is 40 - "with the same political concerns. But our plays are separate and distinct. It's unfair to compare them."

Inspired by `Paradise Lost'

Celestial apparitions aside, he has a point. "Marisol" focuses on the surreal, harrowing, yet finally hopeful odyssey of its title character, a young Puerto Rican woman, dubbed by a friend, "Miss Puerto Rican Yuppie Princess of the Universe."

During an apocalyptic dark night of the soul in a blighted New York of the future, Marisol (played at the Group by Sol Miranda) becomes vulnerable when her guardian angel (Leslie Doqui), goes off to join an angels' revolt against God. Without divine protection, Marisol must learn to survive, and work to keep her decaying city alive.

Acknowledging John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost" as an inspiration, Rivera notes, "The angels' rebellion is an old concept, as old as religion itself. If the earth's health is tied to God's health, and God is very old and degenerating, it's the civilization's responsibility to kill him and protect the planet.

"That's in Milton, but there are even shadows and echoes of it in the Eucharist, where you consume the body of the dead Christ to be saved."

Rivera also sees his play, which has been successfully presented around the U.S., as a political parable: "I wrote it when the Berlin Wall was falling, and old and corrupt governments were being toppled by citizens. So the examples were there."

Breaking stereotypes

Though set in New York, "Marisol" could "just as easily have taken place in San Diego or Chicago." But the choice of an upwardly mobile Latina protagonist was very deliberate. "It's a cliche buster," Rivera contends. "People expect lower-class Latino characters, but that's only part of our story. To me there's nothing unusual about a Puerto Rican yuppie."

Putting realistic people in fantastical situations is also nothing new to Rivera, whose career took off in 1983 with an award-winning memory play,"The House of Ramon Iglesias."

Though he began writing "realistic, Clifford Odets-type, kitchen-sink family dramas," Rivera soon shifted to a "magical realist" style akin to the poetic sensibility of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges and other Latin American novelists.

"I wanted to find my own voice instead of trying to write like every American playwright that ever was," he notes. "Magical realism was a literary form that really spoke to my identity, my background, my people's obsessions."

Rivera applauds the efforts of other dramatists (including Kushner) to mesh the familiar and hallucinatory: "We playwrights need to distinguish our work from TV and films, which do realism to perfection. Why should people go to the theater unless we have something different to offer them?"

But does Rivera personally believe in the angels he conjures? "No," he admits. "I'm a real skeptic. But I do think what we perceive as everyday reality is just a tiny part of it.

"You know, the mythologist Joseph Campbell once was asked if he believed in heaven. He said, `No, but it's a wonderful metaphor.' That's exactly what I feel."