Word: zoot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...highly controlled intensity. Playing the teacher in Stand and Deliver or Lieut. Castillo in Miami Vice, he holds in his energy, radiating it through a laser-beam stare. He is every minority rebel putting his fireworks on a long fuse. In a few roles -- the strutting El Pachuco in Zoot Suit or the crazed, canine avenger in Wolfen -- Olmos cuts loose and explodes with more than his eyes. Nostrils flare, teeth flash, the body language becomes incendiary...
...hooligans. "I was the only person Jack Lord shot in the back, ever," he notes dryly. "That's how bad I was." Then in 1978, during an audition for a play at Los Angeles' Mark Taper theater, he was asked if he would like to try out for Zoot Suit, Luis Valdez's musical drama about the famous "Sleepy Lagoon" case of 1942, in which a group of Hispanic youths were wrongly convicted of a murder...
...Zoot Suit, which opened in February 1978, was scheduled to run at the Mark Taper for ten days. It ended up playing for a year before moving to Broadway, where it closed after seven weeks. Olmos' disappointment was soothed by a Tony nomination (he had already won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award and a Theater World award) and the chance to star in the film version of the play, which Valdez also directed. Acting roles came in faster after that. Wolfen (1981) was followed by Blade Runner (1982), in which Olmos played a multiethnic in the year...
...generation takes its inspiration from the pioneering Hispanic playwrights Maria Irene Fornes (Fefu and Her Friends), Luis Valdez (Zoot Suit, I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges) and the late Miguel Pinero (Short Eyes). Four younger writers particularly stand out. They happen to reflect the major ethnic subdivisions within the Hispanic community -- Cuban exile, Chicano, Puerto Rican and Latin American emigre -- and to embrace literary styles ranging from political invective to lyrical recollection. What distinguishes them, however, is not such representative qualities but a memorable personal vision...
Reinaldo Povod's first full-length play, Cuba and His Teddy Bear, included a street-poet character who was widely seen as a tribute to Miguel Pinero. And like Pinero's. Short Eyes and Valdez's Zoot Suit, Povod's explosive play made the move to Broadway. The script was helped by the casting of Robert De Niro in his first New York stage role in 16 years. Its central character, like the author, was a bright and literate kid who turned to drugs just because they were so pervasive in his environment. Povod, 28, admits that he was addicted...