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Luz Nicolas - Award Winning Actress |
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It is not every day that you get to have a conversation with a star of
the theater world on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but recently
Riveting Riffs Magazine sat down over a Zoom call with Luz Nicolas,
originally from Madrid, Spain and having lived in Washington D.C. for
more than a decade and performing and acting as assistant director for
numerous plays over the years at the GALA Hispanic Theater. She was in
the midst of rehearsals for the stage production of Kiss of the
Spider Woman for which she is the assistant director.
For those not
familiar with the play adapted by Manuel Puig from his 1976 novel and
later made into both a film and a musical, she explains, “It is about
two men in jail, but they develop a character of a woman. It is a
fascinating (story). Manuel is an Argentinian playwright. There is also
a film with William Hurt and Raul Julia. I think that was in the ‘80s
(1985) [Editor’s note: The film also starred Sonia Braga in three
roles as Leni Lamaison, Marta and the Spider Woman]
The story is about two men who are in the same cell. One of them is
there, because he is a revolutionary who goes against the government and
the other one is there, because he is gay and he is also accused of
being a pedophile.
It begins with one of them talking about a movie. He is telling a story
about a woman. They get to know how different they are, and yet at the
same time, they are starting to understand each other very well. They
love and care for each other very much.
What he is sharing with the other (person) is not about an
actress. It is about a movie.
One guy who is struggling and is sick and his body is breaking down. The
other man is helping him by telling a story.”
I was also the assistant director of Mummy in the Closet (Momia
en el Clóset) It was a musical at GALA a year ago. It was amazing.
The two actors came from that musical. I am so excited that we are going
to get together. It is kind of like a theater family reunion. It is at
the GALA Hispanic Theater (Kiss of the Spider Woman - El Beso
de la Mujer Araña) in Washington D.C. September 4th to 28th.
It is absolutely amazing.”
After the Kiss of the Spider Woman, you are headed to Pittsburgh
correct?
She says, “I am going be working with Carnegie Mellon University and I
am doing The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico Garcia Lorca. The
master and poet. There is not a (Spanish) theater that does not
(present) a Lorca play. He died very young. He was killed by the
(Franco) dictatorship. He was killed (during) the Spanish Civil War
because he was homosexual. He was an artist and a free spirit. His body
was never found.
I am acting in it. Funny enough in Pittsburgh I will be doing this play
in English. Then in January I am going to do the same play in Spanish in
Washington D.C. I can’t believe I got the same play in Pittsburgh and in
Washington. It is incredible. It is one of my favorite plays. I already
did The House of Bernarda Alba in Madrid. I played one of the
daughters, Martirio. Now I get to play the mother Bernarda.
The story is the mother has five daughters and the father just died. It
was in the south of Spain and in that moment, if your father dies you
have to mourn for eight years. The mother says to her daughters for now
on for eight years, nobody is going to move from the house. Everybody is
going to stay here and everybody is going to wear black. You can imagine
what happens to these five girls who are from their twenties to their
thirties. Your future is just starting and to get married or to fall in
love or to have your first relationship.
The mother says no. Everybody stays home and nobody moves. There is one
male that you never see during the play. He is just a name. One of the
daughters who is from another father she becomes engaged with him. They
can see each other through a window. They never touch, but she is going
to get married. The rest of the daughters also want him. One of them is
already having a relationship with him. All of this is happening in the
house. What you get to see from the play is how these women are
imprisoned by the mother.
Lorca was talking about repression and lack of freedom and how women
didn’t have any rights. They were basically waiting for a male to be
chosen and to have a life. The mother is like a dictator figure. When
you read the play, you figure out this is not only a story about this
mother and five daughters, it is (also) about a time in Spain when there
was a lot of repression. Everything related to sexual encounters and
freedom was impossible. These women had to wait to have a life.
The House of Bernarda Alba is a drama, but it is also a tragedy. It is a
very beautiful, intense and well written, amazing piece. Tell your
readers it is going to happen in Pittsburgh in October and then it is
going to happen in Washington D.C. in February (You just told them
and we didn’t even rehearse that.)”
I started to perform when I was young and my first show was at Teatro
Calderon in Madrid. I was twenty-one. I like musicals, but I am more
like a theater (as in non musical) person. Last year I was in two
dramas, but before that I was in a comedy. I am very good in comedy,
because I started in comedy. It is all about pace and rhythm and
physicality. I am all of that. I really adore comedy. Comedy is
underestimated. Every time that I do comedy people praise me. They say
it is amazing. I have been nominated for many awards, but only when I do
a drama. My audiences love me in comedy.
While acting in
Madrid Luz Nicolas did however perform in some notable musicals, Hello
Dolly and Grease. In the former she played Minnie Faye,
a young assistant to the owner of a hat store. The show opened in
2001 at Teatro
Calderón.
When Grease was first presented in Madrid, at Teatro Lope
de Vega, on February 23, 1999, Luz Nicolas had a prized role as
Jan, one of the Pink Ladies. To quote the Pink Ladies, “Tell me more,
tell me more.”
“Oh my god, I have never worked so hard in my life (she laughs). We
still have a WhatsApp group of Grease and we still chat.
We are really close friends. That show lasted
for a very long time and we were a wonderful group of people
That was a lot of fun and you have to think in that moment, it was the
beginning of the big musicals in Madrid. Madrid (had been) Opera and
theater, but there were no musicals. For me it was a privilege to be a
part of the first generation to open the musical at the Teatro Lope de
Vega.
It was a lot of fun. It was Rock n Roll, a lot of physical work. We were
training intensely for a couple of months. We rehearsed from 9 am until
9 pm every single day. It was very demanding and there was a lot of
dancing and a lot of singing. It was one of the most intense shows that
I have been a part of. It was really incredible,” you can tell she
enjoys remembering these special moments.
Luz that brings us to something else we wanted to talk with you about,
many of our readers have never been to Spain and even less have
experienced how wonderful the theater scene is in particular in Madrid,
but in the country as a whole.
“Absolutely. I am going to start with the beginning of my relationship
with theater in Madrid. I come from a family and my father has nothing
to do with the arts. My mother was not in the arts, but she loves the
arts. She took me to the theater when I was five years old. We lived on
one of the streets near Gran Via and this is where everything happens (For
American readers think of Broadway, for British readers think of the
West End and for Canadians think of the King Street West Theater
District). My mother used to bring me to every single performance
that was around us. I am fifty-two, and I was watching theater since I
was five. Madrid is one of the richest theater places in the entire
world.
I used to go to the theater weekly. There was so much to see. You would
go Thursday to this one, and I am talking about a time when theater was
not expensive. As a child I grew up not only going to the movies, but I
was going to the theater. I was going to see everything. I am talking
about comedies, tragedies, everything (you can hear both the pride in
her voice and the excitement revisited). Right now, they have four
or five theaters (She then rhymes off). (she mentions musicals)
The Lion King, Mama Mia, Pretty Woman the Musical.
As you know Antonio Banderas bought a theater in Malaga in the south of
Spain. Right now, he is doing musicals with his theater company. He did
Gypsy. Everybody who is in that cast of Gypsy, I have been with
them in musicals at some point. [Editor’s Note: As someone who visits
Spain frequently and has been to numerous productions big and small the
excitement on Gran Via, in La Latina and other areas of Madrid needs to
be experienced.]
I love doing musicals, but that was not the path for me. I like just
straight theater. Right now, you have everything you want in Madrid,
Operas, the best comedies, you have small venues, big venues and you
have affordable theaters that you can go to Monday, Tuesday and
Wednesdays,” she says.
Continuing and talking about her early exposure to theater, she says,
“My mom was in love with theater and that is why she took me to
theater so soon (at a young age). Eventually she got into an amateur
theater group and she was in it for twenty years. She always told me I
would never have done it professionally, because she became a mom of
four of us. She said she was never brave enough to become a professional
actor. She knew it was going to be a difficult life. At that moment for
women to be actors in the forties, fifties and sixties it was like being
a whore.
When I left everything and decided to become an actor, my father was
terrified. Actors were pretty much like wild people, people who just
wanted to party and have sex. They were like no good, (not) proper
people. It took a while for me to help my father understand that it is a
very difficult profession. It is a very disciplined profession. My
father was like; I am going to drag you to the university. I said I am
sorry dad. I was a very good student, so when I did my test for
pre-college, I got a really high grade, but at the same time as I was
applying, I was working and practicing for an acting school, Laboratorio
de Teatro William Layton (William Layton's Theatre Laboratory). He was
an actor from the United States who founded this school. At the same
time as they gave me the grades for the pre-college, they also told me I
could start studying drama in that school.
I told my dad this text thing is a good degree for me and also, I got
accepted into the drama school. He screamed at me, are you crazy. The
theater is for whores, for pimps and for bad people. I was like, well I
cannot change your mind, but I am going to do that.
For me it was a very bold jump. I was so set on that I wanted to do that
for the rest of my life. At that moment I was eighteen years old. I have
not stopped working, but it is not easy. Sometimes I had to do other
jobs to be in a restaurant or babysitting or whatever (Editor: and so
many actors can relate to this part of pursuing your passion). I am
working and I make a living.”
We cannot possibly talk about all of Luz Nicolas’ accomplishments or the
many awards for which she has been nominated or the ones she has
received, the Helen Hayes Award and a HOLA / ACE Award. We do however
want to take a moment and talk about an interesting 2020 film in which
she appeared, La Condesa, a collaboration between Honduran and
American filmmakers.
“That was a really beautiful project and the director Mario Ramos and I
met here in the city. He contacted me, because he knew I was an actor.
He needed an actor for a commercial and he said he needed an actor for a
voiceover. We met and we did a couple of things together, but he is
really a film director. He was collaborating with a screenwriter and
they had the script for La Condesa. He said Luz I want you to be
La Condesa and that is the name of the house but is also a
woman who lives there in the house. It is kind of like a horror movie.
When I read the script, Mario said I also want you to be the casting
director, because you know every actor in the area, not only in
Washington, but in New York and we also need actors who speak Spanish.
The film is in Spanish with subtitles.
We got the cast
together and we were ready to shoot the movie. They found a haunted
house in Ellicott City, Maryland (at Lilburn Mansion). We all
moved to this area and we started shooting the movie about a haunted
house and three different generations. What you see in the movie is
three different times in the story of that house. La Condesa is a
story about her killing young girls. She was like a witch. (Luz, I
thought you said this was a beautiful film – We are teasing you.)
There were two different couples who came to enjoy the house. It is a
movie about everything that might happen in that haunted house and does
happen.
It was a lot of fun to work in that movie. We had a blast. Three weeks
into the shooting and the Corona Virus alerts started and they said they
were going to lock down everyone, so we had to finish the movie fast. At
the third week we were doing everything super fast, because the minute
that we finished everybody had to go back to their places. That is when
the lockdown started. Some actors had to go back to New York by car,
because there were no airplanes. It was at the beginning of the
(pandemic). Some of the actors who were (returning) to Honduras and
other places got stuck in the United States,” she says.
One would think moving from Spain to the United States when an actor is
well established in her career might come with some significant
adjustments.
Luz Nicolas
compares the two countries in terms of their approach to acting and
preparing for a play, “My career in Spain (began) when I was twenty and
I came here when I was thirty-nine. I was already twenty years into my
career in Madrid. I was used to having time for rehearsals. Usually in
Madrid, Spain we have at least forty-five days of rehearsals and then
you open the show. You got through the first rehearsal with the script,
your part memorized. When you got to the rehearsal you did not have to
have the script in your hand. You could dedicate your spirit, your soul,
your eyes and your body to
work with what you have around you.
You have this time to rehearse with the director, the assistant director
and with the designers who are a part of the rehearsal process. When you
get into the previews you are really prepared and everybody is on the
same page. The process is deep. Once you open the show it isn’t for two
weeks or three weeks or a weekend. It is for six months or a year. In
Spain we have tours. When you open the show, you know you are going to
spend one month in Madrid, another month in Barcelona another month in
Valencia, a week in Mallorca, a week in Galicia, so you get to squeeze
the performance, to love it, integrate it and make it better, because
you have time.
When I got here, at first it was very shocking, because musical tours
don’t exist in the United States. There are no theater shows that have
tours. I don’t know anybody who went on tours at all. The musicals have
gone on tour, but those are big musicals. It is not better or worse. I
just had to adjust. The process here is very fast.
Here it is all about blocking. When you first start working with
American directors it is all about blocking the show. Where are you
going to be? Where do you go? Now you go up. Now you go down. It is from
there that you start creating. For me coming from Spain, it was the
opposite, you start creating, experimenting, trying and then naturally
the blocking comes. Here for me it was blocking first and then create.
That took time for me to adjust. Now I have it integrated, because I
have already been doing it for thirteen years.
You get used to it. In a way, it is like some painters, who start by
just scratching and that is the way that I do my job as an actor. I am
like the person who opens the notebook and scratches ideas. They try and
then they (think) this is not working. Some painters need to have the
frame and the lines before. I am the opposite. I like the sketching
part. I try and fail and I try and find. When you start with the
blocking you miss that part.
It works (the blocking) and that is why they do it. There are a lot of
people who love that. With the blocking they feel safer. People here
memorize after the blocking. They get the words as they are walking the
stage. As I said, in Spain you always get to the first rehearsal with
the script memorized. At the first rehearsal you are going to look to
the other actors’ and partners’ eyes. You can only do that if you have
it memorized. I am not saying that you have to already have everything
planned, but you know the words, so now you are free to see what happens
around you. I love that. That is freedom for me.
You can follow Luz
Nicolas on
Instagram
here
or
Facebook
#LuzNicolasActriz #LuzNicolas #RivetingRiffsMagazine #RivetingRiffs #MadridTeatro #TeatroEnEspana #LuzNicolasEntrevista #KissOfTheSpiderWoman #EntrevistaConActrices
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As
for how she became involved in the play she says, “I have worked many
times with the director 