"A play should educate and entertain," said Carlos Morton, using his Univ. of Calif., Riverside, professor voice, in a 1989 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW (LATR) interview by Lee A. Daniel of Texas Christian University. This 1983 anthology was the first published of Morton's plays. It includes "The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales" (1976), "Rancho Hollywood" (1980), "Los Dorados" (The Golden Ones, 1978), and "El Jardin" (The Garden, 1975). (Dates represent year of first production.) Morton was born in Chicago, Ill., but his father's military career necessitated moves to other cities in the U.S. and Latin America. The playwright's escapades as a young man included hitchhiking to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and back in nine months so that he could improve his Spanish. It was his grandfather who lifted the surname "Morton" from a Morton Salt billboard; the name change worked like a charm for grandpa Carlos Perez who finally reeled in a job the first time he used it. (See Alicia Arrizon's bio on Morton in CHICANO WRITERS, 2nd ser., DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY, vol. 122.)

The spark for "The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales" was a NEW YORK TIMES clipping about the 1975 murder of a 26-year-old Chicano construction worker by the police chief of a rural Texas town near San Antonio. A slap-on-the-hand sentence dispensed as justice mobilized Chicanos to request a federal investigation. Morton read through court transcripts and interviewed local residents. The courtroom drama was written with input from Morton's fellow M.F.A. students at Univ. of Calif., San Diego (UCSD). The actual names of the people connected to the criminal incident were used in that 1977 version. However, their names and the play's title were changed when Morton reworked the script in 1980 for the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts in Los Angeles. The play "is seemingly calculated to rouse the audience from their seats directly into a protest rally," wrote TIME magazine in 1988. It won Joseph Papp's 2nd National Latino Playwriting Contest in 1986.

In 1995 I saw a production of "Rancho Hollywood" performed by Grupo de Teatro Sinergia at Unity Arts Center Theatre in Los Angeles. The playwright was in attendance. "Rancho" is a tongue-in-cheek account of California history beginning with the territory's collision with Manifest Destiny. It's also a parody of the popular Ramona pageant, officially designated California's State Outdoor Play, based on Helen Jackson's 1884 novel RAMONA of a doomed romance between an indigenous man and a Spanish senorita. As the play opens, they're busily filming "Ye Olde California Days." The movie's cast of characters includes Governor Rio Rico and his family. (The truth is the last Mexican governor of California was Pio Pico; Morton's "Rancho" character names have a tendency to wink back.) The playwright pulls out all the stops to get clear shots at culturally disparaging cartoon media stereotypes and "it-don't-hold-water" racial prejudices.

"Los Dorados" (The Golden Ones) can be thought of as a prequel to "Rancho Hollywood" though "Dorados" was written first. It's a seriocomic reconstruction of the initial meetings between a California indigenous tribe self-named the Kemyia and the invading Spanish soldiers and missionaries. The characters occasionally access a contemporary frame of mind, which creates a cognitive dissonance leading to laughter or reflection, perhaps both.

"El Jardin" is a Chicano musical spin on the Adam-and-Eve myth (Adam-vs.-Eve is more like it). Bennett B. McClellan in a 1977 LATR review wrote, "Given the context of the play, and the stage of development of Chicano theatre, I perceive that it is a work of great innovation and even daring." (It was called "El Garden" for the 1976 UCSD production to advertise that the play was not wholly in Spanish.) John Igo for the SAN ANTONIO LIGHT said of Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center's 1983 production, "It's toughminded and hurtful, wise and silly, pious and profane, primitive and subtle, but unfailingly interesting." La Serpiente (The Serpent) and a "Just-Do-It!" Eva play against Dios (God) and a stick-in-the-mud Adan. The characters are jerked from a paradise of ignorance...to the year of Christopher Columbus...to the top of an Aztec pyramid where Eva eats tuna (prickly pear) from the Forbidden Tree..to the suburbs of Chicago...to land in the middle of the Chicano movement. Sounds like a familiar journey, doesn't it?

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