INTERVIEW: Roxana Ortega on the fine line between laughing and sobbing
Photo: Am I Roxie? is written by and stars Roxana Ortega. Photo courtesy of Jeff Lorch / Provided by Geffen Playhouse with permission.
Roxana Ortega’s new one-person show at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, titled Am I Roxie?, is that special type of theater that straddles the fine line between outrageously hilarious and somberly saddening. On the surface, Ortega is exploring some tough territory, including her mother’s mental decline, but she retells these family stories with a sense of whimsy, wit and wonder, which allows the audience at the Geffen to laugh while they are simultaneously crying.
“While my mother was sick — this is all the way back at least in 2013 — I started writing stories of what was happening, and I would take the stories to open mics and do stories at The Moth,” Ortega said in a recent phone interview. “And then over time I knew I wanted to turn them into a show because I just loved that art form of a solo show, and it took me so long to figure out how to structure it, how to weave all these stories into a narrative.”
Eventually Ortega hooked up with the Ammunition Theatre Company and its playwrights initiative. She workshopped the piece there, had a reading, nabbed a first-rate director (Bernardo Cubría) and tried to elicit a response from the audience. Luckily, a representative from the Geffen was in the crowd, and the rest is history.
As the piece readied itself for the Geffen run, Ortega kept changing words, adding some and deleting others.
“I retained some of the words for sure,” she said about the evolution from open-mic nights to what is currently running in Los Angeles. “There was material that I knew that worked in front of a live audience, but then I had to let go of a lot because, for example, there’s a part where I go to Africa to Kilimanjaro. … I had an in-depth story just about that. That is in the show, but it’s just a sliver of the full story. But we wove it into the narrative of this show, and so this Geffen piece has some elements that remained and then some totally new things and some new fictionalized things. So, yeah, it’s been a real growth process with the piece.”
Divulging personal details, even ones that can be painful, is perfectly fine for Ortega. She said that this type of truth-telling is definitely within her nature.
“I believe that sharing your personal stories allows people to connect in a very deep way, and the more vulnerable that you’re willing to go, the more reward for connection there is,” said Ortega, who has acted in TV’s For the People, Santa Clarita Diet and New Girl. “That’s what I believe. It doesn’t mean that it’s easy, especially in this piece. It is quite raw and vulnerable and scary, but I still know that that is who I am. And I have such a strong mission around it. … Through the specific is the universal, so the more specific you’re willing to get, the more people will relate to you.”
The response at the Geffen has been overwhelming to Ortega. She absolutely loves that so many diverse people have taken away important lessons from the play.
“It’s just the best feeling you can have as a writer,” she said. “People who have gone through grief, people who have gone through caregiving, people who are comedians who just love the art form, Latinas who feel like it’s just so exciting to see another Latina tell her story on stage and talk about it from that perspective, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and amazing.”
Am I Roxie? is not a downer of an evening. Instead, Ortega weaves in humorous asides to lighten the material. Perhaps this comedic bent comes from her time at the Groundlings’ Sunday Company.
“When you’re in something sad and dark, you need to laugh the most,” Ortega said. “We have it. It’s part of our survival mechanism, I believe, so my brain in the darkest of moments always finds levity and seeks levity. And anyone who has been through anything harrowing knows that there’s comedy in it, and sometimes you just have to laugh. … That is part of the truth-telling, I believe, of the story, and I take the audience on quite the emotional ride. People have said, ‘I was sobbing and then laughing through my sobbing.’ … They’re not just crying; they’re sobbing, and that makes me laugh.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Am I Roxie?, written by and starring Roxana Ortega, continues at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles through Oct. 5. Click here for more information and tickets.
