Q&A: Tony Taccone, director of “Latin History for Morons”

Tony Taccone behind the scenes of "Latin History for Morons." Photo courtesy of Public Theater. Photo of John Leguizamo by Joan Marcus.

Tony Taccone is the director of “Latin History for Morons,” a one-man play inspired by actor John Leguizamo’s search for notable Latinos overlooked in American history. City & State’s Jon Lentz spoke with Taccone about the play, which is playing at The Public Theater through late April, and what it’s like working with Leguizamo. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

C&S: So you’re the director of "Latin History for Dummies" ...

TT: "Latin History for Morons." It used to be called "Latin History for Dummies," but the people who owned the patent on those books threatened to sue us, if you can believe that. So we had to change the title.

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C&S: How would you describe the play?

TT: The play started with John. He was in a workshop at my theater in Berkeley, California, just working on some new material and he came on this idea of doing a lecture about Latin history. He’d gotten really turned on by this personal quest of his to rediscover his own Latin history roots. It turned into kind of a lecture and he started to perform it at some comedy club-type of venues. It quickly became apparent that the audience had come for a night of comedy, and that John’s best intentions as a lecturer was not fulfilling their expectations. So he was like, how do I make this entertaining? Two things happened. One is he tried to find a way to make the material entertaining as well as interesting because he really did want to educate the audience as well as himself about the unspoken history of Latin folks.

"I’d actually sworn off one-person shows. ... But John is so damn good."

The other thing that happened was, with my encouragement, and some others folks wanted him to personalize the story. So the very tiny seed of what was a kind of father-son story, which was somewhat autobiographic, which tracks the story of his son being bullied at school, and how they dealt with that, became a parallel track: John trying educate himself, the audience and his son about Latin history became the three-dimensional paradigm for the show.

C&S: What’s it like to work with John Leguizamo?

TT: I’d actually sworn off one-person shows. I had done a bunch of them, and as wonderful as the performers were that I was working with, it’s a whole different experience. But John is so damn good, and we were close at that point. I just thought, I’d like to hang out with this guy and see what we got. Literally that was three years ago.

C&S: Is there anything that you learned?

TT: Yeah. I’m half-Italian and half-Puerto Rican on my mom’s side, and it’s a little embarrassing how much I did learn. I generally knew some stuff, but when you look back at the level of information that’s been dismissed or ignored or lost to the annals of history, it’s pretty astonishing. And then there’s a section where he comes into modern times, and it’s pretty disarming. So it’s not just people who were war heroes or did something important, but there’s a sense of the dormancy we’re all carrying in this unconscious way. So I learned a lot.

C&S: What is the play’s relevance in the Trump era? Is there a greater resonance?

TT: Absolutely. Every piece of work that you see now is going through what you might call the Trump lens. I’m sure that you experience this every day. Everything you look at has this other kind of light or shadow on it, depending on where you’re coming from. I just feel like it’s a new day, you know, what’s the new normal? The sense of urgency John brings to the material, the sense of looking at these particular events, given the fact that there’s this new administration that feels hellbent on re-establishing the supremacy of (the) white American, in whatever terms that means to anybody, it’s there. So we’re in dialogue with that. It’s funny, John had this line in the show that he’s had in there for two years. He’s talking about Columbus, and says, “Columbus was the Donald Trump of the New World.” It always got a big response. Well, now it’s getting an electrifying response. It’s there in the show, it’s referenced a number of times, but you don’t have to do much to get that political resonance to be felt in a very immediate way.