You’ll often hear college students complain about assignments that are just busy work, time fillers, not worth their ever-important and rapidly disappearing free time.
But for Mina Olivera, an innocuous assignment about her life as a class assignment at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television led to a whole lot more, having inspired her new play, currently showing at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.
Though it took her seven years to really pursue it, the positive responses Olivera received planted the seed for what has become her one-woman show, “LOL! Latina on the Loose,” which follows her life from Brazil to Switzerland to El Salvador and finally to America.
After working as an actress in Los Angeles after graduating in 1999, frustrations with roles in the industry led her to focus on her own writing, and last year she presented her idea for a one-woman show to her good friend, fellow Theater, Film and Television alumnus Miguel Angel Caballero, the producer of “LOL!” It was after a dinner one night during which Olivera came out as one of the characters, that Caballero decided to help produce it.
“It was the funniest thing that I had ever seen. So she kind of pulled a fast one on me because she knew I was going to love it, and then I just got completely involved,” Caballero said.
Now there’s a whole host of UCLA alumni involved, foremost of which is Alberto Barboza, the director, who first worked with Olivera at the Latino Theater Company. Working along with them are recent alumni Francois-Pierre Couture, set designer; Marika Stephens, associate set designer; Emarie Kohlmoos, the costume designer; and Sohail Najafi, the lighting designer.
“When you’re working with people from your school, there’s a lot of unifying elements, past experiences, teachers, and hoops you had to jump through,” Najafi said. “It strikes me that even over a decade, a lot of the experiences and challenges are the same.”
Though Barboza had little experience directing one-person shows, he said it worked to their advantage.
“I didn’t have a preconception of what one-person shows should be, so that allowed us to be a little more free with the form,” Barboza said.
Freedom was something that was important to Olivera, not only in the structure of the show, but in her acting career in general ““ the original motivation behind her decision to pursue writing.
“I felt like I was waiting for things to happen, when I wanted to take command and control of my career,” Olivera said.
A large inspiration for the play came from Olivera’s grandmother, whose advice to her was always, “Show them your worth!” Olivera said that it was two days after she left Brazil for Los Angeles that her grandmother passed away.
“I always had this guilt of not being there, … so the play was a way to honor my grandmother and tell our story about everything that she taught me,” she said.
The lessons of her grandmother would come in handy as Olivera was exposed to the harsh realities of the Hollywood industry. With a theater degree from UCLA, Olivera expected a great acting career to come immediately upon graduation, but she soon found that it wasn’t that simple.
“The politics of it all became frustrating; why you get chosen for a role or not is not necessarily the talent,” Caballero said. “So that’s how the production company was born, to make jobs for ourselves and our fellow alumni.”
Barboza said he believes that it is this type of self-sufficient graduate that UCLA sends out into the world that creates such a strong community of alumni.
“It’s the independent spirit of UCLA that has set us out on our own journey; knowing that we have other alumni artists that are supporting each other,” he said.