Paola Lázaro puts her demons, and family, to work
NEW YORK — Paola Lázaro’s inner left wrist is marked with a jagged outline of Puerto Rico, where she was born and raised.
“My uncle tattooed me, in exchange for a pack of Marlboro Reds,” Lázaro, a playwright and actress, explained.
Lázaro had just spent the morning watching a rehearsal of her new play — her first to be produced professionally — “Tell Hector I Miss Him,” which is in previews and opens Monday, Jan. 23, at the Atlantic Theater Company.
The cast includes two stars of the hit Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black,” Selenis Leyva and Dascha Polanco, as well as Lázaro’s fellow writer-performer Lisa Ramirez, in whose work “To the Bone” she acted two years ago.
Before the company broke for lunch, two other actors, Flaco Navaja and Luis Vega — playing a luckless cocaine enthusiast named Hugo and a clownlike figure called El Mago in Old San Juan — ran a scene in which they have drug-induced visions.
El Mago (Spanish for magician) is based on Lázaro’s paternal grandfather, who has so longed to be reunited with his dead wife that he has devised various suicide strategies and related them — with some humor, apparently — to the playwright’s mother.
“He says, ‘Tell the kids to come visit me in the next 20 days, because I’m going to die,’” Lázaro recalled.
Stephen Adly Guirgis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who mentored Lázaro as she earned her master’s in fine arts from Columbia University in 2013, remembers when she first approached him after a panel: Her head was down.
For Guirgis, the mentoring process was about sorting out which demons are your friends, which you can use and run with, and which need day-to-day management.
The community represented in “Tell Hector” would seem more disenfranchised than the one that produced Lázaro, whose parents are professionals; Lázaro lived with them in a suburb of San Juan before moving, at 17, to study at the State University of New York at Purchase.
[...] the plot has echoes in her experience, including a character with fetal-alcohol syndrome inspired by her uncle.
Polanco’s Malena — “the hottest woman in the neighborhood,” Lázaro noted — is coveted by Isis, a breathless teenage girl.
“People think that in Hispanic countries they don’t accept gay people, and in some cases they don’t — there are parents that would try to beat that out of you,” she said.
Neil Pepe, Atlantic’s artistic director, first met Lázaro during readings of Guirgis’ “Between Riverside and Crazy,” which had its debut at the theater in 2014.