Playwright’s “Ghosts” Reflect a Spirit of Santa Ana

*This is wonderful. We could fill so many pages and so many stages with the stories we remember. VL

By Paloma Esquivel, Los Angeles Times

 In Jose Cruz Gonzalez’s mind, Santa Ana is a city haunted by the dead.

The playwright sees their ghosts watching from the cemeteries and rooftops: Klan members who patrolled local neighborhoods, men shouting their barrio names into the air, and la llorona, the weeping woman, playing tricks with refrigerator doors.

They preside over the city’s unyielding landscape, its streets adorned by multicolored altars marking lost lives with school pictures and dollar store candles.

The ghosts, he writes, won’t be found in Irvine or Costa Mesa. They haunt their own people in Santana.

For more than a year, Gonzalez has been getting to know the ghosts of this crowded, densely packed city in the heart of Orange County, mining its secrets through interviews with hundreds of residents.

A play, based on those interviews and commissioned by South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, is starting to take shape, and ghosts have found themselves in characters like a young boy named Andrés, who one day was playing in the street and never heard the truck barreling toward him.

Click HERE to read the full story.

[Photo courtesy Los Angeles Times]

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