Playwright Isaac Gomez blends memories, fiction in ‘The Leopard Play’

Playwright Isaac Gomez grew up in the Texas border town of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and he returns there in his raw emotional plays that have tagged him as a rising star in American theater.

“The farther I get away, the more I yearn for it,” says Gomez, who now lives in Chicago. “I feel my spirit pulling me back in a way that says ‘No you’re not done here.’ There’s a lot to unearth and so much people don’t know about what it was like to grow up here.”

Two plays with all female casts, “La Ruta” and “the way she spoke,” were centered on the plague of kidnappings and murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez since 1993. The former debuted at Steppenwolf Theatre in 2018; and the latter had an Off Broadway run last summer at Minetta Lane Theatre.

In his newest work, the all-male “The Leopard Play, or sad songs for lost boys,” Gomez switches gears for a more personal story about a writer, simply named Son, who travels back to his family home somewhere along the border to search for answers about his uncle’s mysterious death and confront memories he thought he had left behind.

“I feel my subconscious has been sort of carrying the intention of this story since childhood,” says Gomez, who grew up one of four sons in a Catholic Mexican family. “There was a strong presence of uncles on my father’s side. I spent the majority of my life in relation to these men trying to understand what kind of a man am I especially as someone who is gay.”

Gomez originally came to Chicago for an internship with the Goodman Theatre and then began working in new-play development and dramaturgy at Victory Gardens Theater where he first met “The Leopard Play” director Laura Alcalá Baker. They have remained close friends and collaborators, she says.

Lee Miller

“It’s rare that you meet a writer and collaborator who so closely speaks to your sensibilities and your instincts,” says Alcalá Baker, who also directed the 2016 world premiere of “the way she spoke” at the Greenhouse Theater Center. “There’s something about what he puts on the page that even in its infancy I can feel it before I can see it and that’s such a remarkable thing for a director. I can feel the play radiating off the page.”

The majority of Gomez’s work centers on the experiences of women mainly because as a child he says it was the women who consoled him when he felt displaced by the men in his family — behavior such as playing Barbies with his cousins was frowned upon.

“I understand a woman’s world from a deeply empathetic place because they gave me access to their psyche in a way that men often aren’t allowed,” he says.

Adds Alcalá Baker: “When you remove the women from the equation, the equilibrium is off and Isaac creates a whole new world.”

Thinking back, Gomez says it feels as if he wrote “The Leopard Play” “in a fever dream. “It just sort of poured out of me and pulled from a lot of memories,” he says. The piece has autobiographical elements (Gomez did have an uncle who died mysteriously) but also is hugely fictionalized.

“In my attempts to seek the truth around his death, I learned of the deep and dark underbelly of a world in which my family had been forced to fall into and which they kept hidden from me,” he says.

A big part of the story is a son’s return home and what happens, what patterns do you fall back into not just within family but also in extensions of family, Gomez says.

“The play goes between scenes with men in Son’s family and scenes with men he has sexual and violent relationships with. It’s an attempt to explore the why. Why are we the way we are in the context of men and masculinity?”

Gomez has been openly gay for years and yet when he looked at his body of work he realized something was missing. There were queer elements in his plays but none of the characters were queer and he thought, “Why is that?”

“It’s such a huge part of who I am and yet it somehow hadn’t made its way into my plays. What I realized is that the intersectionality of my queerness and my Latinoness had kept me in a place where I felt like I could not, should not unearth this.”

He says “The Leopard Play” is very much his first “explicitly queer play.”

“Its hugely terrifying because being a queer person means a lot of really beautiful and amazing things but for me as someone who grew up in a largely Catholic Mexican environment it was a very painful thing that I’m still dealing with today. And I know this is true of so many others who grew up believing their mere existence was wrong. This play tries to understand why.”

Mary Houlihan is a local freelance writer.