John Leguizamo took the Page Auditorium stage Tuesday night with a friendly wave and a brewski in hand. As I heard someone whisper behind me, "Is that a beer?", he took a slow sip of Heineken and announced, "I'm trying something a little different tonight, so I brought some lubrication."
The evening, sponsored by Broadway at Duke, On Stage and Mi Gente, continued on a similarly irreverent tack. Leguizamo is likely best known among the college set for roles in Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge, as well as the HBO film Undefeated. Those from the New York area might have seen his solo stage work, most notably Freak and Sexaholix, evenings scripted by Leguizamo with scenes from his own life, exploring his relationships with everything from his father to the Democratic Party.
Tuesday's performance incorporated elements from Freak and Sexaholix, but was a combination lecture-performance: an hour-and-fifty-minutes of extemporaneous speaking on his remarkable career, punctuated with bursts of physical expression that sent him away from and around his a-bit-too-high podium. Discussing former girlfriends and the amount of alcohol necessary to get him through the Super Mario Brothers movie shoot, he followed uncouth comments with "Yeah, I said that," and called out late audience members: "Yeah, thanks for coming. Who is that? Ah, we're on Latin People Time."
An attentive audience delivered the appropriate laughs and roars, but not without a number of gasps and groans. After congratulating his fellow Latin actors, Benicio Del Toro, Benjamin Bratt and Luis Guzman, he poured a little of his Heinie out for the rest. He also commented on some other members of the film community, finishing most anecdotes with "What's said in Durham stays in Durham."
"I'm not here as an example," Leguizamo said, "but as a horrible warning." He commentedin a brief interview after the show, "I'm at a new point in my life and in my work, where I wanted to do something less performative, about how my career went along."
One has to wonder, though, how much of a "horrible warning" Leguizamo is--he's the one behind the podium, after all; he must've done something right. Despite wicked early reviews comparing him to Carrot Top, being the only Latin student in his class at NYU's Tisch School for the Arts and finding early on that Latin roles tend to find limits as drug dealers, gang members, henchmen, thugs, guest villains and janitors, he's nabbed a number of motley roles working with some of the best in the business. "There are more Latin roles now because of money," he said, "and there are also more Latinos, but a lot more middle-class Latinos." Backstage after the show, he talked to family on his cell phone, hanging up with an "I love you" before taking an interview. The result of his life seems more inspirational or enviable than cautionary--the end of his talk was on a similar note: "Do it your way. I wrote my own stuff, and it was bumpier and took longer, but if someone calls you and offers you a role as a drug dealer or a thug, you just say, 'no thanks--I'm playing myself on Broadway.'"
Could he perform this material in New York or LA? "I'd have to talk to my lawyers first," he said. Too much picking on big names. Fame has a price, including watching what you say. "You lose your privacy. The biggest pro of fame is power. I can pick what I want to do, start projects, say no to things. And there's... uh... the money. I wouldn't necessarily want to be more famous, but I wouldn't mind a little more power."
Judging by the crowd, both in Page and hanging out near a post-show reception hoping for an autograph, the inspiration has worked.
"I liked hearing his life story," said junior Natalie Lamela. "It was rewarding to have a Latino speaker as big as him on campus. The jokes made his hardships easier to take, the way he had to deal with failure and keep going." Vanessa Rodriguez chimed in, "I really liked that he drank a beer on stage."
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