Gustavo Ott grew up wanting to be a rock star. He became a theater star instead. Now he has brought his talents to North Texas.
Ott, 59, was hired earlier this year as the new artistic director of Teatro Dallas, which this month is premiering his latest play, The 22+ Weddings of Hugo Multiple. It sounds like a comedy because it is one. The prolific playwright — he has written more than 50 stage shows produced around the world — uses humor to get at serious themes like empathy and what it means to find refuge.
A native of Caracas, Venezuela, Ott likes tapping true stories as a spark for his imagination. Most of the details he makes up.
In the case of Hugo Multiple, he was headed to a theater festival in Tunisia in 2017 when he read an article in an old airline magazine about frauds committed by immigrants to get papers. One of them revolved around an American from the Midwest who, in the 1980s, somehow got away with helping immigrants stay in the United States by marrying them.
The actual number was 17, according to Ott. The rest of the marriages are creative license. For one thing, “22+” has a nicer ring to it.
“It’s a play about an idea more than the story,” he says in an interview on set at the Latino Cultural Center’s black box performance space before a rehearsal. “Our imagination is so priceless, I didn’t want the real story to interfere with the philosophy I already had.”
That philosophy concerns the “other,” as described by contemporary thinkers he’s read, particularly French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Giving more consideration to other people could help solve seemingly intractable social issues like climate change, Ott believes.
“He didn’t charge anyone, and it wasn’t because of sex,” he says of the real-life person Hugo Wagner is based on. “It was because of the other. And there was a personal reason. Something very real happened to this guy. That’s the secret of the play.”
Ott made Hugo a postal clerk and the son of Ghanaian diplomats to the U.S., based on neighbors he had in Virginia, where he lived before moving to Dallas. He developed the three other characters the same way.
At the Tunisian festival, Ott met a woman from Egypt who becomes Wafa Habib, one of the many people Hugo marries. “She had emigrated four times. Every time she was to leave a country to look for another one, she found a revolution such that you had to run away. I realized her story is so incredible. It goes directly to the idea of looking for a refuge.”
At first, the play was a going to be a monologue. Then Ott found other people to build characters from, including his nephew, a writer who was forced to leave Venezuela. He represents those who lose their professions because of language or cultural barriers when they flee to another country.
Hugo Multiple is naturalistic, driven by dialogue in realistic settings, Ott says. But it also breaks the fourth wall, the characters addressing the audience in the self-referential Brechtian style Ott favors. This is how the audience learns about the many other immigrants Hugo helped.
Warm and quietly gregarious, Ott can talk for hours about the modern ideas that drive his plays, the politics behind them.
“He’s very erudite, but he’s not stuffy,” says Sara Cardona, a visual artist who had been artistic director of Teatro Dallas since 2018. She has now moved over to the fundraising job of development director. Her mother, company co-founder Cora Cardona, previously retired as artistic director to spend more time in her native Mexico. “He’s actually very approachable. He laughs a lot and makes everybody really comfortable.”
Ott’s parents divorced when he was young. His mother worked two jobs to support him and his older brother. He saw his father only once or twice a year. Later, his father came to all of Ott’s openings. Ott says he never talked about his upbringing because he didn’t want his plays analyzed as being inspired by the lack of a father figure.
His grades were good, he says, but he also had a penchant for getting in trouble. He stumbled into theater when his teenage band began practicing in the space of a Caracas troupe affiliated with his high school next door. He played drums but says he didn’t have a melodic enough ear to get really good at music.
Ott wound up falling in love with the power of lighting as a storytelling tool and began working on the technical side of theater. One day, the director of the company asked actors to pick a Venezuelan folk story and write a play based on it. Ott wasn’t included, but he went home and wrote one anyway. Blindly submitted, his Horns of the Crow was chosen for production. Ott was hooked.
His breakthrough was a 1989 comedy called Divorcees, Evangelists and Vegetarians that started in a small artistic theater before moving to a big commercial house. It ran for a year and half and still gets produced today.
“I bought an apartment with that,” he says. “I was suddenly very well known.”
Along with his next two plays, it gave Ott the sway to secure an abandoned building that he turned into the Teatro San Martin de Caracas, which he ran for 20 years. During that time, Teatro Dallas took a play to the theater and he became friends with Cora Cardona.
Sara Cardona says her mother and the board were open to a new vision as long as the almost 40-year-old company continued to be a tool for creation. More applicants were regional than local, and the local applicants tended to be young and less experienced. “And then there was Gustavo,” Sara Cardona says, who shared her mother Cora’s internationalist view of theater.
“His presentation was so beautiful and very visionary. He had a very clear kind of idea of the type of work that he was interested in presenting and how that could align with the historical relationship that we’ve had here in Dallas with the community. It was kind of a no-brainer.”
Ott had been working in Washington, D.C., where he moved to be literary assistant at the Gala Hispanic Theatre. For the last several years, he has supported himself as an independent playwright, novelist, director and translator.
He often took his kayak or canoe out on a river near his Virginia home. But when he saw the Teatro Dallas call for applications, he decided he would give up the good life he had established for another chance to run a theater. He plans to build on the company’s rich history as both hyperlocal and internationalist.
New playwriting and translation workshops will help develop local talent, he says, hopefully leading to full productions. The theater is also taking one of his earliest plays, Passport, to a festival in Orlando, Fla., after a performance at the Latino Cultural Center in June. And a reading of another Ott play, The Woodpecker’s Tongue, is scheduled for May 18 at the Oak Cliff Society of Fine Arts’ Turner House. The next season and a half of productions are already mapped out.
Of his time at Teatro Dallas so far, Ott says, “It reminds me of the way we worked in Caracas, the things you did when you were young, the people you met who you miss. What an opportunity to have them again.”
Details
The 22+ Weddings of Hugo Multiple from May 12-17, $15-$25, and Passport on June 21 at the Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak St. teatrodallas.org.
The Woodpecker’s Tongue on May 18 at the Oak Cliff Society of Fine Arts’ Turner House, 401 N. Rosemont Ave. Free. Registration required. turnerhouse.org/events.
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