I spoke with alumna Lisa Hori-Garcia ’96, an actress, activist and artist currently living in Denver. We spoke about her time at Smith College, what it’s like to enter the theater industry post-grad and her current show, “Monument, Or Four Sisters (A Sloth Play)” at Magic Theatre in San Francisco.
During her time at Smith, Hori-Garcia was involved in on-campus theater and performance groups, including acapella group The Notables. She minored in theater and double-majored in Latin American Studies and Latin American Literature—somewhat by accident. After taking Spanish and studying abroad in Ecuador, Hori-Garcia found she had enough credits to double-major in Latin American Literature. “These things kind of just happened,” she says. “I didn’t really seek them out.”
Hori-Garcia connects her go-with-the-flow attitude and willingness to change direction in college with the emotional content of her current role in “Monument, Or Four Sisters (A Sloth Play).” The play tracks four sisters in their adult lives. Hori-Garcia describes the sisters’ challenges as the feeling “after college, when you’re like, ‘What am I supposed to do now? Where am I going?’”
The play, she says, is “subtly infused with politics,” in a way that doesn’t hit the audience over the head, but implies and suggests values and concerns involving and superceding the characters. Much of this is told through one of the sisters’ jobs: she writes for a kids’ show about sloths and the actors playing the sisters also play the animals in the show. Hori-Garcia describes the exciting challenge of playing the animals in the show-in-the-play, which is used to impart commentary on climate change and environmentalism. “It keeps getting deeper and deeper, the longer I live with the script,” Hori-Garcia said. “There’s so much there. Something for everyone.”
The pandemic was difficult for Hori-Garcia, who wasn’t able to perform onstage until recently. She returned to the stage in“Refuge,” a play focusing on the journey of a Honduran girl trying to cross the US-Texan border to find her mother. She connects her Smith education with this show, and cites how important and helpful her knowledge of Spanish and South American literature and culture informed her work on the show and her understanding of global refugee crises.
“It was actually interesting that at the time that we opened the show, the war in the Ukraine started. And so there’s been a lot of discussions about refugees, right? What do they look like? What are the reasons why they leave? When is it that we open our borders to them? And when is it that we, especially during the last administration, put them in cages in holding cells?” Hori-Garcia poses these questions not to receive an objective answer, but to get audiences thinking. She describes the ability to encourage audiences to consider potentially uncomfortable and challenging questions as “part of the theatrical device.”
During the time off for COVID-19, Hori-Garcia was worried about if and how the theater industry would “bounce back.” But, as she learned when she went back to performing, “it’s been a really good reminder how, for decades, people have said the theater is dead, and it’s still not dead. People are still showing up. And we still have so many stories to share.”
Much of her work, as an actress, teacher and activist, centers around untold stories; specifically, those of marginalized and oppressed people. Hori-Garcia sees theater as a medium through which these stories can, and will, be platformed. She speaks of the need to “make space for those stories and representation.” This goal informs her work, and her passion for what she does: “That’s what I love, and in all of that, we still have a long way to go.”
