I realized that there was a part of me that has never evolved from that little Puerto Rican girl looking out the window of a tiny New York City apartment.” “A lot of things came out that were buried way down deep inside me. “The process was very interesting,” says Moreno. The approach, Moreno found, was effective both as a creative process and as psychological therapy. Taccone and his assistant sat and interviewed Moreno for hours, letting her tell the amazing tales of her life without worrying about how they would whittle the story into a two-act play. “The stories should stand on their own: If the audience wants to cry, that should be a pure reaction, not because we are needling them to react.” “Tony and I agreed that the show should not ‘work’ the audience for emotion,” she says. Moreno agreed to put her story in Taccone’s hands, concurring that the show would not be manipulative or melodramatic. My mother is Puerto Rican, just three years older than Rita, and she grew up in the same Spanish Harlem neighborhoods that Rita grew up in,” says Taccone. “It was my predisposition to understand the world of this play. Eventually, Taccone realized that he should be the one to adapt Moreno’s material. Taccone cast Moreno in wildly successful productions of Terrence McNally’s Master Class in 2004 and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie in 2006.Īs they collaborated, Taccone saw an opportunity for Moreno to tell her life story. When Moreno and her late husband, Leonard Gordon, moved to Berkeley in the mid-1990s to be closer to their daughter, Fernanda, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between the legendary performer and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. “She wants to go there, to challenge herself and the audience.” THE PERFECT PROJECT She is willing to explore the dark places,” says Taccone. Life Without Makeup will not shy away from her lowest moments. Following her breakup with Marlon Brando, Moreno attempted suicide by overdosing on pills in the actor’s New York apartment building. And just as Moreno’s body of work demonstrates an incredible range of material, from sunny musicals and children’s shows ( Singin’ in the Rain, The Muppet Show) to pitch-black drama ( Carnal Knowledge, HBO’s Oz), her personal life has been punctuated by both triumphs and tragedy. The show promises to be a tour de force for Moreno, one of the first performers to win all four major awards-an Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy-as well as the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Even after she won an Academy Award for her knockout performance as “Anita” in West Side Story, Hollywood branded Moreno as a “Latina spitfire” and simply stopped calling for most of the 1960s.
Moreno was often cast as a generic foreigner, as in the 1958 Father Knows Best episode in which she played “Chanthini,” a foreign exchange student from India. From the project’s beginning, Moreno and Taccone wanted to reveal the warts-and-all truth of Moreno’s life, without shying away from the kind of humiliations the groundbreaking Hispanic actor endured in the 1950s and ’60s. Life Without Makeup is packed with songs (Moreno will be joined onstage by a live band and dancers) and plenty of humor, but audiences should not expect a dinner theater trip down memory lane. “I was naive, but I really did go to Hollywood with that mind-set.” “When I was a little girl, I wanted to be Lana Turner,” says Moreno. Moreno dreamed of making it big on stage and screen at a time when Hollywood essentially ignored anyone who wasn’t white. Life Without Makeup begins with Moreno, at age five, taking a steamer ship with her single mother from Puerto Rico to New York. I’m sure I’ll straighten that out by September.”
“But I keep reading Life Without Makeup using the Jewish New York accent I use for Happily Divorced. “I go back to my apartment after filming Happily Divorced all week to study Life Without Makeup on the weekend,” says Moreno, laughing. The next day, she would fly to New York to promote her new sitcom, Happily Divorced, which she has been filming in Los Angeles over the summer. When she sat down for an interview with Diablo about Life Without Makeup at her spectacular home in the Berkeley hills, Moreno had just returned from a Hollywood gala at the American Film Institute, where she honored her former Electric Company costar Morgan Freeman. On September 2, she stars at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in what could be her most significant show ever: Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup is the story of her life, written by Berkeley Rep’s acclaimed artistic director, Tony Taccone. At 79, Rita Moreno is still very much in the acting game.
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