A son nurtures his parents' story

Jose Rivera's play is a celebration of commitment

''I wanted to tell this story for 10 years,'' Jose Rivera (above) says of his play inspired by his parents' marriage. Below: Monica Raymund and Elliot Villar rehearse. (Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff (above); eric antoniou)

It was a love story that began in the lush green landscape of Mia Flores, Puerto Rico, and was tested and strengthened through four decades. And even though the romance wasn't his, it has always fascinated playwright José Rivera.

His parents' marriage is at the heart of the award-winning writer's new play, "Boleros for the Disenchanted," which is now in previews at the Huntington Theatre Company's South End space. The play takes us from the couple's homeland to rural Alabama, where their relationship faces obstacles, tragedies, and heartbreak.

"I wanted to tell this story for 10 years," Rivera says during a rehearsal break at the Calderwood Pavilion. "I wondered about it. Daydreamed about it. But I didn't write a word until about last year."

With a career that spans the stage, screen, and TV - and includes a 2004 Academy Award nomination for his "Motorcycle Diaries" screenplay - Rivera says returning to his roots, both personally and theatrically, was a welcome challenge.

He came from humble beginnings in Long Island, New York, having moved with his parents from Puerto Rico when he was just 4 years old.

"I have some memories," says Rivera. "I remember a thunderstorm. I remember sleeping under a mosquito net and catching a spider crawling across the netting. I remember digging up a centipede in the backyard."

What fascinated him, especially, was listening to his mother describe how she and her father came to meet. In the play, the character based on his mother is dating another man who let her down with his chest-thumping theories about the differences between men and women.

"It's about her life, according to her," Rivera says, laughing. "It's all true."

Rivera wanted to put his mother's life on stage before she got too old.

"She's in her 70s now and I really wanted to write something that honored her life and how she met my father," he says. "Before my father died they were living in Alabama. My dad had both his legs amputated and strokes. It was a really hard life. So the play is about the beginning and the end of something - a relationship. A long-term relationship."

"I really wanted to explore," he adds, "what it means to commit to a relationship for the rest of your life - back when that actually meant something."

During rehearsals, director Chay Yew says he pushed the actors to consider their own romantic histories as they thought about the bond between Flora and Eusebio, the characters based on Rivera's parents.

"I wanted them to get inside their worlds," he says. "I also wanted them to draw on past relationships and discuss it. And people were really open."

Huntington artistic director Peter DuBois had a visceral response when he read the script for the first time in his living room: He cried. When his partner asked what the play was about, he responded simply through tears: "Marriage."

'A natural thing'

The Long Island of Jose Rivera's youth was mostly woods and farms, not as overdeveloped as the area became. But his childhood was hardly idyllic.

"We were the first Puerto Rican family in the little town where we lived," he recalls. "It was odd because it was us and a bunch of Italians. And they didn't like us too much."

His father was a typical strict immigrant who worked as a gardener, a cab driver, and a school janitor. But from an early age, Rivera had a different temperament.

"I had trouble with bullies and stuff," he says, pausing for a moment. "I got beaten up a couple times. I got threatened a couple times. Someone threw a firecracker through our window when I was in the third or fourth grade. Sometimes rocks were thrown at our house. It was not pleasant, but it got better as the years went by and I got older."

In high school Rivera gained acceptance by playing sports and discovering the theater. "What's good about the theater, because it's dysfunctional it accepts everybody," he says, laughing.

In college he wrote all the time.

"It was a natural thing," he says. "Growing up in poverty forced me to be in my head rather than the real world. The real world wasn't very pleasant at times. Being on [Long Island] back then when it was still beautiful and natural I could wander through the woods for hours and be in nature and not think about, well, we have no heat in the house, the windows are broken, there wasn't enough food."

After college Rivera moved to the Bronx. It was a far cry from the beauty of Long Island, but it delivered something else - a Puerto Rican community.

To support his playwriting, Rivera took a job writing advertising copy for a science publishing company. His break came in 1983, when Rivera won a CBS-sponsored playwriting contest. He had learned to use his heritage and experiences in his work; the play, called "The House of Ramon Iglesia," was about his parents returning to Puerto Rico after 20 years of living in America. The win came with $5,000.

"On the day the check cleared, I quit my job," Rivera says. "Everybody was saying, 'Are you crazy?' But I couldn't stand it anymore, and this was the validation I was looking for. I haven't worked a day job since then. Feb. 26, 1983. I celebrate it like an anniversary!"

Soon afterward, famed television producer Norman Lear approached Rivera to work on a sitcom called "a.k.a. Pablo." He took the job and moved to Los Angeles, only to learn he was a terrible TV comedy writer.

"I didn't even own a TV," he says. "The show lasted only six episodes."

Married with children by this time, Rivera and his family lived on grants, until they went broke. He got lucky when a second TV series, "Eerie, Indiana," was picked up and had a 19-episode run.

Regional theaters began mounting his plays, including "Marisol," "References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot," and "Cloud Tectonics," about a woman who is 54 and claims she's been pregnant for two years.

Like many playwrights, Rivera had also written screenplays that never got produced. Then he received the book "The Motorcycle Diaries."

While he wasn't sure there was a movie in the story, about Che Guevara's early life, he and director Walter Salles hit it off so well that he signed on. The film, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, broke from the pack at the Sundance Film Festival and, for a Spanish-language film, did well at the box office.

When he was nominated for an Oscar for best screenwriting, Rivera was floored; the experience was all the more surreal once he took to the red carpet.

"We are on our way to the Kodak Theatre, my wife, my daughter, and my son was trailing behind," he remembers. "We were being interviewed by Star Jones and I look over and there's my son, 13 or 14, flirting with Beyonce! They were waving to each other and smiling and I thought, 'Oh my God. My son is flirting with Beyonce."

Since then, the Hollywood portion of Rivera's career has taken off. He's received offers to write scripts for stars like Halle Berry, and he is working on an adaptation of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road."

Still, his heart remains in the theater, and he hopes the audience will be pleased with "Boleros for the Disenchanted" - just as his mother was when she saw it.

"She really loved it," he says. "I thought it would be hard for her, but she was really moved."

Megan Tench can be reached at mtench@globe.com.