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Samuel Garza Bernstein: True Tales of a 70s, Gender-Nonconforming Tween

Samuel Garza Bernstein: True Tales of a 70s, Gender-Nonconforming Tween

Samuel Garza Bernstein

Award-winning television and film writer/producer Samuel Garza Bernstein is currently debuting his live, one-person show, The Secret World of Danny Lopez, at the Two Roads Theatre in Los Angeles.

Reflecting on the wild intersections of modern life, Bernstein collides comedy and drama while channeling his own childhood as a gender-nonconforming, Texas tween in the 1970s. Always upbeat and positive despite material touching on abuse and divorce, the show explores Bernstein’s relationship with his gender, sexuality, race, and wealth through impromptu musical performances, interactive fantasies backed with technology and special effects, and some very inspired drag.

In the vein of current, coming-of-age comedies like Never Have I Ever and Love, Simon, the show uses childhood nostalgia, both good and traumatic, to encourage audiences to let down their guard and find laughter, excitement, and healing through the lens of Danny and their younger self.

OFM had the opportunity to connect with Bernstein and talk more about the production, how it is slated to turn into a television series, and the importance of theatre to tell multicultural LGBTQ stories.

Samuel Garza Bernstein

Without too many spoilers, what can you tell us about your one-person show, The Secret World of Danny Lopez?
It’s a wild ride in a lot of ways. Most of the things that audiences would imagine I made up are true, and most of the mundane connecting pieces to make it all happen within one story frame, like, did we land there, did we go there, and did we eat that meal, while those things are sometimes made up to connect everything, but I really was this Jewish kid living in Egypt in the 70s when Egypt and Israel were at war. My family had this bizarre, fantastic history of lies.

My own heritage was a secret, who our biological mothers were kind of a secret, and we lived this life where we didn’t go to school; we flew around the world, and we lived in a million places including Fort Collins, CO. I’ve had shrinks tell me all sorts of weird things over the years, but I had a shrink once who just looked at me after I told some story, and he just went, “You must feel like an alien.” I thought to myself, “Yes, I do, thank you very much, but I don’t think you’re supposed to say that.” (laughs)

You first wrote The Secret World of Danny Lopez as a screenplay, which won some awards. Was it easy or hard to transform your screenplay into a one-person performance for stage?
In a weird way, it was both. Easier because I am very familiar with the material, obviously, and not just because it happened to me, but because I had already figured out how to shape it into a narrative. The hard part was introducing myself as an adult character. Danny Lopez in what will be the television show is a 10-year-old kid. What he’s like in 2021 is not part of the equation. So, putting myself into it in that way was tricky.

Also, I approached these stories to look at the parts that were joyful for Danny. In no way is it to minimize the sort of dramatic or abusive aspects of the childhood, but even with a childhood that is kind of littered with insanity, some kids are really resilient. It’s not like I remember it all as a terrible Lifetime movie. There was a lot of joy, fantasy, and humor.

This show will act as a pilot for an eight-episode television series?
It’s not the pilot; it’s really like a sales tool. The producing partners on it is a company called Kung Fu Monkey Productions with John Rogers and Jen Court, and they have been responsible for a lot of television. Right now, the thing that’s on the air for them is the reboot of Leverage. They are very prolific.

John created The Librarians, and for the last two years, he was the show runner on MacGyver. I mean, you could not get farther away from Danny Lopez than MacGyver. Although, I was thinking about it, and Danny is kind of an emotional MacGyver. He would never know how to use a bobby pin and a piece of barbed wire to make a nuclear missile, but he would know how to use his own experiences and feelings to sort of engineer ways of making things happen in his life.

How did the idea for this story come about? Is this something you’ve had in the back of your mind, or did you wake up one day instantly inspired to write about your life?
To be fair, I always knew that I would write about my life. Even as a child, I knew that (laughs). I was making notes and have played around with it in different ideas and forms. One time, I was working on this web series with Hearst, but we never found the right tone for it, but I called it Kill Your Inner Child because that was something another shrink told me. She was going on about this damaged, broken inner child. Let him die so that he can be reborn kind of idea. Although, I think she was pretty off the mark because that little kid sort of thrived in his own secret fantasy world, which protected him. Me. I promise, I don’t refer to myself in the third person all the time!

Samuel Garza Bernstein

You are primarily known as a writer and producer for film and television. Have you performed on stage before?
Oh, yes. I started out as an actor and used to tour in musicals. I did Evita a lot and played Magaldi, the character that brings her into Buenos Aires and sings “On This Night of a Thousand Stars.” So, I would do that, and I did a little bit of small things in television and film, and it was sort of a natural progression. A lot of things that I wanted to communicate were essentially things that I could communicate better as a writer than a performer.

What are you looking forward to the most about bringing this production to life?
I would have said something profound about how emotional it is, touching people, and all that kind of shit, but when we did a six-hour tech a couple days before opening, I forgot how much I liked the light being on me. So, to be perfectly honest, I am excited to just be a big ham and a showoff!

What do you hope audiences take away from the show?
I hope they are entertained; I hope that they laugh, and I hope they are touched. Obviously, that is part of storytelling and wanting to communicate with an audience, but I think if there is a broader takeaway, and I really hesitate to look in some respects of broader takeaways because they can be so self-serving, but I hope people see that you can reframe the bad things in your life. It’s not to minimize anybody who is a survivor of abuse or anything. It isn’t to minimize that experience, but it’s to own the experience and take what you can out of it. Life is not an episode of Law & Order where you are trying to figure out who’s to blame or pay.

For me, it all happened, and it was all a long time ago. Now, I can look at how it shaped me in very strange and positive ways. Look, my father was insane. On any playing field, you would go, there are some cards in the deck that are upside down. But in the early 1970s, he was totally OK with the gender-nonconformity of me dressing up as a little girl. The writing’s on the wall that I was going to be gay, and I don’t mean that everyone who dresses up as a girl is, but there were specific reasons why he would look at me and go, huh. Like, he’s 5 years old and very interested in the other 5-year-old’s penis. Maybe this is going to go in a certain direction, and it was fine.

He was one of those guys who really encouraged us to look at the world through our own eyes and make our own decisions—as long as those decisions were the same as his. His were very nonconforming and odd. I mean, he considered himself a socialist. He helped organize a Black Panther rally in Fort Collins at the university in the late 60s, which was both evidence of his progressiveness, but also of his white savior complex. Like, I can go in and tell everybody what to do. He was this white guy from a rich family in Texas, but he’s going to show the Black Panthers, the Guatemalan revolutionaries, and the stateless Palestinians how they should live.

Nobody, at least nobody white, was thinking about it in those terms yet. It was amazing to support these groups, but the politics of realizing that maybe you shouldn’t be the one representing groups that you are not a part of, that was a later part of our understanding of who we are and what we’re doing.

You will be performing The Secret World of Danny Lopez live at the Two Roads Theatre in L.A. throughout September. Will it be available for streaming afterwards for anyone to watch?
We are working on those rights, and we hope to do that on October 1. You can log onto danny-lopez.com and get more information about the show and the upcoming plans for it. Certainly, if you are in the L.A. area, there are links for tickets.

Samuel Garza Bernstein

How important is live theater to tell multicultural LGBTQ stories?
It’s vital. It’s vital that theatre exists on a million levels, but it’s where stories that don’t fit within the mainstream have always been told. They then sometimes jump to other media. My story is sort of a major intersectionality with Latino things and Jewish things. You can say growing up wealthy is its own little subcategory. We were sometimes wealthy, and sometimes completely broke. I wouldn’t say poor because you are never really poor if you know that you can go to your parents and get money or whatever, but we were absolutely broke sometimes, and stranded.

I am a child of violence. Not just in terms of the violence that was around me and happening within our family, but one time in Albuquerque, somebody shot a bullet into the living room and missed my father’s head by inches. We had a painting that was on the wall that had a bullet hole in it, and we just sort of kept the painting. So, in that respect, there are so many overlapping intersectionalities that I am a part of. I didn’t even mention the gay part. Like, oh, right! That was the group that I identified with the earliest.

I think it is vitally important, whether it’s coming from theatre or coming from community involvement, that the LGBTQ community really learns to completely embrace everyone within. In some places, it is still a largely white male driven collection of identities. As a creative person, I always put things in terms of pragmatically, what do you get creatively out of something?  The fact that we should be more inclusive of how diverse our community really is, that’s something that is good and right for humane reasons. For reasons that have to do with our humanity and culture, but it’s also more interesting!

So, from a creative aspect of just looking at it pragmatically, oh my God, there are all these other stories you can tell that aren’t the same one that we have seen over and over again. In a different sense, it’s like, yes, it’s great if we can take gender away from certain professions, like if the pilot of the plane can be a woman and the flight attendant can be a straight man, of all things. It’s not just because it opens our eyes as a society to the difference that we have and that we can embrace, but it’s because it is just more interesting. We have seen all those stereotypes a thousand times, and I am much more interested in exploring people doing things that we don’t expect them to do.

Before we wrap up, are there any other upcoming projects or anything else you would like to mention our plug?
I think Danny Lopez is the beginning of a different chapter in my life, and a chapter that is going to involve being more public and having a more public interaction with people. I mean, I have always had public interaction, but I think this is a new chapter where it is going to become a bigger part of my life, and I am really looking forward to it. So, just keep an eye out on the future.

We really hope that Danny Lopez will go into production next year as a series, and we have already mapped out the first eight episodes. The first year will be Danny at 10, and then we’re going to do Danny at 14 in 1980. Then we will jump to Danny at 18, four years later. So, be on the lookout for that, and I will be posting about any other projects that come along!

Stay up-to-date with Bernstein by visiting his official website. Click here for more information about The Secret World of Danny Lopez.

Photos Courtesy of Michael Shelton and Brian Weiner

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