The cast of Kitchen Dog Theater’s ‘Safe at Home.’ (Photo by Jordan Fraker)
This queer actor finds his athletic side in Kitchen Dog’s sports drama Safe at Home
RICH LOPEZ | Staff writer
Kitchen Dog Theater’s new season is certainly all over the place. As they wait to finalize their home stage, KDT’s season takes over a variety of venues. And to kick off its 33rd season, the company goes far from home for Safe at Home.
Opening Thursday, Dec. 7 through Sunday, Safe at Home is a play centered on baseball, so where better than to stage it on an actual baseball field? This is only the second time the show, written by Gabriel Greene and Alex Levy, has been staged professionally.
From Kitchen Dog Theater:
Instead of creating nine interiors in a traditional theatre with a stationary audience, Riders Field in Frisco expands the art form of theater, with its existent spaces becoming stages for a cast of actors who repeat their scenes over and over as the patrons, not the cast, move from scene to scene.
Actor Jovane Caamaño plays pitching coach Ramon Gonzales in KDT’s ‘Safe at Home.’ (Courtesy photo)
For actor Jovane Caamaño, the experience in preparing for the show has certainly been, well, an experience: “This is very new to me and I’m excited to be part of something like this,” he said.
Each actor is performing only one scene, but they perform their scene over and over as the audience moves through the story. And the actors have to time it just right for the play to continually move.
“We have to be very strict about how long the scene takes,” he said. “The plan is for each of us to do our scene five times in a row. It’s something very new but there’s also something satisfying about the precision of that. It’s a challenge and test for our brains. Sometimes, I’m like, ‘Did I say this already?’”
Safe at Home centers on star pitcher Victor Castillo (Ryan Michael Friedman) who is preparing for Game 7 of the World Series. When word gets out that Castillo may stage a political protest on the field, those around him scramble.
Caamaño plays pitching coach Ramon Gonzales who shares cultural origins with Castillo.
“They are both from the Dominican Republic and brought up in the academies to foster talent,” Caamaño said of the two characters. “But for my character, it was not a good situation. It was an abusive one.”
The actor said that sometimes the play spoke to him personally of his own Latin experience growing up in South Dakota. (He now lives in Texas.)
He described his own feelings of invisibility and difference while growing up, noting that adding to that struggle, there was another layer: Caamaño identifies as queer.
In many ways, he still sees the challenges of being both queer and Latin.
“Definitely I feel like both those parts of my identity and communities at large are being targeted. So much of society defaults to cis straight white male so any identity apart feels different. I’ve felt that feeling or even inferior ones,” he said.
“I struggled with my queer identity for a long time, but also, as a Latino, I didn’t feel fully American but not fully Latino.
For Safe at Home, there’s another layer of identity, as well. Most queer kids — especially boys — may not find themselves leaning toward athletics.
“I was not into sports growing up. I didn’t feel my place there at all. I was much more comfortable in choir and theater,” Caamaño said.
As an actor, Caamaño gets to have that sports experience with Safe at Home, as a self-described queer Puerto Rican rainbow person.
An elementary school teacher by day, Caamaño has appeared before on stage at Theater Three, Undermain, Stage West, Circle, Amphibian and Second Thought. And for many of his characters, if he can, he’ll paint them with some rainbow colors.
“Unless they are expressly determined, I usually envision my characters as queer, and I like to have fun with that. I think it can color the character, but I love that it also doesn’t have to be relevant to the character or story. The more queer characters onstage the better.”
Safe at Home runs through Sunday at Riders Field in Frisco. For tickets, visit KitchenDogTheater.org.
