Francisco’s Fire

Francisco is a Latino immigrant who has a menial job at a hotel job in Hollywood, attending to guests to support his informal spouse and infant child. His quack doctor has him on a diet that physically debilitates him. The hotel manager clearly regards Francisco as a moral inferior by reason of his poverty. He is utterly and thoroughly humiliated when a glamorous visiting celebrity seduces his beloved Marie. Her betrayal is the last straw. Stressed beyond endurance, Francisco embarks on a course of determined, bloody revenge.

When Georg Buchner, a short-lived political revolutionary, wrote "Woyzeck" in Germany in the early 19th Century, it was hailed as the first German literary work with a working class protagonist. Buchner, then declared a traitor by the ruling class, fled imprisonment before dying of typhus at 23. He is today one of Germany’s most revered literary figures.

L.A.-based playwright/director Keith Watabayashi has adapted Buchner’s tale to contemporary Los Angeles, with Latinos at its focus. Its story of shameful exploitation of the working class, economic and even sexual, and its warning of potentially explosive repercussions to come in the absence of change, seems as timely today as when Buchner imagined his narrative nearly two centuries ago.